Posts Tagged: Summer of '86
by azanzie on July 8th, 2011 at 6:00 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! The Great Mouse Detective was released in theaters on July 2nd, 1986. This article is cross-posted at Icebox Movies.]
The Great Mouse Detective (1986) is not a Disney movie about good vs. evil but, rather, a Disney movie about two, fiercely-opposed egos. On the one hand we have charming, energetic Basil of Baker Street: lives under Sherlock Holmes' floorboards, cross-dresses in Japanese fat suits, plays his violin whenever miserable. On the other hand, we've got menacing, charismatic Professor Ratigan: lives in the waterfront sewers, dresses in kingly get-ups, despises it when people call him a "rat." They've both spent their entire professional lives trying to hunt each other down. Nothing is more important to them than the long-desired satisfaction that comes with a superior mind.
Disney specialized in movies like The Great Mouse Detective in the '30s, '40s and '50s, back when the studio used to believe in making films that stressed themes of intelligence and character study. Then the '60s and '70s gave us a series of movies that were significantly less-inspired (101 Dalmatians; The Sword in the Stone; The Jungle Book; The Aristocats; The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh; The Rescuers), and it was as if Walt Disney's long-term artistic promises had all but evaporated. Had it not been for Disney's short-lived nirvana in the '80s and early '90s, it seems likely that the studio would have been gone for good. Thus, The Great Mouse Detective ranks with The Fox and the Hound (1982), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992) as one of the last truly excellent 2-D films released by Disney—before the studio grew into the corporate monster that it is today. The movies have gotten cheaper in quality again, and the concepts are no longer fresh. Without the beneficial support of Pixar, we would probably forget that Disney still plays a major role in our lives as moviegoers. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alan Young, Barrie Ingham, Basil Rathbone, Burny Mattinson, Candy Candido, Dave Michener, Fred Zinnemann, John Musker, Ron Clements, Summer of '86, Susanne Pollatschek, The Day of the Jackal, The Great Mouse Detective, Val Bettin, Vincent Price, Walt Disney
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by Odienator on July 6th, 2011 at 11:00 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Under the Cherry Moon was released in theaters on July 2nd, 1986.]
Under the Cherry Moon opened on a Wednesday in 1986, well before Wednesdays became the go to weekday for "urban fare." It opened July 2, 1986, to be exact. I'd been out of high school 5 days when a classmate of mine invited me to a movie in Times Square with some of her friends. The group was split down the middle on cinema choice: the women wanted to see Prince's Purple Rain follow-up, and the men wanted to see something we erroneously thought would be scarier, Psycho III. The deciding outcome is easy to predict because, as luck would have it, women have vaginas. And if we didn't do as they said, certain teenage boys would not GET those vaginas. So His Purple Badness won handily. While we were at the UA theater in Times Square with Moon's main character, Christopher Tracy, the ceiling fell in at the theater showing Psycho III. No one was killed, but several people got chunks of plaster in their Jersey Hair and mullets. If I had to do it over again, I would rather have my fade flattened by shoddy architecture than sit through Under the Cherry Moon.
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Tags: Christopher Tracy, Francesca Annis, Jerome Benton, Kristin Scott Thomas, Mary Lambert, Michael Ballhaus, Psycho III, Steven Berkoff, Summer of '86, Under the Cherry Moon
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by Odienator on June 28th, 2011 at 11:15 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Labyrinth was released in theaters on June 27th, 1986.]
Labyrinth is a collaboration between the Muppets, a Monty Python alum, the Man Who Fell To Earth and that guy who ruined Star Wars. It stars a future Oscar winner, is shot by Excalibur's cin-togger, was inspired by M.C. Escher's puzzles and features an early appearance by the dude who plays Elmo on Sesame Street. Cementing its Sesame Street tie, Labyrinth was directed by Kermit the Frog. With all that fantasy and sci-fi pedigree, Labyrinth was doomed to be a box office flop and a latter-day cult favorite. Its Underground status is cemented, at least by Wikipedia, with the throwing of an annual Labyrinth costume ball in Hollywood. My hat is off to anyone who comes as Ludo.
Ludo is my favorite character in Labyrinth, but hold that thought for a moment. I identified with Jennifer Connelly's protagonist, Sarah, and not just because we're both drop dead gorgeous. Connelly is saddled with babysitting her younger sibling, putting a damper on her adolescence. In retaliation, she does something I did numerous times growing up: She wishes for someone to come take her brother away. Unlike my desperate pleas, her call is answered by the Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie). What David Bowie wants with a toddler is too scary to fathom, and the dark side of Jim Henson knows this. Note the scene where Bowie tosses the boy high in the air, then walks away as he plummets to the ground. (Don't worry, a goblin Muppet catches him.) Hell, listen to the chorus of "Magic Dance," one of the catchy, memorably superb songs Bowie performs in the film. No good can come of this kidnapping. Continue Reading »
Tags: David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, Jim Henson, Kevin Clash, Labyrinth, Percy Edwards, Steve Whitmire, Summer of '86
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by Odienator on June 14th, 2011 at 11:03 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Legal Eagles was released in theaters on June 18th, 1986.]
When Butch Casssidy took up law, he did so under the direction of Sidney Lumet and the verbal styling of David Mamet. Not even the stars of Mandingo and The Night Porter could trash up his boozy tour-de-force. When the Sundance Kid took up law, however, he called Ghostbusters' director and the writers of Top Gun. Not even the star of Terms of Endearment could class up his snoozy tour-de-farce, though in all fairness, The Verdict was a drama and Legal Eagles is decidedly not.
Legal Eagles is a comedy, if you believe its ad campaign, but it's funny in all the wrong places. Ivan Reitman's 1986 Robert Redford vehicle is a strange brew of slapstick, mystery, court shenanigans, heist movies, romantic comedy and pyromania. I counted no fewer than three uses of raging fires, none of which manifested itself as romantic chemistry between the three leads. Had there been musical numbers, Legal Eagles could have passed itself off as a rejected Bollywood movie, something for everyone wrapped in the bright colors of its veteran cin-togger, Laszlo Kovacs. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brian Dennehy, Darryl Hannah, Debra Winger, Ivan Reitman, Jack Epps Jr., Jim Cash, Legal Eagles, Robert Redford, Roscoe Lee Brown, Steven Hill, Summer of '86, Terrence Stamp
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[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! The Manhattan Project was released in theaters on June 13th, 1986.]
Growing up in Brazil in the 1980s, I got acquainted with cinema mostly in the form of Hollywood movies, which would pop up dubbed and often chopped-up on TV. Though notions of film as an art form wouldn't occur to me for another decade or so, I became familiar with thematic motifs quite early in the game: Masked bogeymen, muscle-bound warriors, wisecracking action heroes and virginity-ditching youngsters were familiar screen images during these formative years, all of them running together in a fractured, Lewis Carrollesque sneak peek into the American culture I would years later visit and embrace. Of these recurring figures, two in particular fascinated me: Whiz-kid fables (which made me aware of the need to venture beyond the suburban neighborhood and into the outside world) and paranoid doomsday scenarios (which reminded me of how easily that same world could evaporate in a mushroom cloud). By braiding these two subgenres, The Manhattan Project gave me an early taste of film as a medium of contrasts. Never mind that WarGames and Real Genius (to say nothing of Dr. Strangelove) had gotten there first and done it better—the movie's frequently odd mix of mischief and danger seemed to these unseasoned eyes downright radical. Continue Reading »
Tags: Christopher Collet, Cynthia Nixon, Jill Eikenberry, John Lithgow, Marshall Brickman, Summer of '86, The Manhattan Project
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[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! 8 Million Ways to Die was released in theaters on April 25th, 1986.]
[Author's Note: This review was based on a DVR'd airing of 8 Million Ways to Die on IFC, back when movies weren't interrupted by commercials.]
Released (dumped) in the early part of the summer of 1986, 8 Million Ways to Die turned out to be the final film of one of the most endearing filmmakers from the New Hollywood era. While guys like Altman, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg and DePalma may have made more immediate and galvanizing films during the 1970s, Hal Ashby's unbroken streak of human-scale masterpieces is pretty much unprecedented. Beginning with 1970's The Landlord and ending with 1979's Being There (with Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory and Coming Home in-between), Ashby represented all that was good about socially conscious studio filmmaking. Then, almost overnight, he was out of fashion with Hollywood. In the 1980s, movies started to be packaged, and Ashby's modest humanism in films like Second-Hand Hearts and The Slugger's Wife failed to connect with audiences. His Iconoclast stature got him labeled as "trouble" in the '80s. By the time Ashby got the job directing 8 Million Ways to Die it was almost seen as a last-ditch effort to make a hit—a fallen master's attempt at redemption.
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Tags: 8 Million Ways to Die, Alexandra Paul, Andy Garcia, Being Hal Ashby, David Lee Henry, Hal Ashby, Jeff Bridges, Lawrence Block, Nick Dawson, Oliver Stone, Randy Brooks, Robert Towne, Rosanna Arquette, Stephen H. Burum, Summer of '86, Vyto Ruginis, Wilfredo Hernandez
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by Tom Stempel on May 16th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Top Gun was released in theaters on May 16th, 1986.]
When I remember Top Gun, I always think of a pair of women's shoes and a message from God.
In the spring of 1986, I was, in addition to my regular gig at Los Angeles City College, teaching a course at UCLA in the History of American Film. They needed somebody in a hurry, I was available, I did it, they never asked me back, and I never wanted to go back. The thing about teaching at UCLA is that you stand behind a wooden lectern that could repel Genghis Kahn and look out at 144 students. They are all 19 or 20, they all have perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect tans, perfect teeth, and are all very bright in very conventional ways. All you have to do is imply something will be on the final exam and 144 heads go down, even though the official notes are taken by one of the graduate student TA's. To me that is not teaching but shooting fish in a barrel. I much prefer LACC, where you never know who or what is going to walk in the door. The UCLA students were all upper-middle or upper class, and were surprised to see Benjamin's father in The Graduate (1967) cleaning his own swimming pool. Didn't they have pool cleaning services way back in the '60s? The students bought into Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan from two years before: that it was morning in America, and we were building up our might to combat the evil empire. That attitude showed up in a number of movies of the period, especially Top Gun. Continue Reading »
Tags: Don Simpson, Jerry Bruckheimer, Kelly McGillis, Meg Ryan, Summer of '86, Tim Robbins, Tom Cruise, Top Gun, Val Kilmer
4 Comments »
by Odienator on May 4th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling was released in theaters on May 2nd, 1986.]
With its fractured narrative, complete with gimmicky spectral figure guiding us through the proceedings, Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling is Richard Pryor's All That Jazz. Playing like a greatest hits collection of Pryor's stand-up routines, it begins with its titular character freebasing his way into a hospital burn unit, features him pulling a starter pistol on the Mafia, and shows him destroying his wife's car when she threatens to leave him. Jo Jo Dancer's profession mirrors Pryor's own, as does his backstory: The film is shot in Peoria, Illinois, Pryor's hometown and the location of the brothel where both he and Jo Jo Dancer grew up. Columbia Pictures wouldn't grant Bob Fosse's wish to play Jazz's Joe Gideon, but they let Pryor play himself, or "himself" as it were, creating a meta experience before meta was popular.
Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling is far from a perfect film, with passages as awkward as its title. But it is far more ambitious than one would expect from Pryor, who made this his narrative feature film debut. After directing Richard Pryor: Here and Now, Pryor and his longtime comedy writer Mr. Paul Mooney teamed up with Rocco Urbisci to write a biographical film about a destructive stand-up comedian. Since Hollywood, with rare exception, gave Pryor the chance to play dramatic scenes of great pathos and emotion, his writers script him several well-executed moments where Pryor proves a much more subtly effective actor than one might envision. As director, Pryor makes typical newbie mistakes but is excellent when portraying something he knows well. Assisted by his DP John A. Alonzo, Pryor shoots a coke-fueled party with frenetic energy, visually propelling the narrative forward with minimal dialogue. Dancer's first scene, with Pryor crawling around looking for freebase to smoke, reeks with desperation. Continue Reading »
Tags: All That Jazz, Art Evans, Billy Eckstine, Blue Collar, Debbie Allen, Jo Jo Dancer Your Life Is Calling, John Alonzo, Live in Concert, Live on the Sunset Strip, Paul Mooney, Paula Kelly, Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor: Here and Now, Rocco Urbisci, Summer of '86
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[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! No Retreat, No Surrender was released in theaters on May 2nd, 1986.]
No Retreat, No Surrender is as innocuous as they come, but it still took me eight sittings to get through it all. That's the kind of peek-through-your-fingers statistic more suited to Salò or Jeanne Dielman, which is no mean feat for a bunch of chirpy teenagers in a Karate Kid ripoff. I give full credit for this to director Corey Yuen, whose mise-en-scène is so static and immobile that you can't help but focus on the non-dialogue and barely-acting: where a zestier schlockmeister might have risen/sank to the level of his enthusiastic writers and performers, he phones in the pictures and yawns through the cutting. Visually, it's like the mutant progeny of Stranger than Paradise and The Room, and not in a good way. Continue Reading »
Tags: Corey Yuen, J.W. Fails, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kathie Sileno, Ken Lipman, Kurt McKinney, No Retreat No Surrender, Summer of '86, Timothy D. Baker
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[Editor's Note: This is the first entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, copresented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United! My Beautiful Laundrette was released in New York on March 7th, 1986 and played throughout the summer at various venues.]
Nineteen eighty-six never seemed as far away as it did when I rewatched My Beautiful Laundrette. What I remembered most fondly about Stephen Frears' film is the sexual relationship between Omar (Gordon Warnecke) and Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis), the former school chum Omar hires to do his dirty work after his uncle gives him a laundromat to manage. The film's straight-ahead treatment of that relationship, which is neither pathologized nor played for titillation but simply shown as a fact of both boys' lives, was a boundary that still needed busting in those days. It made Laundrette an instant classic for me, one of those movies that validates your life experience and worldview at a point when it needs validating, making you feel as if you are not just seeing but being seen as you watch it. Seen now, without that brave-new-world charge, the sex scenes seem a little stagey and the chemistry between Omar and Johnny feels lame—especially in the final scene where the two splash water on each other's bare chests, as self-conscious as bad actors in a porno.
Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, like Omar, is a native Englishman with an Indian father and an English mother, and his insider's perspective on the pain of assimilation was also pretty new—and much needed—when the movie came out. I remember absorbing what his screenplay had to say about the xenophobia and cultural dislocation endured by Indian immigrants in Maggie Thatcher's England almost as if I were watching a Frontline documentary. Now that that perspective is no longer so rare in our media universe, what stands out for me is the didacticism of the script's expository dialogue. Omar's Indian relatives are forever making declamatory statements like: "In this damn country, which we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and available. … You have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system." Even one of Johnny's ignorant, Paki-bashing friends gets into the act, warning him: "Don't cut yourself off from your own people…everyone needs to belong." Continue Reading »
Tags: A Room with a View, Daniel Day-Lewis, Gordon Warnecke, Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette, Oliver Stapleton, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey, Shirley Anne Field, Stephen Frears, Summer of '86
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