BLADE RUNNER
****
USA
A landmark philosophical
sci-fi noir, loosely based on Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?" The original Hollywoodised version of the film has
practically gotten buried over the years. Whenever people rave about the
picture - and boy, do they ever - you are to assume they're referring to
the substantially revised 'director's cut' which was released on DVD ten
years later.
It's L.A. 2019, Harrison Ford plays the ex-cop recruited to
kill off a group of rebelling 'replicants' (manufactured humanoid slaves
barely distinguishable from people). There is a coldness to the film that
doesn't appear to coincide with the characters' detachment as much as it
does with the actors' inexpressiveness. But though it's difficult to
engage with it emotionally, it's compelling on several other levels.
Since Ford and his fellow humans are portrayed as even less
emotionally responsive than the androids, you're meant to spend the
picture pondering what it is exactly that makes us human. It's not
necessarily a novel proposal, but it's more intelligently, intriguingly
executed than is the norm.
The shock effect of Ridley Scott's bleak, neon-lit,
perennially acid-rain-soaked vision of the future has been muted somewhat
by a score of imitators. But there is an eeriness to its familiarity and
the way it seems to increasingly resemble our world.
dir: Ridley Scott
ph: Jordan Cronenweth
m: Vangelis
ad: Lawrence G. Paull, David L. Snyder, Linda DeScenna
cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James
Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah
E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
****˝
USA
A boy befriends an alien
creature stranded on Earth.
The warmest sci-fi picture ever made; a magical tale of
friendship defying impossible barriers. The title creature is one of the
most original and adorable in cinema history.
dir: Steven Spielberg
wr: Melissa Mathison
cast: Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Robert
MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, K. C. Martel
EATING RAOUL
***
USA
A conservative couple decides
to raise money for a restaurant by luring perverts into their apartment
and murdering them.
Dark, deadpan screwball clearly eager for cult status. It's a bit
funny, and bit quirky, but not as funny and quirky as it thinks it is.
dir: Paul Bartel
cast: Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Robert Beltran
FANNY AND ALEXANDER
****˝
Sweden
The chronicles of a well-to-do
family in Sweden at the turn of the century.
A dark, detailed and haunting morphing between a psycho-drama and a fairy tale, with heavily autobiographical
elements.
wr/dir: Ingmar Bergman
ph: Sven Nykvist
m: Daniel Bell
cast: Gunn Wĺlgren, Ewa Fröling, Bertil Guve, Pernilla
Allwin, Jarl Kulle, Erland Josephson, Allan Edwall, Börje Ahlstedt, Mona
Malm, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jan Malmsjö
FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH
**˝
USA
A pioneeringly vulgar teen comedy that is relatively tame - and
uninteresting - by today's standards.
dir: Amy Heckerling
wr: Cameron Crowe
cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold,
Robert Romanus, Brian Backer, Phoebe Cates, Ray Walston, Scott Thomson,
Forest Whitaker
FIRST
BLOOD
**
USA
Pretty much the archetype for the muscle action bug that plagued the 1980s
- and just barely got neutralised towards the late 90s. It was the first time the
former Italian Stallion got to strut his steroid-assisted stuff as Rocky,
the insistently peace-loving Green Beret who has the luxury of being
pushed too far by a sleepy small town that stands in for his ungrateful
motherland. He is thoroughly justified, as a result, to go up in the
woods, dress like a caveman, strap on the machine guns and obliterate the
best part of a small community's law enforcement team and infrastructure.
Analysing the ideology of a Stallone vehicle however, is an
inevitably joyless endeavour. You watch it for the fist fights and the
gunfights, the incisions and the explosions. But handled as they are
without a strand of independent creative thought, the action scenes are
arbitrary. The entire picture is 80 minutes of arbitrary, capped off with
a preposterously mismanaged tear-stained homily.
dir: Ted Kotcheff
cast: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy, Bill
McKinney, Jack Starett, Michael Talbott, Chris Mulkey
FITZCARRALDO
****˝
West Germany / Peru
In Peru in the 1890s, an
eccentric Irishman sets out to build a grand opera in the jungle.
A strange, stunning, hypnotic study of a madman.
wr/dir: Werner Herzog
ph: Thomas Mauch
m: Popol Vuh
cast: Klaus Kinski, Claudia Cardinale
48 HOURS
***
USA
This
one fired off that neverending cycle of action-comedies that always seemed
to come with a synth score, a small army of scriptwriters, Eddie Murphy
and an unlikely buddy. In his feature-film debut, Murphy plays a convict,
with Nick Nolte as the racist, world-weary cop forced to work with him in
order to track down the crooks who killed his partner.
The star duo starts
off putting far too much strain into their wisecracks but they quickly
relax into it. And there are several scenes where you could swear the
picture is genuinely dealing with race relations. When Nolte forces Murphy
into a lengthy fist-fight, it seems fueled by his prejudice as much as it
is by his desperation to get the facts. Unlike most movie fist-fights,
this one goes without the context of a thrill-savvy score. But then Nolte
grows rapidly tolerant in time for the two of them to chase the bad guys
four times in a row before cornering them for that final showdown (where
Nolte channels Clint Eastwood). The villains are incessantly psychopathic.
When one of them is held at gunpoint, he grins like a crackpot and
maniacal laughter is dubbed on.
dir: Walter Hill
cast: Nick Nolte, Eddie Murphy, Annette O'Toole, Frank
McRae, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Sonny Landham
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GANDHI
**˝
UK/India
The life of Mahatma Gandhi.
A long, prestigious, completely dull and formulaic biopic, aside from a
mesmerizing central performance.
dir: Richard Attenborough
cast: Ben Kingsley, Candice Bergen, Edward Fox, John
Mills, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen, Ian Charleston HAMMETT
***
USA
Writer Dashiell Hammett gets
involved in a mystery outside his fiction.
A film noir in Technicolor that is technically accomplished - the
photography and score are particularly beautiful - but the story often
drags and very nearly falls apart by the end.
dir: Wim Wenders
ph: Philip Lathrop, Joseph Biroc
m: John Barry
cast: Frederic Forrest, Peter Boyle, Marilu Henner, Roy
Kinnear, Lydia, Lei, Elisha Cook LABYRINTH
OF PASSION
**˝
Spain
Almodóvar's sophomore feature revolves around the adventures of a teenage
nymphomaniac called Sexilia and a further gallery of mostly maladjusted
people. The picture is a series of crude, absurd, mostly kinky gags, which
don't lack energy as much as they do bite.
wr/dir: Pedro Almodóvar
cast: Cecilia Roth, Imanol Arias, Helga Liné, Marta Fernández
Muro, Fernando Vivanco, Ofelia Angélica, Ángel Alcázar, Antonio
Banderas AN OFFICER
AND A GENTLEMAN
**˝
USA
A once-popular romance between a misfit naval officer and a factory
girl, about as cheesy and formulaic as its title would suggest. Except
there's some swearing.
dir: Taylor
Hackford
cast: Richard Gere, Debra Winger, David Keith, Louis
Gossett Jr., Robert Loggia, Lisa Blount, Lisa Eilbacher, David Caruso
PASSION
**˝
France/Switzerland
A puffy, joyless rehash of the director's own "Contempt". It's
just as beautifully photographed by Raoul Coutard, but far less likely to
be formed by a central purpose or any kind of feeling at its core.
wr/dir/ed:
Jean-Luc Godard
ph: Raoul Coutard
cast: Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Isabelle Huppert, Hanna
Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, Laszlo Szabo, Sophie Loucachevski
POLTERGEIST
***˝
USA
Supernatural things start to happen
in a suburban family home.
Eccentric occult of the warm-hearted, family-oriented,
Spielberg-approved kind. It's expertly handled as such, with unexpectedly
convincing performances.
dir: Tobe Hooper
cast: Jobeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight,
Zelda Rubinstein, Heather O'Rourke, Oliver Robbins, Dominique Dunne
QUERELLE
***˝
Germany
Self-involved would-be soft-core gay-porn,
where a French sailor discovers his
homosexuality at a Brest whorehouse.
It's made memorable by gorgeous photography. The visuals are so beguiling that for a sizeable
portion of the picture, you forget how insufferably pretentious it is.
dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
ph: Xaver Schwarzenberger, Josef Vavra
cast: Brad Davis, Franco Nero, Jeanne Moreau, Laurent Malet
THE THING
***
USA
A lot of the gore is unnecessary
and this version never comes close to equating the eeriness of the 1951
classic. But it does follow more faithfully the story the original was
based on, retaining the notion of a monster that takes on the form of its
- often human - victims. And it definitely milks out some tension.
dir: John Carpenter
cast: Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, David Clennon,
Keith David, Richard A. Dysart, Charles Hallahan
TOOTSIE
****˝
USA
An unemployed actor pretends
he's a woman and becomes a feminist soap star.
A little stretched and uneven but hilarious and often perceptive screwball comedy.
dir: Sydney Pollack
wr: Larry Gelbart, Don McGuire, Murray Schisgal
cast: Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr,
Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Bill Murray, Sydney Pollack, Geena Davis
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP
***
USA
The life of an eccentric man,
greatly influenced by his liberated mother.
An episodic and decidedly offbeat study of an overwrought character.
Often funny but generally thin.
dir: George Roy Hill
cast: Robin Williams, Mary Beth Hurt, Glenn Close,
John Lithgow, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Swoosie Kurtz
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
***
In Indonesia 1965, young
Australian journalist falls in love with a British attaché.
A polished political drama with fascinating insights obscured by a
dramatically hollow and poorly acted love story.
dir: Peter Weir
ph: Russell Boyd
cast: Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hunt,
Michael Murphy
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