by ·Comments Off on The Color of Money (1986, Martin Scorsese)

1961 original: downbeat, guys go broke and get injured, the girl dies
1986 reboot: a party, guys get rich and have a good time playing the game

“He’s gotta learn how to be himself, but on purpose.” The Hustler finds a hotshot kid named Vince who is such a hotshot that he busts into pool halls and beats everyone in the room while wearing a shirt that says VINCE. Newman says let’s apply some strategy to this skill, and the kid’s girl (M.E. Mastrantonio) hears him, but the kid (T. Cruise) doesn’t, and the guys end up playing vs. each other in a tournament.

Mouseover to refocus on the next generation:
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by ·Comments Off on New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way.

The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way.

Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria:

After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982 were too busy having weird sex to go out to movies or shows. Almost everything here is offputting, but the staging of some closeups and quick zooms are pure cinema, unfortunately.

by ·Comments Off on Missing (1982, Costa-Gavras)

Everyone wanted Vangelis the year after Chariots of Fire, and the two movies who landed him were Blade Runner and this downbeat drama. It’s a dialogue-heavy movie, light on the music, but whenever those classy synths kick in, you float for a little while.

Missing Charles aka TV’s Lex Luthor, talks with his pet duck:

Gavras was by now typecast as the guy who makes depressing movies about leftists getting destroyed by oppressive military governments, so the coup in Chile was right up his alley. Shot and cut like a standard prestige drama, without the nervy energy of Z. The physical action can be clunky too, but casting late-career Jack Lemmon and post-oscar Sissy Spacek as the leads really helps for authenticity. The most impressive thing here is the shifts in perspective, following one character then another, jumping through time, and rewriting history (showing different versions of a past event depending who’s telling it).

Was there a rash of “parents’ worst nightmare” movies around then, or have I just seen the poster for Hardcore too many times? Lemmon’s son has disappeared during the coup, but surely he’s fine because he is a documented American, and therefore immune to foreign political violence. Straightlaced Jack reluctantly teams up with the son’s wife Spacek and their dirty leftist friends, scouring hotels and hospitals while the embassy is being prickly. Faith begins to falter in the “helpful” men in suits, the American exceptionalism, and the safety of the son, as the bodies mount up – it doesn’t help that their government contacts are played by the stalker/murderer of Klute and the guy who fails his blood test in The Thing.

by ·Comments Off on Dead Calm (1989, Phillip Noyce)

Memorial screening for the great Sam Neill. He and Nicole Kidman are a bereaved couple on a sailing voyage when they meet Billy Zane, typecast as a sexy guy who wants to kill you aboard a sinking ship. His stories about his former vessel don’t add up, and when Sam goes to investigate, Billy takes control and speeds away, leaving Sam to sink and die. But this is one of those movies where the best mechanic / sailor / problem solver wins the day, and Neill is up to the task. Kidman’s no slouch either – nothing’s hotter than a woman whose reaction to running out of fuel is to hoist the sails. We get no insight into Zane and what his whole deal was, just a psychopath, finally taken out by a head-exploding flare gun. The same story Orson Welles would partially adapt as The Deep, screenwritten here by Terry “Mad Max” Hayes. Noyce made a movie the same year where Rutger Hauer plays a blind swordsman, and I’ve never watched it for some reason?

by ·Comments Off on Spetters (1980, Paul Verhoeven)

Follow-up to Soldier of Orange features another bunch of young male friends. These guys ride bikes together and have literal dick-measuring contests, and most of them will meet bad ends. Rutger’s getting too old to play a teenager so he’s the local motorbike champion they idolize. Still too plotty and obvious, but the great 4th Man was up next and Paul’s next couple of decades would be very good.

Rien with his girl in the good early days:

The girl on the poster is future 4th Man star Renée Soutendijk, running a food truck with her gay brother. When she sets up at a bike race, all three of the young dudes fall for her, and though she would appear to be out of their league, she sees them as a possible way out of the food truck life, dating each guy at different points.

Do not get caught ripping off a food truck:

Rien starts winning races and getting paid, then crashes on the highway because dudes in cars can’t stop littering, ending up in a wheelchair. Rien considers Jesus but settles on suicide (again on the highway). Mechanic Eef has been earning cash for his trip to America by mugging gay guys at the mall, until they catch and gang-rape him. Hans is not the greatest racer, gets mocked by Rutger on TV, but apparently still earns enough to buy a local bar after it gets trashed by bikers. This seems at least more stable than the food truck, so the girl stays with Hans and her brother moves on. Multiple Blondie songs on the soundtrack is the movie’s real highlight – also a good fake-sex-noises scene early on.

Eef considers a flasher’s offer:

Rutger can’t stop winning:

by ·Comments Off on Strangler vs. Strangler (1984, Slobodan Sijan)

The credits roll over a long slow zoom into the back of a conductor’s head – someone has been watching Unfaithfully Yours – and later they’ll steal the Psycho music during a shower murder. It’s a cute mass-murder/mass-media comedy from Serbia, the director’s follow-up to How I Was Systematically Destroyed by Idiots. There are elaborate flashbacks, an opera, a music video, and an intertitled talking cat.

No one will be admitted during the thrilling shower scene:

The police inspector, having a bad day:

Strangler One is Pera, a flower salesman tormented by his mother, who falls into mad amnesiac rages when women insult his flowers. Spiro is an indie rocker who claims to be in touch psychically with the strangler, and writes a hit song about it. Women are just around to be strangled, until DJ Sofia bites off a strangler’s ear during the final struggle.

by ·Comments Off on Body Heat (1981, Lawrence Kasdan)

Lawyer William Hurt meets Kathleen Turner on a hot week in Florida and goes absolutely sex mad, ultimately buying bombs from Pyro Mickey Rourke and murdering Kathleen’s older husband Richard Crenna (of MST3K flick Marooned) so they can be (rich) together, but she vanishes with the money, letting Hurt get busted by his cop friend J.A. Preston (Remo Williams) and prosecutor Ted Danson (the year before getting buried in the sand in Creepshow).

The director’s and Turner’s debut, with Hurt fresh from Altered States, and some good quippy dialogue. Filipe called it genre autopsy. I had high hopes, but this week I’d just seen better craft in The Stunt Man, better dialogue in The Jerk, and more perversion in Turks Fruit.

by ·Comments Off on Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987, Eric Rohmer)

Two girls meet on a country road and spend four chapter-titled episodes together, this might as well have been named Four More Moral Tales. M is a city ethnology student (Jessica Forde of The Blind Owl the same year). R is a country painter (Joëlle Miquel of Lelouch movies). M agrees to stay over another night after a passing truck ruins their experience of The Blue Hour (a moment before dawn when “you can feel nature holding its breath”, the exact opposite side of the day from The Green Ray). So far I’m on R’s side, because she thinks a lot about outside bird sounds.

2. After M stays in the country, she invites R to paint in the city. Tyrannical waiter Philippe Laudenbach (Mon oncle d’Amérique) illustrates how much Europeans hate when you try to pay the tab with large bills.

3. The most tedious episode – M sees a woman shoplifting, attempts to help her evade the police by moving her bag aside, but the criminal runs off leaving M with a bag full of pilfered groceries and an ensuing lecture about it from R, then she in turn lectures a subway scammer (Green Ray star Marie Rivière).

4. R shows off her portfolio to an art dealer (Perceval himself, later evil boss of The Empire), M pretends to be a disinterested visitor who shames the dealer into paying more for a painting.