Prick Up Your Ears (1987)

Chapter Six of "Do the Eighties Hold Up?" August

Of the six movies I picked for this little theme month I'm finishing tonight, this is the one that had the most influence on my life. That's because before seeing it I had never heard of Joe Orton, and after watching it I went out and bought his work. All those years I was rootless and wandering, living in my van a lot of the time, I had a box of about a dozen books that I carried with me everywhere I went, the ones I read the most often and enjoyed the most. Joe Orton: Complete Plays was one of those books. I liked all of his work, and adored Loot and Funeral Games. He was this incredibly witty and irreverent writer, at a time in my life when I was utterly rejecting authority and tradition. He was one of my favorite writers, and that's all down to me having seen, and loved, this movie.
But what about the film itself? Well, it's technically a fine film, nothing earth-shaking, but the direction by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things) is interesting. It isn't told in chronological order, but rather as a series of flashbacks that arise from interviews conducted by John Lahr (Wallace Shawn), the man who wrote Orton's biography, also called Prick Up Your Ears. It jumps around from the early Fifties to the late Sixties, but you never get confused, and with the exception of an orgy scene early in the third act the film never lags; Frears is always moving the story forward.
There's almost no score. With a very few exceptions we just hear music that's playing on radios or phonographs within the scenes. Actually, the most memorable bit of music in the film is when Orton's family scatters his ashes at the end; in real life, this moment was accompanied by “A Day in the Life” (Orton was once contracted to write a screenplay for the Beatles), and so Frears plays a bit of that song over the scene. In the original theatrical release, and on the VHS edition, the original track was used, but there must have been some kind of licensing issue, because the DVD release has a fairly dull cover of the song instead. But other than that, the music mostly doesn't draw attention to itself, and after Witness and Educating Rita that's a relief, really.
The story is pretty straightforward: Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) is an uneducated, in fact barely literate, working-class kid who dreams of being an actor. He wins a scholarship to RADA but doesn't seem to have what it takes. While there he meets the more cultured Ken Halliwell (Alfred Molina), and the two become a couple. Early in their relationship Ken is as much Joe's mentor as his lover, but as the years pass Joe becomes a famous playwright, while Ken fails over and over at various attempts at artistic expression. Also, Joe is not monogamous, and has flings with apparently every homosexual in the U.K. Eventually, tormented by both envy and jealousy, Ken murders Joe while he sleeps, and then commits suicide.
The script is pretty good, if a bit heavy-handed in places. Ken is so obviously the First Wife, the one who coached and supported Joe when he was nothing and is then discarded when Joe's ship comes in. The script makes that plain just in the way the story develops, but in case the audience is simple-minded, Joe's manager Peggy Ramsay (Vanessa Redgrave) actually says, while being interviewed by Lahr, “Poor Ken. He was the First Wife. He did all the work and the waiting, and then...” It's a good scene, but I definitely felt that I was being told something I already knew while I watched it.
Also, we hear Ken complain several times in the film that he helps Joe write his plays and never gets any credit, and Lahr's wife Anthea (Lindsay Duncan), who is helping him write the book, twice complains about the same thing. I don't know if Frears is trying to draw a parallel here, but if he is he doesn't do anything with it, and if he isn't I don't know why he let those scenes into the film at all.
Anyway, like I say, a very straightforward story; the only thing that makes it stand out is that the couple are homosexual men rather than a man and a woman. That was pretty daring in 1987, of course, and even though there's no actual sex, Oldman and Molina spend a lot of time making out both with each and with other actors. But if you imagine that Ken is played by Diane Keaton and Joe by Alec Baldwin, say, it's hardly innovative, and in the 21st century it has rather lost its power to shock.
Still, it's a very solid script, written by Alan Bennett from Lahr's book and Orton's diaries. Oldman, Molina, and Redgrave are all given plenty of excellent lines, and there are many moments, particularly between Ken and Joe, that are near-perfect, both because of what they say and because of how quickly those scenes move. Frears and Bennett never linger, but Molina and Oldman can say a lot in just a very few lines. The scene where Joe won't let Ken accompany him to an award presentation is a marvel of concision (“Okay, so when they have awards for titles, you can go to that.”), but the best example of Frears' pacing is the scene where Joe learns that his mother has died. He and Ken have been fighting, but when Joe says “My mother is dead,” Ken instantly becomes sympathetic, knowing how it feels to lose a mother and wanting to comfort Joe. When Joe rejects him and walks out it's devastating, but it's so quick and clean that we don't know we've been hurt 'til the next scene has begun.
When you have such a simple story, with such sharp dialog, your film lives on its performances, and on that note I have a confession to make: the inclusion of Prick Up Your Ears on this project is a bit of a cheat. It's supposed to be about eighties films that I loved when they were new but haven't seen since, but I watched this and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead on the same night back when Rosencrantz was new, so in 1990 or possibly even 1991.
The important point is that by the end of that night, Gary Oldman had gone from being the curiosity who had played Sid Vicious to being my favorite actor. I'll eventually write about Rosencrantz, which I own on DVD and have watched many times over the years, and of course he's brilliant in that, but in this he's really something special, so biting and ironic. He has a definite arc, moving from an innocent but inquisitive youth to a cynical and selfish man, world-weary and caustic but still charming. No effort is made to age him with makeup through the film, and yet you can tell roughly how old he is in each scene, from 17-year-old Joe in his mother's house to the 40-year-old wowing audiences across the U.K., just by the way he carries himself. Something in his eyes, the way he moves his lips, tells you everything about who Joe is at any given moment.
Molina might be even better. His arc is more distressing than Oldman's, as he moves from an arrogant and insufferable young man to a broken, neurotic paranoid. Ken seems never to have learned to have fun, and as he gets older it gets harder and harder for him simply to enjoy himself. He's utterly miserable, at times nearly unwatchable...a tragic figure, even as a murderer.
Both Oldman and Molina are chameleons; they seem to really become whoever they're playing, to the point that it's hard to imagine what their actual personalities are really like. They are both true actors, and must be among the most talented actors alive. It's great to see them playing off of each other in this. Both are completely flawless.
Ken and Joe are extremely unlikeable, really, and yet there's so much depth of character there for Oldman and Molina to explore that you really latch onto both of them. Even though Joe is a selfish slut, we never lose sight of what Ken sees in him; he's sharp, witty, unbelievably charming. He gives that little grin and we want to forgive him everything. Ken, on the other hand, is pathetic to the point of distaste, and yet when Joe is cruel to him we want to put our arms around Ken and comfort him, and scold Joe for being such an asshole, even though if I had to live with Ken I'm sure I'd treat him pretty badly as well.
Their relationship is fascinating. Why does Joe stay with Ken as long as he does? It's obvious that they are no longer lovers; Ken says at one point that he can't remember the last time Joe touched his cock. They clearly don't enjoy each other's company. Joe is successful, raking in enormous fees. Clearly he could simply walk away from Ken and get on with his life, but he stays with Ken in a cheap one-room walkup in Islington. Why? All of his feelings for Ken seem to have disappeared; have they perhaps been replaced by pity? Does Joe, for some reason, simply enjoy hurting him, keeping him on a string to toy with him? Does he feel obligated to stay with Ken, because he learned so much from him? Is it simply that it's what he's used to? He doesn't strike me as the sort who's afraid of change.
The scenes where Joe tries to teach Ken to pick up lovers are interesting from this perspective as well. I think Joe has both altruistic and selfish motives here. I believe that he genuinely wants Ken to enjoy himself, but also he wants Ken to find someone to replace him, so he can escape without guilt.
This is the first time I've watched the movie since reading Orton's work, and it's amazing how much of their lives together made it into the plays (or possibly how much Bennett took from the plays for his script). For example, they show a rehearsal for one of Orton's radio plays where a character talks about his lover, who he met when he was 17 and the lover was 23, and how his life used to revolve around their relationship. While these lines are spoken we just see Oldman look at Molina, and Molina winces. I wish they had inserted more of the plays into the movie; I would have enjoyed that.
The supporting cast is strong. Vanessa Redgrave is characteristically wonderful, although like our leads her character is quite unlikeable, charming and witty but pretentious and contemptuously condescending to Orton's family, the “little people from Leicester,” as she calls them. Still, she has a few very good lines and in a way drives the film, since she seems to have been the only person who really knew Joe. She and Frances Barber narrate a lot of the film, since we're seeing their memories in flashbacks. I've always loved Barber, and she's so good as Joe's sister Leonie, uncomplicated in her affection for the brother she didn't really understand, sweet and jovial, and frank enough with Lahr that her husband gets positively screechy with embarrassment over his brother-in-law's notoriety. She has such a beautifully expressive face; I love the way her mouth moves at the funeral home, when she and Joe are viewing their mother's corpse, and she's trying so hard not to laugh. I wish she had made more movies, rather than settling for television, but at least I'm glad we have her here.
Janet Dale is nearly as good in her role as the boys' landlady, Mrs. Sugden. She has one of the film's most memorable moments, when she says to the boys, “Do you notice I'm limping? Spilled a hot drink down my dress. My vagina came up like a football.” Joe and Ken melt into helpless laughter; it's nearly a very sweet scene between the two, but then Joe once again rejects Ken and tells him to “have a wank,” which sends Ken into one of his speech-making fits, and of course it's laughable because he's so ridiculous. It's moving, the sudden change in pressure, from a funny moment to a sweet one to an ugly one, and back to a funny one. Of course, the effectiveness of that scene is mostly down to Molina, but Dale does a good job getting it rolling; she draws the attention upon which Molina capitalizes.
Shawn is his usual likeable, reliable self. Also, he provides the film's most interesting bit of trivia: in real life, Peggy Ramsay was once Shawn's manager. It must have been strange for him, acting opposite Redgrave, who was playing a person he had actually known. I wonder if that affected his performance, or hers. I would love to hear him discuss that experience. Julie Walters (making her second appearance in this project) is funny in an unfortunately limited role as Joe's mother, and James Grant has an even smaller part as Joe's father. The only meaningful dialog he has is sitting in a dark room, where he delivers only a couple of lines about his unhappy marriage after his wife's death (“You must have had some good times,” says Leonie; “Several,” the old man replies), but he does it well. My favorite supporting performance, though, is from the great Joan Sanderson, about whom more in a minute. Also, Sean Pertwee supposedly has a very small part, which I have not yet been able to pick out. I'll have to watch it again and look out for him.

DOES IT HOLD UP?: I think it does. In some ways it means more to me now than it did when I first saw it, now that I know Orton's work so well, and have come to terms with my own sexuality (which was still very much up in the air in 1990). I was both turned on by this movie, and ashamed of being turned on by it, when I first saw it. I feel like I have the perspective to appreciate it now in ways that I couldn't then. And those performances from Oldman and Molina are timeless; I doubt that folks will still be watching this in a hundred years, but if someone happens to come across it, I bet those performances will still impress. I like to think of some guy on Jupiter calling this a hidden gem someday.
In some ways this is very similar to Educating Rita. Both have unspectacular stories but strong scripts, and both hinge upon two very strong central performances. The script for this one, although good, is not as good as Rita's, but Frears' direction is far smoother than Lewis Gilbert's (barring the “worst thing” entry below) and the performances are at least the equal of Caine's and Walters' (and the supporting cast in this is definitely superior). If Educating Rita holds up, this does even better, though of course it's a good bit less cheerful.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: It's impossible to pick out a single moment for either Oldman or Molina, or to choose between the two of them, so instead I'm going with a scene in which neither of them appear: the one with Joan Sanderson. I just love her; she is now long-dead but she is immortal in my memory for her hilariously unimpeachable turn as Mrs. Richards in my favorite Fawlty Towers episode, “Communication Problems.” Anyway, in this movie she plays Anthea's mother, and her single scene is helping with Anthea's transcription of Joe's diary. He typed most of it, but the sexiest bits of the early ones are in shorthand (so that his mother couldn't read them). Anthea knows that her mother learned shorthand in secretarial school, so she gets her to translate Joe's stories about getting handjobs in public lavatories and masturbating in his mother's bedroom for her. It's very funny to hear that voice talking about ejaculating on some man's raincoat, and she somehow remains very stern and aloof throughout. I'm calling it the best scene in the film, which is probably not true, but I feel pretty good about saying it anyhow.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: This isn't really the worst thing. I'm not even sure it's a bad thing, but it's a little bit jarring. For a movie about a playwright, this is surprisingly nontheatrical, until we get to the actual murder. Then, suddenly, it's very stagey. Ken has just suffered what turns out to be Joe's final insult. He steps to a mirror and begins a brief monologue, but we're inside the mirror and he's looking directly at us, speaking to us, even though he's nominally talking to Joe. It's a soliloquy, really, and is actually pretty good, and of course Molina milks it for all it's worth:

I don't understand my life. I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was going bald. I'm a homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright, but I'm not and you are. Joe, you do everything better than me. You even sleep better than me.

And then he bashes Joe's head in with a hammer. The score, which basically didn't exist through most of the film, suddenly gets very loud, very over-the-top. As Ken makes his speech, his face is lit from below, like a counselor with a flashlight telling a ghost story around a campfire, and then when he picks up the hammer the lighting gets very garish. We get the shot of Ken's raised hand with the hammer in it. The hammer falls, and blood spatters the ceiling. We see Ken with his hand raised again and a comic look on his face, and then blood spatters the walls. Then Ken, hand raised, comical expression, and blood spatters his clothes. Then Ken has another brief soliloquy, takes an overdose, strips, and collapses dead and naked on the floor. I can't help finding the whole scene very...out-of-keeping with the rest of the film, which has been so wedded to realism for most of the running time. This is almost like a dream sequence in comparison.
I know it's a conscious choice Frears made; I'm not even sure it doesn't work, assuming it's meant to be a depiction of Ken's final break with sanity. But watching this I definitely had to wrestle with that scene a bit. I'm still not sure what I think of it. I'd like to hear Frears talk about it, just as I'd like to hear Shawn talk about Peggy Ramsay. I'll have to get the cast and crew together for a dinner party some day.

SCORE: 8/10.

Amadeus (1984)

Chapter Five of "Do the Eighties Hold Up?" August

I've written several times here about great performances from various actors, including a couple of occasions where I felt that those actors deserved Oscars that went to others. This, however, is the first time I've written about a performance that actually did win an Oscar: F. Murray Abraham's win for his portrayal of Antonio Salieri.
Perhaps it's a bit presumptuous of me, but I'm totally with the Academy on this one. Abraham's performance really is masterful, particularly in the framing device, where he's an old man in an asylum (the makeup department deserves credit here, as well...Abraham looks great in those scenes). It's a tremendous performance, and would be worth watching the film for even if the rest was crap.
But of course it isn't; it's a great film top to bottom. Abraham stands out, but everything is near-perfect. The script was adapted from a play, one I've neither seen nor read. Based upon the inadequate research I did, the original play is just Salieri's confession; he tells the story to the audience, who never sees any of it. When Milos Forman, the great director, first took an interest in the play as a screen property he brought Peter Schaffer, the original playwright, in to write the screenplay, and it shows. There's a cohesion between the scenes that would have come straight from the play, and those enlarged to make scenes on film, that wouldn't have been there if Forman had brought in a writer more experienced with movies, but less so with the original work.
And those new scenes are enormous. The sets are gorgeous, from the Vienna streets to the Emporer's palace, Mozart's apartment, Salieri's home, and of course the great opera house. The opera scenes were filmed partly in the real opera house where Mozart's work was first performed, and partly in a set built to duplicate it but be more cinematic and easier to film in; those cuts are seamless, though. I can't tell which is which. And the cinematography is excellent. Every frame of this film is its own small masterpiece. Those scenes are towering, magnificent.
But then, of course, the film always comes back to that little room in the asylum, to the bitter old man of the original play. Those are the film's best moments, I think, the counterpoint to how big the rest of the movie is. It would be easy to get caught up in the enormity of the story, of the Hapsburg court and the life of one of the greatest men who ever lived, and yet it feels like these moments, between Salieri and his priest, are the real heart of the story. We would expect to sit back a bit and relax in those smaller scenes, but we can't. We're alone with Salieri and his memories and his vitriol and his still-burning envy. Abraham has a lot of charm in those scenes, but it's the devil's charm, corrupt and dangerous. In his mind, he waged war on God and, on the very edge of triumph, was finally defeated. And then, of course, he was left alive for decades to watch his own music fade into obscurity while Mozart came to be regarded as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. It has left him etched and twisted and beaten. Salieri sees himself as a devil and so we can't relax around him, because we don't know what he might still be capable of. You can see it on the face of the priest; he very much represents the audience, and we see our own horror in his eyes.
Abraham wasn't the only Oscar winner for this film. Forman took Best Director, and Schaffer got one for his screenplay. And the Academy respected how beautiful the film is, as well, with Oscars for Art Direction, Makeup, Sound, Costume Design, and of course Best Picture. All well-deserved, and I'm sorry that the editing and cinematography didn't win as well (both went to The Killing Fields, which I admit is not crap). And Tom Hulce also got nominated for his performance as Mozart; he was quite good, but he never had a chance to beat Abraham.
I should note that I watched the 2002 Director's Cut for this. There's about twenty minutes of added footage, most of it not terribly important, but there is one big change. When Constanze, Mozart's wife, comes to plead with Salieri to help her husband get an important position, in the original film he just turns her away (if I remember correctly, and my memory seems to be supported by IMDb). In this version he instead extorts sex from her in exchange for his assistance, or rather means to, but at the last can't go through with it and throws her out (and also doesn't help her). I don't think it's a necessary addition, but it does make sense; Mozart had once claimed a student of Salieri's for whom the older man had feelings, so it's a sort of revenge, and it also makes it more clear why Constanze is so insistent upon Salieri leaving her house when she finds him with the ailing Mozart near the end of the film. It's a little more screen time for Elizabeth Berridge, who I've always thought of as a bit of a disposable actress, but actually she does a good job.

DOES IT HOLD UP?: It more than holds up. It's far better than I thought it was. I was in love for a summer back when this was new, and the family of the object of my affections had a little money, which is to say they had a VCR, and she owned a copy of this. It was her favorite movie. I watched it with her perhaps a dozen times that summer, and I loved it, but I think I loved it because it was of her, if you understand me, rather than on its own merits. And then we split up and I never watched it again, because of course it reminded me of her. I suppose that, for that reason, I undervalued it in my memory. I guess I saw it as a simple period piece, a costume drama with an Oscar hook and some fine music, but it's much more than that. One of the best films of its decade, and I regret not having watched it more.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The music. I mean, it's Mozart, isn't it? It's among the finest music ever written. That helps the film's appeal to me very much. Music is my first love, I am a musician, and though I'm certainly not on the same level as Mozart or Salieri, I do know how music is performed, and how it's created. I write about movies here because I think they're more fun to talk about, but I understand music far more deeply. I can pick out complexities and themes in Beethoven or Schubert that I couldn't in Goddard or Fellini.
Of course the music in this film is beautiful, but I love the way the creation of that music is depicted, the way Salieri talks about it. I'll include just this small bit, of him discussing the piece Mozart is conducting when we first meet him:

On the page it looked like nothing, the beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse, bassoons, basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox, and then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there unwavering, until a clarinet took it over, sweetened it into a phrase of such delight... (sighs) This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I had never heard, filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.

I love the passion that he and Mozart have for music; they are alive in it, and everyone else in the movie seems lifeless in comparison. It's a movie made for musicians. Anyone, I think, can enjoy it, but there's another level of emotion there for anyone who ever dreamed of being a composer.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The film slows down quite a lot when it becomes about court politics. Those scenes cost the film a bit. It is at its best when it's about the music, or about the comic opera, or about the relationships between Mozart and Constanze, Mozart and his father, or (obviously) Mozart and Salieri. Frankly, I could have done without the rest of the court, and even Jeffrey Jones. Sometimes in those scenes I'm impatient to get back to the things in the film that matter to me.

SCORE: 9/10. It's very tough to call, between eight or nine stars, but I think upon consideration I must go high. And of course, it moves up the lists as well.

LISTS: #17 on my Favorites of the Eighties

Witness (1985)

Chapter Four of “Do the Eighties Hold Up?” August

I liked this movie so much when I was a teenager that I actually read the novelization. I had never heard the word “novelization,” of course. I assumed that I was reading the novel that the film was based on; the concept of taking an existing screenplay and turning it into a book seemed very strange to me when I figured out that had happened. Still does, in fact.
But the point is that I loved this movie. Part of that, of course, was that I was a teenager and Kelly McGillis had breasts that she didn't mind showing me (by far my clearest memory coming into this re-watch), but it went deeper than that. I suspect that, to me, the Amish represented my own family and their religion (we were not Amish, but were very strict and unworldly), and the City represented, you know, the real world. I was in the very early stages of suspecting that my family's religion might not be true, and more important might not suit me. There seemed to be things worth knowing that I wouldn't find in the Bible, and things worth experiencing that couldn't be had in church. Yet, those things you're taught when you're young have a hold on you; they're very hard to let go of. I felt like Harrison Ford was playing one side of my mind, and Kelly McGillis was playing the other side, right there on the screen, and the conflict between them really resonated in me. The debate has been handled better in other films and other media, of course, but I didn't know that then, and I found it fascinating.
McGillis plays Rachel Lapp, a recently-widowed Amish woman, who is traveling with her young son Samuel (Lukas Haas) from their farm somewhere in Pennsylvania to Baltimore by train. In Philadelphia they are delayed, and Samuel witnesses a murder in a public restroom. The victim is a cop named Zenovich (Timothy Carhart), and it turns out that the murderers are also cops (Danny Glover as McFee and Angus MacInnes as Fergie), involved in some straightforward movie corruption. John Book (Harrison Ford) is the officer investigating the murder, and when Samuel identifies McFee from a photograph in the police station Book informs his commander, Schaeffer (Joseph Sommer). Unfortunately, it turns out that Schaeffer is in on it too and sends McFee to kill Book. Book escapes but is wounded, takes Rachel and Samuel home, and then collapses after telling Rachel that she can't send him to a hospital, or Schaeffer will find him and come for the boy. So he has to stay on the farm, first to recover from the gunshot wound, and then to stay hidden, and this is where the conflict arises between the old world and the new.
I can't love the script for this movie. It was written by three television writers, and I think it shows. I get the impression that they wrote a few key scenes very carefully, which would have carried a TV show with a bit of hand-waving in between them. Then they found out that you can't do that in a film, it has to be twice as long, so they just painted-by-number to get us from one good bit to the next. The scene in the deli, where Rachel is telling Book what his sister thinks of him (“she thinks you like policing because you think you are right about everything and you're the only one who can do anything...”) is fun. The discussion between Samuel and his grandfather Eli (Jan Rubes) about the gun is really quite strong, and says more about the differences between our world and theirs than the rest of the movie put together.
But for the most part the script is pretty forgettable, and there are some very clunky moments, and a few that just leave me scratching my head. At one point Book and his partner grab a suspect out of a bar and pin him against the window of their car, screaming and swearing, for the boy inside to identify him. Of course Samuel was terrified and Rachel was justifiably outraged. Has any cop ever actually done that? It's not only stupid and presumably unethical, it's thoroughly out of character for Book.
The script is elevated somewhat by the key players. Ford is his usual self, gruff but likeable. Book isn't Indiana Jones or Han Solo, but he's smart, tough, and honest. He's a hero you feel good cheering for. McGillis is even better as Rachel; I think it's her best role (though she's done a lot of work I haven't seen), and she's the class of this movie. She and Ford have surprisingly good chemistry. Physically she suits the role, being simultaneously very beautiful and very plain, and she seems to get Rachel, who's a fairly well-drawn character. Although she's lived a sheltered life she is not naïve, and although she's modest she will not be pushed around. She's the wisest character in the film and she, and to a lesser extent Eli, don't allow the Amish to seem silly, which would have been very easy to do. Haas is about as good as you can expect a nine-year-old kid to be; I generally can't stand child actors, but he never annoys me, and the scene I mentioned before is as good as it is because he and Rubes play so well together. He's actually quite charming.
Unfortunately this is balanced out by getting little value from the bad guys. Again, they seem like TV villains; they have no depth, no memorable lines, no personality. Sommer is not terrible, but he's nothing special, and the film suffers from giving him most of the attention. MacInnes is better (and has a memorable death), but is a bit underused, and Glover is utterly wasted as McFee. He's such a commanding presence, and he has made a wonderful villain in other films, looming and threatening, but they just don't give him anything to do. This would have been a much better movie if Glover had been the main bad guy.

DOES IT HOLD UP?: No. In fact I'm afraid it's the least impressive movie I've seen on this project so far. The direction is competent but does nothing to distinguish itself. Peter Weir is a director I have no particular feeling for, but there are some nice shots, like the three crooked cops approaching the farm in the dawn, which was a fairly iconic image when I was a kid. As I mentioned, the acting and characterization are a mixed bag and the script is uneven, and the score...well, I'll talk about that in a moment. So all that's left is that old conflict. And the thing is, it no longer resonates with me. I'm no longer torn in two. I've completely abandoned the old faith and so, although I can appreciate the Amish characters and the choices they make, I don't really sympathize with them. I've come to realize that even when the Amish are right about certain things, they are right for the wrong reasons, so to me there's little tension left. Without it, the plot just can't keep me interested enough. Ford and McGillis make it worth watching, and since it's streaming on Netflix I'm sure I'll put it on now and then, but I won't buy it, and when Netflix stops streaming it I won't miss it much.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: McGillis gives the best performance, but I have to come back to that one scene between Eli and Samuel, where Eli is explaining why the gun is bad and Samuel is disagreeing with him. The film sides with neither, instead letting each make his point:

Samuel: I would only kill the bad man.
Eli: Only the bad man. I see. And you know these bad men by sight? You are able to look into their hearts and see this badness?
Samuel: I can see what they do. I have seen it.
Eli: And having seen you become one of them? Don't you understand? What you take into your hands, you take into your heart.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The score. I know I just complained about the music in Educating Rita, but that was nothing like this bad. This was composed by Maurice Jarre, who did some very good work over a long career, but goodness gracious, he's toxic here. It's just soooo Eighties, such a thin and screeching Vangelis knockoff. There are a very few well-written passages in it, but an awful lot of bad ones, and even the bits that are well-written are played with this reedy synth sound that's hard to bear. The film mostly gets by without background music, but when it kicks in it's pretty bad, and also incredibly intrusive. You can't tune it out. It's ridiculous how loud it is. The barn-raising scene, I actually had to mute the TV. I just couldn't take it. In fact, I would say that with a better score this would have had seven stars; it's rare that a score can cost a whole point, but this one's atrocious. If there's much more of this, I'm gonna swear off the Eighties altogether.

SCORE: 6/10. It's a solid film with two good leads, but it's nothing special.

Educating Rita (1983)

Chapter Three of “Do the Eighties Hold Up?” August

Of all the films I'm re-watching for this project, this is the one I remember least. I knew there was a woman who called herself Rita but that wasn't her name. I knew she was trying to get an education to better herself. I knew that her husband didn't like it, and I knew that her tutor was a crazy drunk who ended up getting himself thrown out of his university. And, since that's very nearly the entirety of the story, I guess my memory is better than I thought it was.
So, not a terribly complex or original story. Also, the score was pretty bad, a relic of the 80s, a whiny synth playing not-bad music but making it sound terrible. The direction by Lewis Gilbert, a veteran of a whole pile of James Bond films, was extremely pedestrian. Also, during scenes where we're getting what amounts to narration from Rita, when she's telling a story or we're hearing a letter she's written, the sound is out of synch with the background action. The film doesn't have an array of well-done offerings for the viewer.
What it does have, though, is Julie Walters as Rita and Michael Caine as Frank, and a script that lets them be brilliant. Rita (her real name is Susan, but Frank calls her Rita throughout and I'm gonna as well) is one of my favorite film characters. Her life is exactly what the folks around her think she should want. She's married to a man who loves her, she has a decent job and a home of her own which her husband Denny (Malcolm Douglas) is working hard to improve. All she has to do now is start having babies and raise a perfect little family. But Rita isn't ready for children. “I don't want a baby yet. No, I want to discover myself first.” We later learn that she's been taking birth control pills on the sly, so apparently she's already tried to discuss this with Denny and the conversation didn't end well. But Rita is convinced that there's a larger world of thought and knowledge that she's missed, and she's determined to study literature to find it.
So we meet Frank, a disaffected literature professor, who is going to tutor Rita to ready her for exams. Frank is a poet who can no longer write, and a teacher who no longer cares about teaching. When he first meets Rita, and realizes how earnest she is and what an education means to her, he tries to chase her off. “Between you and me and the walls, actually I'm an appalling teacher. That's alright most of the time. Appalling teaching is quite in order for most of my appalling students, but it is not good enough for you, young woman.” But she responds, “You're my tutor. I don't want another tutor...because you're a crazy mad piss-artist who wants to throw his students through the window. I like you.”
Denny doesn't understand her urge to better herself. When he finds her birth-control pills, he burns all her books and papers, and issues an ultimatum: either she quits school and gets serious about raising a family, or he's done with her. This resonates with me, actually. It isn't that Denny specifically wants her ignorant or subservient; he seems to love her and the life they had before she became dissatisfied, but he's afraid that if she betters herself she'll become too good for him. My family is full of people who feel exactly the same way. My grandmother, who was the best Gramma ever, was a terrible mother, and once she did exactly this to my father; made him take all his books down into the basement and burn them in the furnace. Some people are afraid that they themselves can't improve, and so they want to keep the people they care about down on their own level, and if those people try to take them along on the voyage towards knowledge and discovery they take it as an insult. It's a desire that comes from love, but it's right at the root of so many problems in our society. Every parent who derides the universities for filling kids' heads with crazy ideas (and Rita's own father fits into this mold) is really afraid that his children will realize that he's a fool, that his values are unconsidered, that much of what he's taught them is utter bullshit.
Denny is my grandparents, and my aunts and uncles and cousins. I'm very fortunate that he isn't my parents. His character is sensitively written and competently played. People like him are, in fact, sympathetic characters. They mean well, but they're utterly destructive, and while it's sad that Rita must leave him, it's also a relief when she finally does. My father had to run away from home to go to college; I see a lot of him in the Rita we first meet, strangely enough. There's a lot of allure for me in a character willing to abandon everything for the love of learning.
Frank exhibits behavior not so different from Denny's, in a way. Early on in their relationship he cuts back on his drinking. Rita sort of brings him back to life, reminds him of how wonderful the actual literature is, rather than just the brilliant things that can be said about it. In fact it's implied that he's quit drinking altogether while she's at summer school. But she comes back knowing things that he didn't teach her. He's been looking forward all summer to introducing her to William Blake, and it turns out that she can already recite it from memory. He seems a little heartbroken, and the next time we see him in the office, we see him grabbing his bottle from its hiding place behind the books on his shelves. Like Denny, he has trouble realizing that Rita is more than what she means to him. They never have another moment where he's at ease with her. Instead we get, at best, this sort of passive-aggressive behavior from him, the “oh, well, you don't need my help, you can do this all by yourself” kind of thing. Later in the film he equates himself with Mary Shelley, and though he doesn't go so far as to say out loud that he's created a monster, it's a very selfish moment.
But Rita is at her worst in that scene as well. She's so superficial. She's begun to lose the love of learning for its own sake. At the end of their argument she snaps at him, “Oh, Rita! Nobody calls me Rita but you. I dropped that pretentious crap as soon as I saw it for what it was,” but of course she's abandoned that obvious pretension for a more subtle one. The books, the poetry, the music should matter because of what it teaches her about the world, and about herself, but instead it matters to her because it makes her popular, helps her fit in with the upper-class kids who are her peers as students. She abandoned her old life for an education in the first place to find herself, but she's stopped looking.
Things develop further from there, with Rita ultimately realizing that she's lost her way and trying to find her way back and Frank, having destroyed himself, trying to start over (another storyline that appeals to me). I won't go into any details of that, because if you're reading this and haven't seen the film you should go watch it. We can discuss the last twenty minutes in the comments if you'd like. For now I'll just say that Rita and Frank have a very nice scene in Frank's office that should have been their last (there's a superfluous goodbye at the very end as well) and you end up feeling pretty good about the direction everyone's going in. Simple happy ending, but like I said earlier, it wasn't about the story so much as it was about the characters.
Caine, of course, is great. He's always great, even when he's fighting swarms of killer bees or running from a shark that possesses surprising tactical abilities. It seems like a little less work went into developing Frank's character than Rita's, which is understandable, but Caine fills in the gaps. He brings his own depth to the character. And Walters is perfect, smart and sharp-witted and genuine, and every discussion between the two in the film is classic. It's almost a shame, really, that anyone else had to be in it. I could happily have watched those two in Frank's ratty old office talking for 100 minutes. So let me not close without mentioning the screenwriter, Willy Russell. He got nominated for an Oscar for this, as did Walters and Caine (he lost to James L. Brooks for Tender Mercies). He was a playwright and didn't do a lot of film work. That's too bad; he would have been better than most.

DOES IT HOLD UP?: Yes it does. I had given it a seven, based on my memories of it, and it gets a seven still. The Elephant Man and Diner both lost points during my re-watches, but this didn't. What surprises me most is how much I liked it when it was new. I must have been a more serious and mature kid than I remember being. I was twelve when this came out, and really, this is a thoughtful, grown-up film that doesn't seem to have much to offer a teenager. It's got an awful lot to offer an adult, though. I'm glad I watched it again.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: “I hate smokin' on my own. Everybody's packed up these days. Afraid of gettin' cancer. Bloody cowards.” I couldn't possibly have said it better. But that's only my favorite line. Rita is such a deep and interesting character. I wish more films had characters as well-drawn and acted. I would love movies even more than I do now.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Gilbert doesn't seem to have realized that he wasn't making another Bond. There are lots of quick cuts and zooms to closeup and so forth that don't really suit the project, and I can't say a lot for the photography either. And when he isn't Bonding us to death he's so by-the-numbers, like the shot of Rita's face, framed in a window pane, with a tear on her cheek while Denny burns the books. That's such a film-school shot. He wasn't necessarily bad, but he didn't offer anything, either. If he had done work worthy of what Walters and Caine were doing, this film would be a nine-star at least and one of the best of the Eighties.

SCORE: 7/10, but a quite high seven, and the best film I've seen so far on this project.

Diner (1982)

Chapter Two of “Do the Eighties Hold Up?” August

This film was very important to me when I was a teenager. It's really the whole reason I decided to do this Eighties retrospective; not that I wasn't curious about the other films, but I absolutely adored this. It would easily have been my favorite of the bunch if you'd asked me back then, and if I hadn't started thinking about this one I probably wouldn't have bothered with the others.
This was Barry Levinson's first movie. He both wrote and directed it, and for a first film it's remarkably assured. The story is disjointed (in fact, it could be argued that the film doesn't have a story), but Levinson never gets lost, never gets bogged down, and he gets great performances from an inexperienced cast. I remember being young and watching this when it was still new and being blown away by it; it was just so smart, and so funny and serious at the same time, and I don't think I had ever really seen that done before. I wanted to be as cool as Mickey Rourke, and as clever and unpredictable as Kevin Bacon, and as thoughtful and big-hearted as Tim Daly. I really looked up to those guys.
It's amazing how much my perspective has changed since I was a teenager. The movie is about six guys wrestling with growing up, resisting to varying degrees the pull of maturity. Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is finding that marriage isn't everything he hoped it would be (and so is his wife Beth, played by Ellen Barkin). Meanwhile Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is having cold feet about his own pending marriage to Elyse (Sharon Ziman, Levinson's sister, who never appears onscreen), and talking with Shrevie about it is not helping either of them. Fenwick (Bacon) is set up as the brains of the bunch, but he's aimless and falling into alcoholism. Boogie (Rourke) is also aimless, but his problem is gambling debts. Billy (Daly) is the most sympathetic of the group, pursuing his master's degree and a female friend, impregnated by him, who refuses his offer of marriage. And then there's Modell (Paul Reiser), who doesn't really have any problems; he's just there to be funny.
When I was 15, they were more mature than me, and it was interesting to watch their struggles, and to imagine myself facing these same difficulties in a few short years. Now I'm in my forties, and it's amazing to me how immature they seem. They're very well-drawn characters, but I found myself incredibly frustrated with almost all of them, in large part because of how they treat the women in their lives. Eddie is clearly just a dickhead, and his fiancée should run screaming. And the scene where Shrevie confides to Eddie that he and Beth can't even have a five-minute conversation seems unutterably sad to me. I hope Beth and Shrevie will work out their problems, but to be honest, if I was her I'd rather be with Boogie, even if he comes very close to doing something unforgivable. It seems like at least they'd have things to talk about.
Boogie himself has moments where he is, as my friend Mills calls him, "the blueprint for cool." For the most part he seems much more mature than his friends, much wiser and more in control, and yet he keeps doing things that aggravate me. The whole “dick in the popcorn” thing is just too ridiculous for words. I had completely forgotten that scene. And the thing with Beth and his bet with the guys...well, like I said, he came really close to going too far there. I understand how desperate he was, but if he'd gone through with that plan I would have had to hate him, and the fact that he even thought of it was pretty awful. Still, he's so likeable otherwise; it's easy to forget, now that he's become an alien space lizard, how charming Rourke was as a young actor. Beth forgives him, so I forgive him, but man, there are things about him that make me pretty uncomfortable. If I have a problem with the script, it's the inconsistency of Boogie's character as written. He seems to be the best of the lot, and yet...well, I suppose we're all a little bit duplicitous, aren't we? I do have to say that his salvation at the end of the film is a little too...providential. His debts are paid and he's offered a good job? It feels like Levinson trying not to have an unhappy ending.
Billy is the only one I really feel good about. His relationship with Barbara (Kathryn Dowling) is the only one that feels...well, modern, which might not be fair, since the film is set in 1959. I mean, of course the other guys are dicks to women. In 1959, that's what women were for. But Billy actually treats Barbara with respect. He doesn't want to take her away from her job, which she enjoys and is good at. And although he might have just been saying it because he felt obligated, I think he actually loves Barbara, that he wanted to marry her even before she got pregnant. Daly plays that very straight, and I believe him. Barbara says that he's confusing a friendship with a woman on one hand, and love on the other, but I say 1) I'm not sure she's right, and 2) that she's missed an important point: a strong marriage should be a friendship. If they enjoy each other's company (as they must, since they've been friends for years, close enough that she came to New York to visit him) and are sexually attracted to each other (which, since they're about to become parents, seems to be the case), then that's as good a recipe for a strong marriage as you're likely to find, far better than mindless passion or just thinking, as Eddie does about Elyse, that “it just seemed like it was time.” I think Billy and Barbara have a much better shot at happiness together than Beth and Shrevie have, as well.
Still, although the romantic in me is pulling for Billy, it's the one note in this movie that stands out: Barbara isn't willing to rush into a marriage because she's found herself "in trouble," to use the vernacular of my mother's generation. She's competent, intelligent, and self-sufficient. Maybe she'll marry Billy, and maybe she won't, but it'll be her decision. Nothing will force her one way or the other, and whatever she decides, she'll handle the consequences. She makes every guy in the film, including Billy, look like a child.
Fenwick is the one I identify with. In fact, he's quite a bit like I was as a very young man; aimless, self-destructive, difficult to be around, but still fun, still charming, so folks are reluctant to abandon him. Of course, he has a trust fund, whereas I was sleeping in the park, but still, his character feels familiar to me. I think that in his forties, once the trust fund ran out, he probably found himself in a situation very much like my own. I hope that, like me, he made peace with who he was.
I never married, and I have no children. I'm 42 now, so that's unlikely to change. It could be argued that Shrevie and Eddie are at least taking the plunge, and I just dodged the responsibility. But I would say in reply that they decided to marry for the wrong reasons, and that in fact not marrying would have been the more responsible decision in both cases. Of course, I say that not having lived in 1959. It was a different world, one I don't really understand, and pressures might well have been higher on them than they were on me in the eighties and early nineties, when I was their age. But their attitudes are difficult to defend when you consider how much more enlightened Billy's outlook is. Even in the fifties it was possible to not treat women like useful but disposable objects. Eddie's marriage looks doomed to me, and Shrevie has a long hard road ahead to save his (though I submit that Ellen Barkin appears to be worth the effort). They just all, except Billy, seem so childish to me now.
I like talky movies. I'm perfectly happy to sit and watch people have interesting conversations for an hour and a half. I did notice that some of the conversations in this film don't feel anywhere near as clever now as they did thirty years ago, like when Reiser is saying that he's uncomfortable with the word “nuance.” A lot of it seems to have been just stream-of-consciousness writing by Levinson, or possibly ad-libbing, particularly as far as Reiser is concerned. He was not an actor at this time, but rather a stand-up comic, so Levinson may have just let him go in some scenes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Those moments are pretty few, though, and on the whole it's a wonderful script, full of good lines and real-sounding conversations.
This is almost more a series of loosely-related vignettes than a film, and structurally I think it's pretty solid. The film was pioneering in that regard, and it was influential, but in places it just doesn't feel well-thought-out. For example, does the bit where Boogie stops to chat up the woman on the horse add anything to the film? Not obviously. But there are many more moments where it works. Not a single one of the scenes that focus on Kevin Bacon are important to the overall story, they don't affect the lives of any of the other characters (except for getting them briefly arrested), but put together they paint a very clear picture of his character, and his character adds a lot to the feeling of the film. With a very few exceptions it's a remarkably well-written screenplay, and you can see its influence in everyone from Hal Hartley to Quentin Tarantino. The “Cinema of Cool” may have blossomed in the late eighties and early nineties, but it took root right here. You gotta give Levinson and Diner propers for that.

DOES IT HOLD UP? I'm afraid not, at least not 100%. I respect Barry Levinson a great deal, and this is a fine film within its context, but it just isn't what it used to be. Like with The Elephant Man, it's a very good film, but it isn't timeless; other films since have followed its blueprint and done it better. Still, you know what I'd love? A reunion of some kind. Maybe a sequel set in 1989, thirty years later (they're all thirty years older now in real life), or maybe a whole new story. It would be fun, given what I consider to be the...

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Well, like I said, some of the dialog is very good, but what really stands out is the cast. The six friends, plus Barkin and Dowling, are not quite perfect, but they're everything you could reasonably ask. Even though I dislike many of the characters, it's hard to find fault with the way they were played. Of course all of them (except Dowling) went on to have solid careers, so looking back today it isn't surprising that they did a good job, but in 1982 audiences must have been blown away by all these talented newcomers. Rourke had done some interesting work, but certainly wasn't a household name. Bacon had been only a minor player in Animal House (and had made the much-maligned Friday the 13th) and none of the others had really done anything at all. This movie, to some extent, made them stars, and it's great to see them together, right at the beginning.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: I can't identify with the characters anymore, and it bothers me a little that I once could. Christ, was I that big a dickhead?

SCORE: 7/10.

The Elephant Man (1980)

Chapter One of "Do the Eighties Hold Up?" August

I didn't see this in theaters when it came out, but I saw its television premier, probably a year or so later. I was about eleven. It was my first David Lynch film. At the time, of course, I had no idea who Lynch was; it was still a few years before I would start paying attention to him because of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. All I knew at the time was that it was very sad, very moving, but then I always was a very soft-hearted youngster.
This is the first time I've seen it since figuring out (to the extent that this can be done) who Lynch is, the first time I've watched it as “A Film by David Lynch.” You can really see in places that this is a guy fresh off of Eraserhead. And I hate to say it, but I kind of feel like Lynch did a slightly amateurish job of directing this. Not visually, of course. The black and white cinematography is gorgeous, though I think a lot of the credit for that has to go to Freddie Francis. He was the DP both for this and for The Innocents, one of the most beautifully-shot B&W films I've ever seen, and when I see a particularly lovely shot in this movie, I imagine Francis holding Lynch's hand a little bit.
No, the problems aren't visual, they're thematic. They are issues of pacing and emotion and weird digressions from the story. We all know Lynch's directorial flourishes by now; he practically signs his name on every frame of film he shoots. These flourishes are generally pretty highly regarded by film fans, including me. But when a film is his own work, his own story, then these flourishes are part of that story. In this he's imposing them onto someone else's story, and I think it detracts from the overall effect. I kept getting pulled out of the film. I'd be getting into the story and then suddenly “Oh, that's Lynch...” “Yup, there's a Lynch moment...” “Oh, right, David Lynch directed this.”
It's the same problem I usually have with Quentin Tarantino. A director should leave an imprint on a film, but he doesn't have to constantly bang me on the head with a club engraved “I MADE THIS.” I guess it had never occurred to me before how similar Lynch and Tarantino are in that way, because it usually doesn't bother me with Lynch, but it did here. All through the more surreal moments the word “Eraserhead” kept going through my mind. I think someone who didn't know Lynch's later work might enjoy it more, but I am no longer that person.
It's a good story, but I would argue that it's a little bit sophomorically told. There is never any real flow in this movie; it seems to just jump from moment to moment. It's not a tragic flaw, it doesn't stop the film being enjoyable, but it is definitely noticeable. And although I disagree with those who feel that the film is just too sentimental on the whole, I'll concede that it does sometimes sink into sentimentality. I think the scene where Dr. Treves and John Merrick (Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt) are discussing whether or not Merrick can be cured is very deftly and subtly handled. Hopkins is close to perfect in that bit, trying to be clinical and yet finding it difficult to maintain eye contact; it's far and away his best bit of acting. Merrick's calm acceptance is good, as well. Hurt mostly plays Merrick as a very emotional man, but in this scene I feel like he understands how difficult this admission is for Treves, and he's being stoic for the doctor's benefit. Both men convey so much with their expressions (even with Hurt under all that makeup) and so few words, and Lynch just lets them do it, and it's really great to watch, definitely the film's high point.
Now, compare that to the scene where Mrs. Kendall (Anne Bancroft) shows up and reads Romeo and Juliet with Merrick. That scene is extremely heavy-handed. By the time Mrs. Kendall drops to her knees in front of him and says, “Why, you're not an elephant man at all! You're...you're Romeo!” I'm really desperate for the next scene to get started.
The performances I really liked, not to take anything away from Hurt and Hopkins, were the supporting roles played by Wendy Hiller (Mrs. Mothershead) and Freddie Jones (Bytes). I suspect that Bytes was written as he was to distance most of the rest of the cast from being evil, if you understand me. The film makes a lot of the way people react to Merrick, and those reactions mostly come from fear and ignorance; people think he's a monster. Bytes is not afraid, and he's not ignorant. He knows Merrick is a man, but it suits him to treat Merrick like a dog. He's there to show that the ordinary people in the film aren't actually bad, they're just insular and stupid, and in case we forget, here's this guy who is actually evil. That's a little bit heavy-handed as well, but I'm not saying I like the character, I'm saying that Jones plays him perfectly.
Hiller is the most interesting. When we first meet her, which is when she first meets Merrick, she has the same reaction to him that everyone else does. It's actually more troubling with her, because she's an intelligent, professional woman who lets her disgust with Merrick's appearance interfere, at least slightly, with how she does her job. But over the course of the film she warms to him, and becomes even more protective of him than the doctor (in fact, at one point she tries to protect him from the doctor). Her character arc, from ignorance and fear to compassion and acceptance, is the best in the film, the most human. I'm not gonna actually write out the after-school-special-ish moral here. You know perfectly well what it is, but Lynch and Hiller don't overplay it. It's a bit of a comfort to see Mothershead make this journey, and while Wendy Hiller never put in a bad performance in her life, this might be her best.
Also, someone else deserves some credit, and it's John Morris, who was basically Mel Brooks' house composer. He did some great work for this movie. I especially love the more, well, Lynchy bits, like the haunted-music-box theme at the beginning. Lynch hadn't yet discovered his beloved Angelo Badalamenti, but Morris came through with music that totally fit the feel of what Lynch was trying to do. And the inclusion of my all-time favorite piece of music, Samuel Barber's “Adagio for Strings,” at the end was a very nice touch.

DOES IT HOLD UP? I can't honestly say that. It's a good film, but not the masterpiece I thought it was when I was a kid. Its director was still very young and inexperienced, and although there are great artistic moments I would have to say that on the whole the film succeeds to some extent in spite of him rather than because of him. You can see flashes of his genius in this, but he just wasn't himself yet. Still, well worth a watch, for some interesting music and some very solid performances, and of course the legendary makeup effects, plus what I consider to be the...

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The cinematography. I know, in modern black-and-white films, everyone seems always to be in love with the cinematography, but come on; this is a beautifully-shot movie.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Jeez, David, just settle down, let your actors tell the story. You'll have plenty of time for fever dreams in your later pictures.

SCORE: 7/10. I wrestled with this one a lot, and actually registered a six for it, but upon reflection I think it deserves a seven, though not by a lot. I'm glad it was made, and I'm glad Lynch got this chance, and it is quite a good film, but it leaves me with a depressing sense that it could have been better.

AUGUST: Do the Eighties Hold Up?

When you’re a kid, you like everything, don’t you? I mean, at least as far as TV and movies are concerned. You don’t really have any concept of good and bad, you just watch whatever’s on. I know I was like that, and some of the stuff I loved when I was little, like Hee Haw or the Adam West Batman, was really appalling.
But then in my teens I started to mature, and to realize that movies can be more than just something to pass the time; they can actually be well-made, moving, thought-provoking. I still didn’t have tremendous taste, but I started to recognize that there was a world of difference between Casablanca and Motel Hell. I started to get into the classics, and I started judging current releases more stringently. Really, what I was doing was falling in love with film itself, I guess.
Anyway, there were many true works of art released in the eighties (the time we’re speaking of), and I latched onto most of them. Many I now have on DVD (or even VHS) and still watch on a semi-regular basis, from Chariots of Fire to The Unbelievable Truth. But I couldn’t afford to buy them all, and there are some movies that I was blown away by, movies that shaped my growing perception of the art of filmmaking, that I haven’t seen since they were new.
A few days ago I was thinking about Mickey Rourke, as I often do (he’s a personal favorite), and I remembered that the first time I ever saw him was in Barry Levinson’s Diner. My friend Mills refers to his character, Boogie, as the blueprint for cool for eighties teenagers. I’m sure I felt the same way at the time, but I can’t remember a single scene from that film. I vaguely recall someone making his fiancée pass a Colts trivia quiz before he’d marry her, and something about Rourke putting a wig on Ellen Barkin, and that’s it. I know that I adored the film twenty-five years ago, but now it’s a blank. That’s a shame. So I’m doing something about it. I’m inaugurating the first Theme Month on Remembrance of Films Past: August will be “Do the Eighties Hold Up?” Month. I’ve selected a half-dozen old favorites that I haven’t seen since 1990 or before, and I’ll be getting them all from Netflix and writing about them here. The films selected are:

The Elephant Man (1980)
Diner (1982)
Educating Rita (1983)
Amadeus (1984)
Witness (1985)
Prick Up Your Ears (1987)

I’ll still be watching newer films as well, of course, and going through my DVD collection writing about films I know better, but I think this will be a rewarding experience. The first two should be here the middle of next week. Fingers crossed that I’ll love them as much as the first time.