Category Archives: 80’s Movies

Music Box (1989)

Posted on June 28, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: She defends her father.

Anne Talbot (Jessica Lange) works as a defense attorney in Chicago and is shocked when her kindly father (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who immigrated to the US from Hungary many years ago, is threatened at having his citizenship revoked due to being accused of committing past war crimes.  Several witnesses have come forward to identify him as being ‘Mishka’ a man who headed a Nazi terror unit known as the Red Arrow that systematically tortured and killed Hungarian Jews during WWII. Anne refuses to believe this and immediately volunteers to defend him in court, but as she researches the case she finds many unsettling elements that makes her question whether her father really is the victim of mistaken identity as he claims, or actually the man responsible for committing heinous acts against humanity.

The film was inspired by the true-life case of John Demjanjuk who immigrated to the US in 1952 and worked as an auto worker for many decades before being identified by 11 Holocaust survivors as being Ivan the Terrible who tortured and killed many Jewish prisoners while working as a guard at a concentration camp. Script writer Joe Eszterhas also adds his own experiences into the story by channeling the emotions he felt when he found out that his father had been involved in disseminating anti-semitic propaganda during WWII.

The plot had all the hallmarks of being a trenchant courtroom drama especially since it was directed by Costa-Gavras who has shown a knack for helming political thrillers with a psychological bent, but it all ultimately falls flat. Much of the problem is that we learn little about Mueller-Stahl’s character as his face never shows any emotion. At first this makes it interesting as he comes off like this kindly old man who seems the complete opposite of what he’s being accused of, but after awhile we need to see what’s going in his mind and beneath the facade. Whether it’s anger, fear, madness, or evil at some point it needs to get conveyed in his face as the trial goes on, but instead all the viewer sees is a constant blank stare that keeps the character frustratingly transparent.

Having a male model pose as the younger version of him in the wartime photos was a mistake too. Googling images of Mueller-Stahl when he was young shows that he looked much different than the model in the movie making the portions where the witnesses positively identify Stahl from the photos seem off-kilter since the guy in them even when given the realities of aging doesn’t look anything like the man sitting in the courtroom. To avoid this they should’ve cropped an actual pic of Mueller-Stahl into the war time photos.

The court case itself ends up becoming quite draggy because instead of focusing on one witness they put in several of them one after the other who essentially retell the same type of story, which gets redundant. There’s also some Hollywood theatrics that get thrown in like when Mueller-Stahl physically confronts one of the witnesses in the courtroom with no one attempting to restrain him before he collapses to the floor in a completely over-the-top fashion. Having everyone in the trial then get flown across the Atlantic to a Hungarian hospital to hear testimony from a dying witness only helps to turn the entire thing into a misguided spectacle.

Lange, who was Hollywood’s darling at the time and constantly offered first dibs at every ‘important’ movie that came out, gives a good performance, but her emotional character arch is predictable. The focus should’ve been on Mueller-Stahl’s character and what made him tick, but no insights are ever given even during the climatic final confrontation, which ultimately cements this as being a big disappoint.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: December 8, 1989

Runtime: 2 Hours 4 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Costa-Gavras

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, Court Drama, Movies that take place in Chicago

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Lovesick (1983)

Posted on June 24, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Therapist falls for patient.

Saul (Dudley Moore), who works as a psychoanalyst, starts to see a new patient, Chloe (Elizabeth McGovern) who he immediately starts having feelings for, but every time he fantasies about her he sees a vision of Sigmund Freud (Alec Guinness) in his head who advises him not to go through with it due to ethical issues. The problem is that Chloe also has feelings for Saul. Can the two work out a relationship despite being up against professional and societal obligations that won’t let them?

The biggest mystery here is why these two stars would choose to act in this project. Moore was coming off two mega hits at the box office and McGovern had just gotten nominated for an Academy Award for her work in the critically acclaimed Ragtime and yet they choose this vapid thing as their follow-up. I realize it was written by Marshall Brickman, who won the Oscar for his Annie Hall script, but not everything he touches will turn to gold and it’s pretty obvious pretty quickly that this screenplay isn’t on par with that one. In a lot of ways this thing, which was critically panned and just barely able to break even at the box office, could be blamed for sinking both of their careers. It also smothers their talents by forcing Moore to play a part in too normal of a way to the point that he isn’t funny at all and completely upstaged by everyone else. McGovern on the other hand, who was only 21 at the time, plays a woman who is more middle-aged, which squelches her youthful beauty and energy.

The supporting cast aren’t allowed to play to the full potential of their talents either. I was intrigued to watch the movie when I read the plot synopsis about Alec Guinness appearing as Freud, which I presumed would be really funny, but the concept does not get played-up enough and becomes completely dull and forgettable. Alan King with his abrasive personality is always good for a few sparks, but here his presence doesn’t add much and it would’ve been funnier had he been cast as a therapist.

The biggest disappointment is how Ron Silver gets misused. He plays the perfect composite of an arrogant, obnoxious actor that manages to give the film a slight boost, but then as it progresses his demeanor gets softened until he becomes as boring as everyone else and then by the second-half he gets dropped completely.

The story itself is unbelievable and hard to fathom how anyone could’ve given it the green light. The part where it jumps-the-shark is when Moore steals McGovern’s house key, breaks into her home, reads her private diaries and then eventually gets caught hiding in her bathtub, but instead of her becoming freaked out about this and running to the police she immediately goes to bed with him!

It’s not like therapists don’t sometimes have romantic feelings for their patients or vice versa, but that doesn’t mean they always follow through with their emotions, or if they did it most likely wouldn’t work out. The film here takes an intriguing concept and then glosses over all of the potential complications that would ensue. Everything works out too seamlessly by packaging a complex issue in too much of a cutesy way.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: February 18, 1983

Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Marshall Brickman

Studio: The Ladd Company

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Romance

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Stoogemania (1985)

Posted on June 22, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: Too much Three Stooges.

Howard F. Howard (Josh Mostel) is a man suffering from an obsession with the Three Stooges and it’s starting to affect his daily life and even is impending marriage to Beverly (Melanie Chartoff). He finds others that are having the same problem and the only way to cure it is to commit himself to Stooge Hills Sanitarium where he and others like him hope to rid themselves of their ailment through proper psychiatric care, but only if the inmates don’t overrun the asylum first.

It may seem hard to believe, but during the 80’s the Three Stooges franchise enjoyed a renaissance mainly due to its reruns being shown on TBS and the hit 1984 novelty song ‘The Curly Shuffle’. Personally I don’t get what the enjoyment is and  like with ‘Gilligan’s Island’ that somehow caught on with later generations, but in my opinion should’ve been forgotten instead. To me it’s just a lot of inane humor and predictable antics. If you’re 4 their routines might seem ‘hilarious’, but beyond that it most likely would bore anyone else and yet in the 80’s they were people out there that couldn’t get enough of the stooges including a former dentist of mine who had collected all of their film shorts.

If put in the imaginative hands of someone like Tim Burton this concept might’ve  worked, but with Chuck Workman at the helm it sinks fast. Workman has had a lot of success in directing documentaries and even won some awards for them, but his heart clearly wasn’t into this one. I almost wondered if he himself even enjoyed The Three Stooges or was just vomiting out some substandard product simply to collect a paycheck. The humor lacks even a modicum of cleverness and amounts to people acting incredibly stupid and equating this as being ‘funny’. No where is this more painfully evident then in the wedding scene that has first grade level pratfalls coupled with the dumb facial reactions from the actors and annoying cartoon-like sound effects, that are so stupid it starts to make the actual Three Stooges clips of which there are many that get shown here, seem brilliant by comparison.

Mostel is weak in the lead and had it actually been his father Zero Mostel, who had been cast here it would’ve done better. Zero had great ability to play off the camera and wonderful facial expressions and reactions that could keep even the worst of movies that he was in fun, but his son comes-off like some fat blob of a guy who got into the business simply by riding on his father’s coattails. Besides, if this is supposed to be a parody of the Three Stooges then why not have three men in the lead instead of just one?

There’s a host of other famous faces that drop in and out here including: Thom Sharp (who actually is kind of funny here), Sid Caesar, Victoria Jackson and Bill Kirchenbauer, but none of them can save this disaster that amounts to being an embarrassment even to the name of the Three Stooges and will most likely disappoint even those that enjoy them.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: October 10, 1985

Runtime: 1 Hour 23 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Chuck Workman

Studio: Atlantic Releasing Corporation

Available: VHS

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Posted in 80's Movies, Movies Based on Songs, Movies for the Whole Family, Obscure Movies, Parody, Slapstick

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Gandhi (1982)

Posted on June 20, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 9 out of 10

4-Word Review: Fighting for India independence.

The film follows the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) starting at the age of 23 when he gets thrown off of a train in South Africa simply for being Indian. After spending many years fighting for Indian rights in that country he then moves back to his homeland of India. It is there that he takes up the challenge of fighting for its independence from Britain by advocating for his followers to practice peaceful civil disobedience.

This film project took director Richard Attenborough 20 years in the making as all the Hollywood studios refused to back it. He also went through many different casting choices in regards to who would play the lead and at one time seriously considered Dustin Hoffman and Anthony Hopkins in the title role. Due to the difficulty of finding backers and other hurdles some of the stars that do appear here were offered their parts many years before the filming actually took place including Candice Bergen, who plays Margaret Bourke-White, who first got approached about it in 1966.

Yet the long wait proved to be worth it as the film comes close to being a masterpiece in just about every conceivable area. I was surprised too that for  such a long runtime it hardly ever seems slow and clips along at a brisk pace. The story is filled with many strong scenes even a few harrowing ones like the recreation of the Amritsar Massacre that is quite disturbing, but thoughtfully handled.

After making his film debut a decade earlier as the bad guy in Fear is the Key and then moving back to the stage Kingsley shines in his Academy Award winning performance . The rest of the cast gets filled with a lot of big names, but many of them have brief appearances that almost amount to walk-on parts. My favorite though was Trevor Howard, who plays a judge and despite have little dialogue and only 2-minutes in front of the camera still manages to make the most of it, which is what great acting is all about.

The film though lacks a complete oversight of Gandhi’s character as we only get introduced to him when he is already 23 even though the crucial formative years are during childhood and it would’ve been revealing and insightful to have seen some scenes of him during that period. His family life also takes a backseat. We see only one scene of him with his children and then they just disappear. He also discusses marrying his wife when he was very young, but a flashback showing it would’ve been stronger.

The film also has its share of dissenters who feel it’s biased as it only shows the positive side to Gandhi’s personality. It even instigated three novels, which paints Gandhi in a much different light by arguing that he fought for Indian rights while in South Africa, but not for the blacks and there’s evidence that he had the same disdain for the blacks in that country as the whites did.

Some also argue that his involvement in the push for India independence was much more minimal than the film portrays and that India most likely would’ve eventually broken off from British rule one way or the other had Gandhi existed or not. All of these counter arguments could have some merit, but I don’t think that was the intended point of the film, but instead the focus was on how peaceful non-violent resistance can make a difference and in that regard the movie succeeds nicely.

My Rating: 9 out of 10

Released: December 6, 1982

Runtime: 3 Hours 11 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Richard Attenborough

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Academy Award Winners for Best Actor, Academy Award Winners for Best Director, Academy Award Winners for Best Picture, Academy Award Winners for Best Screenplay, Epic, Historical Drama, Movies Based on Actual Events

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Liar’s Moon (1980)

Posted on June 16, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Couple harbors dark secret.

During the summer of 1949 in a small Texas town Jack (Matt Dillon), who has just turned 18, falls for Ginny (Cindy Fisher) who is 17. Jack is from the poor side of town and helps out his father (Hoyt Axton) on a family run farm while Ginny lives a more privileged life as the daughter of the town’s banker (Christopher Connelly) As Jack and Ginny’s relationship progresses they find stiff resistance to it from their mutual parents particularly Ginny’s father, but they don’t know why. In order to get married they go to Louisiana to elope, but Ginny’s father hires a detective (Richard Moll) to track them down and bring his daughter back no matter what the cost.

The one aspect about the movie that I did like is that it paints its small town characters in a generally positive light. Too many times movies that deal with stories that took place in a bygone era always seem to portray the characters as being more dopey than people of today, or more racist and meaner especially if it takes place in the south, but fortunately that doesn’t occur here. Instead we get shown regular, everyday people that you could easily meet today that just so happen to have lived a long time ago.

The film also has a nice leisurely pace to it and the romantic angle doesn’t seem quite as rushed, which is good, but the film also lacks finesse. The only part of the movie that has any atmosphere or cinematic flair is the opening flashback sequence, which gets done in black and white, while the rest of it pretty much flat lines. The scene where three men get royally drunk on some strong whiskey and another one where the town’s young men try to tackle a baby hog at the fair are the only times when there’s spontaneity or verve.

The story itself is too obvious and too many clues are given away, so by the time the ‘shocking’ secret get revealed you pretty much had guessed it way earlier. A few extra twists are thrown in during the final 15 minutes, but overall it becomes soap opera laden and too similar to the tragedy tinged teen romances of the 70’s that gives the whole thing a formulaic feel.

The eclectic cast is really the only interesting aspect about the film with Dillon giving a solid performance and Fisher looking quite beautiful even when she is constantly crying, which is pretty much all she does during the final third. Academy Award winning actor Broderick Crawford, whose last film this was, gets completed wasted in a pointless role that has very little screen time and the same goes for Yvonne De Carlo who speaks here in what sounds to be an Irish accent. Susan Tyrrell though is strong playing another one of her fringe characters, this time in the form of a prostitute, who comes off as cold and snarky at first, but eventually becomes surprisingly sympathetic.

Spoiler Alert!

Two different endings were filmed and distributed and which ending you saw depended on which theater you attended. One has the main character dying while the other one doesn’t, but both come-off as rather cheesy and make you feel like sitting through this thing really wasn’t worth it.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: September 2, 1982

Runtime: 1 Hour 46 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: David Fisher

Studio: Crown International Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video.

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Drama, Movies that take place in Texas, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with Nudity, Romance

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Out of Africa (1985)

Posted on June 14, 2019 | 2 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 9 out of 10

4-Word Review: An illicit love affair.

In 1913 a wealthy Danish woman named Karen Dinesen (Meryl Streep) gets spurned by the man she is in love with, so on the rebound she decides to accept the marriage proposal of the man’s brother, Baron Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) Despite the fact that neither she nor he are in love with the other, but decide to make it a marriage of convenience. They move together to Kenya where they plan to at first start a cattle farm, but it soon turns into a coffee plantation. Through the years Karen’s marriage to Bror begins to sour as he continues to have affairs with countless other women, so Karen turns her attention to the dashing big-game hunter named Denys (Robert Redford) and the two share a passionate and adventurous love affair, but when Karen tries to turn their relationship into a committed one he refuses.

The film, especially the first hour, comes off more like a broad sketch than a fluid story, or a highlight reel taken from a wide outline. I could never really get any type of handle of who this Karen person really was. I never understood why she would want to leave Denmark for Africa, or why she’d be so quick to settle down with a man that she didn’t love. So what if she got spurned by one guy there’s still other fish in the proverbial sea. Why not wait around for someone she could truly be excited about instead of just jumping in with someone that she really wasn’t?

To some degree I did find the marriage-of-convenience idea an interesting one. It’s rare that both parties admit that neither has the hots for the other, but still decide to make a go of it, which seemed like highly modernistic behavior especially for the time period and I was hoping this whole scenario would be explored more, but the film treats this mainly as a side-story that pretty much fades away after the first hour.

The introduction of the Denys character gets a bit botched too as he keeps popping in and out at the most convenient times out of literally nowhere, like when Karen finds herself ready to be attacked by a lion, and then just as quickly disappearing again almost like he were a magical genie.  The fact that Streep puts in so much effort into her Scandinavian accent, but Redford puts none into conveying an English one is off-putting. Supposedly Redford did initially try to speak with a light accent, but director Pollack apparently found it ‘distracting’ and advised him to speak without it, but in the process it makes the acting seem uneven.

It’s during the second-half where the film really comes together as it focuses solely on the affair though in real-life there was only a two year difference between Karen and Denys, but here there’s a 12 year difference between the actors playing the part and it shows, but despite that discretion this segment really works. I loved watching the different things that the couple did like playing a phonograph record to some monkeys and seeing how they responded to it and watching Karen taking an airplane ride for the first time and all the majestic scenery that she takes in.

The cinematography is indeed sumptuous and one of the things that holds it altogether even when the script jumps precariously and sometimes jarringly from one point in Karen’s life to another. The film would’ve worked better had it focused on only one area, like her relationship with Denys, which could’ve helped create a stronger, more immediate emotional impact with the viewer while also cutting down on the excessively long runtime.

My Rating: 9 out of 10

Released: December 10, 1985

Runtime: 2 Hours 41 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Sydney Pollack

Studio: Universal

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Academy Award Winners for Best Director, Academy Award Winners for Best Picture, Academy Award Winners for Best Screenplay, Epic, Movies Based on Actual Events, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Romance

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Soul Man (1986)

Posted on May 25, 2019 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Pretending to be black.

Mark Watson (C. Thomas Howell) has been accepted into Harvard Law School, but just before he’s ready to attend his father (James B. Sikking) states that he won’t help to pay for it forcing Mark to try and find other avenues of funding. He eventually decides to take some tanning pills, which makes his skin darker and then apply for a scholarship only available to African American students. After getting the money he continues with the charade, but encounters many problems along the way that he wasn’t expecting.

This is one comedy that hasn’t aged well at all. At the time of its release it wasn’t considered too great to begin with and I avoided it, but now almost 30 years later the blackface plot line has made it a bad stain on the careers of those involved particularly the producer, writer and director who were all white and apparently thought they were ‘woke’ and making something ‘socially relevant’, but really weren’t. However, even if you get past the politically incorrect scenario this is still a really bad movie either way.

The basic premise is the biggest problem as Howell never ever effectively looks black, Egyptian maybe, but more like some white guy wearing a tacky wig and who stayed under the sun lamp too long. The fact that anyone could believe that he was really black for even a second is patently absurd as his skin is more of a dark beige color and his other facial features never change, which makes the scene where his own parents don’t even recognize him all the more stupid.

The idea of having him intentionally overdose on tanning pills just brings up even more questions. For instance if he takes more than the recommended dosage wouldn’t that cause some dangerous side effect and how exactly is he able to turn white again at the end as overdosing on the pills would’ve most likely have caused some sort of long term health risk to either his system or skin.

The fact that he’s able to get the scholarship right away is pretty ridiculous too. Don’t applicants have to go through some sort of background check before they get accepted or do they simply get handed the money the minute they walk in and ask for it like it seems here and wouldn’t this background check then expose that he was really white?

This also has to be the dumbest guy ever to get accepted into Harvard. I’m not saying the character has to necessarily conform to the nerd stereotype, but the guy comes off like a world class slacker from the beginning who proceeds to say and do one clueless thing after another until you wonder if he’d ever be accepted into junior college let alone an Ivy League one.

James Earl Jones’ performance, where he channels the black version of Professor Kingsfield from The Paper Chase, is one of the film’s few bright spots. I also enjoyed Rae Dawn Chong who plays Howell’s potential love interest and who comes off as far more real and multi-dimensional than any of the other characters in the film to the point that she should’ve been made the star while scrapping Howell and his silly shenanigans completely.

Not only does the film fail to offer any true meaningful insight into race relations, but it manages to stereotype white people in the process particularly the two white male students who are constantly getting caught making racist jokes about black people. Is the viewer actually supposed to believe that this is all these two guys ever talk about as it certainly is made to seem that way, which is just one more example as to why this has to be one of the clumsiest, most unfunny and most poorly thought out satires ever made.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: October 24, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Steve Miner

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Basketball Movies, Cold Climate/Wintertime Movies, College Life, Romance, Satire

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Nothing in Common (1986)

Posted on May 15, 2019 | 3 comments

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Father needs his son.

David Basner (Tom Hanks) is leading a happy life as a successful advertising executive yet he’s forced to put it all on hold when his parents (Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint) of 36 years announce that they’re getting a divorce. His father also loses his job as well as being diagnosed with diabetes forcing David to give him round-the-clock care despite the fact that they don’t get along.

The best thing about the film are the performances of its two stars. For Hanks this marked his transition from comedy to more serious roles, but for the most part his charm still comes from his comic edge especially with the way he greets each of his co-workers when he returns to the office after a vacation. It’s really Gleason though, who was dying from cancer as he performed in this, that is the most compelling and he should’ve been in the movie more and better yet made the star as he literally owns every scene that he’s in and despite his cantankerous personality manages to elicit a lot of sympathy from the viewer.

Unfortunately the script doesn’t focus enough on the father/son relationship and instead goes off on many tangents like David’s struggles to come up with a creative ad for one of his clients, which isn’t as compelling or interesting. There’s also several running jokes that digresses the whole thing down to almost a sitcom level especially with Hector Elizondo’s, who plays David’s boss, desperate attempts to come up with a suitable hairpiece. The bits involving David’s pranks on an office receptionist in order to try and get her to laugh makes him seem more annoying than funny and she would’ve been justified to have him reported for harassment.

Dwelling into David’s love-life dilutes the story even further. Initially I thought his courting of Sela Ward had some spark as she played-hard-to-get and part of what makes potential relationships so interesting is the chase itself, but after putting up a cold front for a few minutes she then jumps into bed with him, which just takes the air out of everything. Bess Armstrong, who plays his former girlfriend, seemed more his type. However, the scene where he barrages into her apartment drunk late at night and hassles her and the new guy she’s sleeping with made him seem extremely obnoxious to the point that I was hoping he’d get punched in the face.

Saint’s character does nothing but add to the dramatic clutter in a bland role that  offers little to the story. It would’ve been more effective had she died instead of divorcing the husband, which would’ve offered more of a catalyst for Hanks and his father to get together.

The film ends where it should’ve began with Hanks deciding to move in with his father in order to help him with his health problems. Watching these two with very diametrically opposed personalities trying to get along inside this very cramped apartment could’ve been quite revealing and insightful and yet we see none of it. Instead we’re treated to a rambling narrative that offers generic drama and little else.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: July 30, 1986

Runtime: 1 Hour 58 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Gary Marshall

Studio: TriStar Pictures

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Movies that take place in Chicago, Movies with a Hospital setting

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Simon (1980)

Posted on May 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: College professor becomes brainwashed.

An underground group of scientists who enjoy playing elaborate pranks decide to brainwash a college professor named Simon Mendelssohn (Alan Arkin) into believing that he is an alien from another planet. After he is successfully brainwashed he then escapes from the institution and gets in with a religious cult who have a transmitter that can block the TV airwaves and allow him the ability to be seen by the entire nation where he tries to reform American culture while also becoming a celebrity sensation.

This extremely odd comical satire  seems out of place for a studio backed film and more in tune with a independent project as it’s unclear what specific type of audience the filmmakers were hoping to attract as mainstream viewers will most likely find the humor off-putting. One could describe it as being ahead-of-its-time, but the banal potshots at such overused targets as TV and American consumerism makes it seem more dated instead.

The movie would’ve worked better had it remained focused on one intended target and then ravaged the hell out of it instead of soft jabs at various safe targets, which makes its overall message muddled and unclear. There are some funny bits including watching Austin Pendleton, who is the head of the research group, making love to a giant telephone receiver, whose voice is supplied by Louise Lasser. It’s also funny having a brainwashed person such as Simon trying to brainwash others via the airwaves, which could’ve been really hilarious had they gone farther with this idea.

There’s signs that writer/director Marshall Brickman hadn’t fully thought through the quirky story idea to begin with. For instance why would this underground group of scientists allow a video crew in to film what they are doing as the members are seen at the beginning talking directly to the camera and answering questions by some unseen interviewer. Wouldn’t this allow their secret to get out and get them into trouble? The army that takes over the institute is too incompetent as Simon and his girlfriend Lisa (Judy Graubart) are able to escape from it too easily and their inability to locate Simon’s rogue TV transmitter even after days of searching is rather pathetic. I realize this is meant to be ‘funny’, but even a comedy should have some tension to it to make it more interesting and the army’s extreme buffoonery isn’t humorous at all, but just plain dumb instead.

Arkin is the one thing that saves it. His unusual acting style makes him hard to cast, but here he really delivers especially during the segment where he plays out the evolution of man, but without using any dialogue although it might’ve been funnier and more of an interesting contrast had his character not been so kooky to begin with, but instead some stuffy intellectual only to become zany once he was brainwashed.

Judy Graubart makes for a good anchor as the one normal person in the whole movie. She was best known for her work on the children’s TV-show ‘The Electric Company’ and this was her live-action film debut, which should’ve lead to a long line of film appearances, but instead she only had brief bits in two other movies and that was it.

There are signs of a great movie trying to break out and the overall concept has brilliant potential, but this is the type of film where you’ve got to go full-throttle and Brickman seems either unable or too timid to do that making what could’ve been sharp satire into a transparent, benign mess that offers only a few chuckles, but not much else.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: February 1, 1980

Runtime: 1 Hour 37 Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Marshall Brickman

Studio: Orion Pictures

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive) Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Black Comedy, Movies Based on Conspiracy Theories, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Offbeat, Satire, Sci-Fi

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So Fine (1981)

Posted on May 5, 2019 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Jeans that expose ass.

Bobby Fine (Ryan O’Neal) is an English professor at a college waiting to get tenure who inexplicably becomes the head of his father’s clothing company, which produces women’s apparel, when his father Jack Fine (Jack Warden) is unable to pay off a debt that he has with a local loan shark named Eddie (Richard Kiel). Bobby knows nothing about the clothing business, but inadvertently strikes on a hot idea, jeans that look like they’re revealing a woman’s butt cheeks, which becomes a huge fashion sensation. Unfortunately Bobby also starts having an affair with Eddie’s wife Lira (Mariangela Melato) which jeopardizes not only his newfound success, but his life as well.

The film was written and directed by Andrew Bergman who was just coming off great success as the screenwriter for The In-Laws and was fully expecting this film to do just as well, but instead it had less than a 2-week run in the theaters. Much of this can be blamed on the humor, which is lowbrow and farcical while failing to give any new insights into the clothing business, or anything else for that matter. The jeans themselves don’t look sexy either as plastic gets used in replacement of the real butt cheeks where exposing the actual ass would’ve been far more provocative.

O’Neal’s affair with Melato is both unfunny and dumb. Why would such a good-looking guy, who could easily get women to fall for him,  fall suddenly head-over-heals to a wife of a mobster who will kill him instantly if he found out? This guy teaches at a college, so why not get into a sexual relationship with one of the coeds, who are most likely younger and better looking than this middle-aged woman and does not have the baggage of a marriage?

The climactic sequence, which takes place at an opera is when this thing really jumps-the-shark as it features Melato coming out of the audience and agreeing to replace the leading lady on stage when she falls ill, but how would Melato have known all the words to the music without having been to any of the rehearsals? This segment also features Kiel getting on stage and becoming a part of the opera as well where he sings in fluent Italian even though it was never established earlier that he knew the language.

It was fun seeing Kiel, who built a career by playing a lot of mindless hulks most notably in the James Bond films, being given more speaking lines than usual, but I noticed the very apparent lump on his forehead, which in his other films I didn’t. Maybe this was because in the Bond movies he was given metal teeth, which is what got the viewer’s attention and took away from the lump, which here I found became a distraction.

Melato, who was a big star in Italy particularly with the films she did with director Lina Wertmuller, gets completely wasted in a thankless, one-dimensional role of an over-sexed vamp that is neither funny nor interesting. O’Neal, whose best bit may just be the perplexed expression he conveys in the film’s poster seen above, is adequate, but upstaged by Warden who is far funnier and the movie would’ve worked better had he been the star.

The jeans angle, which features a TV-ad that has Anita Morris as one of the dancers, is brief and more of a side-story while the emphasis is on O’Neal’s fling with Melato that isn’t very inspired and no surprise why this ultimately failed at the box office.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 25, 1981

Runtime: 1 Hour 30 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Andrew Bergman

Studio: Warner Brothers

Available: DVD-R (Warner Archive), YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, College Life, Farce, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Sex

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