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AIRPLANE!
**½
USA
A parody of airplane disaster pictures, where a traumatised Air Force pilot
is forced to take over a flight.
The AFI would have me believe this is the tenth funniest film ever made,
but the jokes have dated so badly it's hard to believe they were ever funny. Most
of the laughter they elicit is the nervous kind.
dir: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker
cast: Robert Hays, Julie Hagerty, Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, Leslie Nielsen, Lorna Patterson,
Robert Stack, Stephen Stucker, Ethel Merman
ATLANTIC CITY
***½
Canada/France
Small time crooks intermingle in Atlantic City.
An offbeat, understated, stylish character study.
dir: Louis Malle
wr: John Guare
cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy
THE BLUES BROTHERS
*½
USA
An ex-con just out of jail joins his brother in a plight to raise money to
save their orphanage.
An odd, smug, dragged out mix of variable numbers, celebrity cameos,
elaborate car chases and pileups - all of them gratuitous, few of them
relieving the overriding tedium.
dir: John Landis
cast: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd,
James Brown, Cab Calloway, Carrie Fisher, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Henry
Gibson, John Candy, Twiggy, Steven Spielberg
COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER
***½
USA
The life of country singer Loretta Lynn.
A vivid, engrossing and superbly acted biopic.
dir: Michael Apted
cast: Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Leavon Helm, Jennifer Beasley, Phyllis Boyens
DRESSED TO KILL
***
USA
A mysterious, deranged transvestite brutally slaughters a sexually frustrated
housewife, with who he shares a therapist.
A ludicrous mix of gruesome violence, copious bloodletting, psychological
disorders, soft-core porn and Hitchock homage that
does manage to afford several tense setpieces.
dir: Brian de Palma
cast: Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Angie
Dickinson, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz
THE ELEPHANT MAN
***½
USA
In London 1884, a hideously deformed man at a freak show is rescued by a
doctor.
Perhaps Lynch's most mainstream and accessible production, this still
makes for an odd and oddly affecting drama with a striking performance at its
centre.
dir: David Lynch
cast: John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, John Gielgud, Anne Bancroft,
Freddie Jones, Wendy Hiller
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
**½
USA
The rebel forces fight Darth Vader from an ice planet.
Considered by many to be the highlight of the trilogy. Admittedly it is
darker, more visually majestic and less idiotic than the first. But also
rather boring.
dir: Irvin Kirshner
cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie
Fisher, Billy Dean Williams, Anthony Daniels, David Prowse, Peter Mayhew,
Kenny Baker, Frank Oz, Alec Guinness
THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY
***
Botswana
A bushman sets out to get rid of a Coke bottle that has caused controversy in
his tribe, and on his way encounters some of the more ridiculous aspects of
civilization.
An unlikely blockbuster, which pretty much wastes a fantastic concept onto
mildly amusing slapstick. There's an obvious curiosity value to it though.
dir: Jamie Uys
cast: N!Xau, Marius Weyers,
Sandra Prinsloo, Louw Verwey, Micahel Thys, Nic De Jager
KAGEMUSHA
***
Japan
Akira Kurosawa later came to consider this samurai epic as pretty much a
dress rehearsal for his great "Ran" (1985).
For a two-and-a-half hour running time, the plot is a slim one:
a sixteenth-century warlord's final wish is that he be replaced by a double
and that this be kept secret from everybody but his most faithful followers
for three years.
There isn't the amount of warfare and blood-letting you'd
expect. This time out, Kurosawa is almost exclusively interested in pondering
the Samurai code and what it stands for, but his philosophising is muted. He
seems eager to expose the pomp and pageantry of war as hollow at the same
time as glorifying it with sweeping panorama shots of impeccably arranged
armaments. He doesn't necessarily come up with any observations striking
enough to support the ponderous pace. But the majestic vistas and the vibrant
lensing make the picture that much more
endurable.
dir: Akira Kurosawa
ph: Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda, Kazuo Miyagawa,
Asaichi Nakai
cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsutomu Yamazaki,
Kenichi Hagiwara
THE LAST METRO
***½
France
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, a Jewish director hides in the basement
of his theatre.
An entertaining though never quite gripping or insightful backstage soap
opera.
dir: François Truffaut
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Poiret,
Heinz Bennent, Andrea Ferreol,
Pauline Dubost, Sabine Haudepin
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MELVIN AND HOWARD
***
USA
Today aggressively quirky sitcoms about well-meaning but uneducated losers of
a lower economical bracket are abundant – redundant really. But back at the
beginning of the 80s, this must not have been the case. So this awkwardly
paced, ostensibly observational farce about a real-life none-too-bright
blue-collar mid-Westerner who may or may not have ended up on Howard Hughes’
will was hosanna’d by critics as something fresh
and real. It’s well-acted and loose and relaxed on the surface, but beneath
the dusty, folksy, gawky veneer, it’s crude, contrived and all too desperate
to be loved.
dir: Jonathan Demme
wr: Bo Goldman
cast: Paul Le Mat, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards,
Pamela Reed, Michael J. Pollard
ORDINARY PEOPLE
****
USA
A moving, remarkably intelligent, perceptive exploration of a repressed,
grief-struck family's dynamics.
dir: Robert Redford
wr: Alvin Sargent
cast: Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton, Judd
Hirsch, Elizabeth McGovern, M. Emmet Walsh
PEPI, LUCI, BOM
***
Spain
Pedro Almodóvar's first feature serves no purpose
other than to shock - and in this sense it still succeeds. With a half-assed
half-plot about the bizarre sex lives of three women in Madrid as basis, Almodóvar's main premise is to depict as many different
kinks as he can squeeze into 80 minutes. Along these lines, he brings up and
sexualises just about every type of human waste you could imagine, as well as
several that wouldn't necessarily cross your mind. Your options are to laugh
or be offended. It's easier to laugh, especially during a commercial for an
extraordinarily practical brand of women's underpants.
wr/dir: Pedro Almodóvar
cast: Carmen Maura, Eva Siva, Olvido Gara, Félix Rotaeta,
Cecilia Roth
PRIVATE BENJAMIN
**½
USA
Despite her best efforts, this Goldie Hawn vehicle is about as unfunny as the
rest of them.
dir: Howard Zieff
cast: Goldie Hawn, Eileen Brennan, Armand Assante,
Robert Webber, Barbara Barrie, Mary Kay Place, Harry Dean Stanton, Albert
Brooks, Sam Wanamaker
RAGING BULL
****
USA
Probably the most hosannaed of Scorsese's
pictures, his biography of prizefighter Jake La
Motta is an indictment of male values founded on aggression from a man who
has made a career of gawking at such values with a schoolboy’s awe. A tension
persists throughout the movie between the raw tragedy of La Motta's
self-destruction and Scorsese's infatuation with
the movie gangster – La Motta isn’t all that removed from the flawed,
hyper-macho, glamourised gangsters he had de Niro play on [too] many occasions. It's that much more
uncomfortable to witness the patently despicable acts that define La Motta's
persona, filtered as they are through the cinematic codes of on-screen
machismo which for decades have sneakily rendered such behaviour acceptable.
That said,
the committed rawness of the performances and dialogue as well as the slow-mo
extreme-close-up brutality of the violence play off the glamourising
movie-ness of Scorsese's
orchestration in an often hypnotic way, charging La Motta's tale of damage
and devolution into the realm of the operatic. It's a shame therefore that in
the crucial moments Scorsese hurtles into the realm of the redundant: he
taints the final, visceral impact of his movie with some undergrad-level
solemn posturing, capping things off as he does with no less than a quote
from the Bible.
dir: Martin Scorsese
wr: Paul Schrader, Mardik
Martin
ph: Michael Chapman
ed: Thelma Schoonmaker
cast: Robert de Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe
Pesci, Frank Vincent, Nicholas Colasanto
THE SHINING
***½
USA
The caretaker of an isolated hotel goes insane and his family suffers.
King's manipulative commercialism and Kubrick's meticulous stylising make
for an expectedly uneasy combination. The end result is heavily flawed, not
in the least for exhibiting Nicholson's worst performance, but also tense,
chilling and compulsively watchable.
dir: Stanley Kubrick
ph: John Alcott
cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Barry Nelson, Scatman Crothers
STARDUST MEMORIES
***
USA
Woody Allen often brings up masturbation in his movies but the only time he
made a movie entirely structured around it was this self-assured variation on
Fellini's 8½. He lifts from Fellini the aggressively autobiographical,
self-aggrandising slant, the stark monochrome, the dream-like fluidity and
the army of funny-faced extras. And he contributes nothing of his own. It's
an empty, polished pastiche of a movie, filled with lovely visuals and lovely
tunes, none of which resonate.
wr/dir: Woody Allen
ph: Gordon Willis
cast: Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling,
Marie-Christine Barrault, Jessica Harper, Tony
Roberts, Helen Hanft, John Rothman, Louise Lasser
WHO'S SINGING
OVER THERE?
***½
Yugoslavia
A misguided Yugoslav Film Academy in 1996 overlooked Dušan Makavejev's
entire oeuvre and voted
this slight if likable surrealist-tinged farce the best Yugoslav film of all
time. It concerns a disparate bunch of rural eccentrics aboard a creaky bus
to Belgrade on the eve of Nazi invasion. The lunacy takes on a bittersweet
flavour in the lead-up to the grim finale. An irrepressible Gypsy with an
accordion and a pubescent support vocal pops up regularly to present
variations on a very catchy folk tune.
dir: Slobodan Sijan
cast: Pavle Vujisic,
Dragan Nikolic, Danilo 'Bata' Stojkovic, Aleksandar Bercek, Neda Arneric, Milivoje Tomic, Tasko Nacic, Boro Stjepanovic, Slavko Stimac, Miodrag Kostic, Nenad Kostic, Bora Todorovic
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