When I look back on this after almost thirty years, I am impressed with what director Howard Greenhalgh managed to achieve on a no-doubt razor-thin budget in 1994. The morphing and other CG was primitive, but BHS actually does a better job of using these new tools artistically than just about anything else of the era.
In addition to having his fingerprints on videos from half the major acts of the ‘90s, Greenhalgh coincidentally also made a forgettable video for one of my favorite songs of the early Aughts, Zero 7’s Destiny. Fortunately, someone had Tommy Pallotta make a better one, and the result was beautiful. I’ve always loved rotoscoping, and this was some next-gen stuff that was ripped off by other directors for years to come.
NOTE: I loved this song so much, but it took me fifteen years to find out that I was listening to Sia the whole time.
In 1987, hair-metal had reached its zenith, David Coverdale was the closest thing MTV had to Robert Plant —who had been busy making ‘50s-style pop with The Honeydrippers earlier in the decade— and Tawny Kitaen was The Girl.
She did it kind of backwards. You were supposed to be a video-slut, get noticed, and then explode on the scene as a model or actress… but Tawny had already had her big break. She was in Bachelor Party, which in retrospect was like a peek into an alternate universe where Tom Hanks briefly flirted with being the star of trashy, manic sex comedies instead of America’s most down-to-earth prestige actor, and she had tried her hand at being the screaming girl in a horror movie with Witchboard.
A few years down the road, she even managed to be one of Jerry’s girlfriends on Seinfeld, which is a bigger deal than it sounds, if you pause to look at the ’90s and 2000s acting royalty who landed that much sought-after, purposefully short-term gig over nine seasons.
But as one-hit-wonder Bowling For Soup made clear in its song 1985, it was being the girl “on the hood of Whitesnake’s car” that had the biggest cultural impact. It wasn’t even a particularly good video for its era —as you can see in the remaster above— but something about its aggressive fetishization of Tawny captured our imagination. And Coverdale’s, apparently, since he briefly married her.
She was way too young to go. Farewell to her, and the piece of 1987 she takes with her.
The Revenant: I’ve avoided Leo’s big breakthrough for six years because… well, I’m not sure I had a good reason. It didn’t help that the mauling scene became a meme that trivialized the whole thing in my mind, but that doesn’t really explain my disinterest. And while I considered Birdman to be overrated, Alejandro Iñárritu directed one of my favorite films of the 21st century —21 Grams— and thus deserved the benefit of my doubt. It was an odd movie to skip.
(Another one I should have watched and haven’t: The Shape of Water.)
Whatever the reason for taking so long to watch it, I won’t be forgetting The Revenant any time soon. The combination of unrelenting brutality and bleak, frigid beauty is clinging to my brain a week after seeing it, and while there are times it feels more like Tom Hardy’s movie than DiCaprio’s, the intensity of the latter’s work more than earned that long-delayed Oscar.
Minari: Is it as significant a work as its collection of awards and nominations would suggest? No. It’s a small film, set in a forgettable corner of the world, about modest dreams that are still somehow eternally out of reach, not a crowd-pleaser or Major Work of Art. But it still feels special thanks to the performances, particularly from Youn Yuh-jung and the cherubic, cranky Alan Kim.
Invincible: Meanwhile, I feel like this is Steven Yeun’s real starring vehicle of the year. I was already fond of Invincible from reading the first few volumes of the comic years ago, and while the show is moving a little too quickly for my taste —some character motivations are glossed over, and some plot twists aren’t given the setup time they deserve— the voice work is excellent across the board. Yeun’s Mark Grayson manages to sound youthful and idealistic without becoming annoying, and while I can’t say I ever imagined JK Simmons as the voice of Nolan, the old man nails it.
It’s important to note that —like fellow Amazon show The Boys— Invincible is a product of early 21st-century comics’ attempt to take a “realistic” look at super-heroic violence, so virtually every episode of the show is just about as bloody and jolting as The Revenant. But unlike The Boys, Robert Kirkman’s creation isn’t fixated on cataloging the endless depravities of a world full of morally vacuous demigods, and seems more interested in horrifying the audience than winking at them through a hailstorm of viscera.
The Empty Man: For fifteen or twenty minutes, it’s a watchable, engaging bit of supernatural creepiness. Then the plot kicks in and everything falls apart.
Blade Runner 2049: Prepare yourself for some heresy… I am not a fan of Blade Runner. (Worse, I’m not even a fan of Ridley Scott.) So I approached BR2049 with no real expectations… which is handy, ’cause this moody, overlong, and ultimately pointless movie would have disappointed me if I had. As it is, I was able to enjoy it for the frequently gorgeous cinematography and an Ana de Armas performance that is both figuratively and literally shimmering.
At least it gives me some bit of hope for Villeneuve’s version of Dune.
The Mosquito Coast: This one was a re-watch of a film I first saw in 1986; I was inspired to return to it by the imminent release of the (dramatically reimagined and expanded) Apple TV series of the same name. And while I’m 35 years older today, my view of it hasn’t changed much.
It’s actually a pretty ballsy effort, from Harrison Ford’s perspective; the biggest movie star in the world plays a character that the audience cannot help but hate. Every time Ford’s undeniable screen charisma starts to seduce you, the character says or does something so problematic or detestable that it can’t be overlooked. Allie Fox is a disaster of a father who didn’t have the imagination to be a cult leader.
Sadly, Helen Mirren’s Mother —seriously, that’s the only name she’s given— is a paper-thin doormat of a character who enables her husband’s madness until the plot decides her acquiescence is no longer convenient. And while there are flashes of the brilliant young actor River Phoenix would become, his Charlie Fox is reduced to little more than a muted narration track and a mix of admiring and/or worried looks.
In the end, director Peter Weir delivered a work that is just as frustrating and infuriating and watchable as its lead character.
Married At First Sight (Australia): I’ve never watched any iteration of MAFS before now, but this menagerie of weirdos, fuck-ups, and social rejects is a sight to behold. We’re only halfway through the season, but right now, I’m cheering for the so-awkward-they-could-be-siblings Patrick & Belinda, and am cautiously optimistic about Booka & Brett… the rest are trainwrecks with varying body counts.
With that said, as I discovered with their version of Love Island, Australian sensibilities seem well-suited to this sort of thing. They’re slightly prettier and sluttier than their British counterparts, while being a little less competitive and narcissistic than the Americans who typically populate these shows. It’s a nice balance.
She hit the peak of her career in her 50s, which is impressive for any actor, but especially so for a woman in the 1980s. And she did it sharing the screen with some of the biggest, showiest actors of her era —Nic Cage and Cher in Moonstruck— and as part of star-heavy ensembles like Steel Magnolias.
Amazingly, she was working right up to the end; I still need to sit down and watch 2019’s installment of Tales of the City.
Ah, Hayley. 2018 was so long ago, but I have not forgotten all that you bring to the table.
Last week, I watched Grease 2 for the first time in 30 years. And viewing it with adult eyes, two things jumped out at me:
It’s like it was made by someone who hated the original Grease.
Based on the contemporaneous reviews I’ve read, it was made for those people, too. Who knew so many folks hated Grease back in the day?
It has —and I’m being generous— two tolerable songs, and the performances are so bad and/or weird that Adrian Fucking Zmed manages to steal the show. Maxwell Caulfield may be the least talented singer to ever front a musical, and like Adam Driver in Star Wars, Michelle Pfeiffer acts as if she’s in a different movie altogether… she’s too subtle where she should go big, too loud when she should be quiet, and seems like she’s doing her best not to shout “fuck this” and walk off at any minute.
But dear God help me, it still instantly transported me back to thirteen years old. Which is quite a long trip at this point.
That’s kind of a huge topic, but one piece of it is “learn to speak with intent”.
I know it’s cool to tell The Olds that communicating in more than ironic in-crowd gibberish and meme-speak is unnecessary, and if you have nothing particular or intimate to convey, that’s probably true. A “THIS IS FINE” gif can get a point across to a diverse population with minimal effort, after all.
But that’s the thing… expressing your emotions shouldn’t be easy. They’re your emotions, and they’re precisely as memorable and meaningful as you make them. Don’t just spew your thoughts… make careful choices.
Something I constantly recommend: Al Pacino directed one of my favorite movies back in ‘96, entitled Looking For Richard. On the surface, it’s an excuse for a bored fiftysomething to indulge himself and his film-actor buddies… “let’s put on a cheap production of Richard III and record it!” But in reality, it’s (a) the best Shakespeare For Dummies ever created, and (b) an opportunity for Pacino and the audience to explore what it means to use language to extract and elevate the base material of the human condition.
And the tone is set in the first five minutes, when a toothless old homeless guy speaks fervently to the camera.
It feels unfair that I never give Ally Sheedy credit for being a part of many of the movies I loved as a kid. Perhaps it’s because she was seldom the centerpiece in a cast, or perhaps because I wouldn’t start appreciating her look for another ten years… whatever the case, I seldom think about her, and when I do, it’s solely related to The Breakfast Club.
But when I look at her filmography, there’s a lot I’ve forgotten.
Wargames (1983)
It wasn’t a Good Movie, but Wargames probably had a bigger impact on my life than any other film. I walked out of the theater convinced that I needed to understand how computers worked, ASAP. And even after I learned that one could not, in fact, trigger a Global Thermonuclear War from one’s bedroom, and that simply using a damned modem all the time would cost your parents hundreds of dollars in phone bills, I still wanted to understand. The topic consumed my life for the next twenty years.
Again, Oxford Blues was not a Good Movie. It was a pretty standard Rob Lowe Vehicle of that era, although casting Julian Sands was a rather bold choice. Anyway, it’s hard for a movie about rowing to be memorable, and OB isn’t. What it had going for it was HBO and The Movie Channel, who ran the thing almost as relentlessly as they did Eddie & The Cruisers.
Oxford Blues (1984)
(Virtually none of you know this, but Eddie & The Cruisers was a delightfully cheesy piece of rock ‘n roll melodrama. Someone wrote exactly one killer song for a movie about a band with one killer song[1], they hired a young Tom Sizemore and young-ish Joey Pants to make Michael Pare look good as their lead, slipped it into theaters… and it bombed. But once it hit HBO and was shoved in front of our faces four times a day, the song became a Billboard success and the movie earned an unnecessary, disappointing sequel. And that’s what activist fandom gets you, kids: The Snyder Cut and Eddie & The Cruisers 2. Oh, and a third season of Roswell. Yay?)
St. Elmo’s Fire (1985)
Let’s face it, there was only one actress that a high school boy could see in St. Elmo’s Fire, and it wasn’t Ally. Also, and this is just between us… Andrew McCarthy always bugged me. Fuck him. #TeamDucky
Short Circuit (1986)
I’m noticing a pattern here… both Ally Sheedy and I liked a lot of shitty movies in the ’80s. But I won’t even pretend that I simply “liked” this crap… I loved it. To this day, within five seconds of hearing the name “Stephanie” or a reference to “number 5”, that grating robot voice bursts to life in my brain.
Hm. Looking back at this list, I suspect that I tend to overlook Ally because her career is basically the jewel that is The Breakfast Club, sandwiched by a lot of cinematic mediocrity that I mostly enjoyed Because It Was There And I Was Bored.
