by Linda Holmes

We've been talking this week quite a bit about how much John Hughes knew about life in high school, but Daniel Waters, who wrote the 1989 blacker-than-black comedy Heathers, knew something too.

If Hughes understood the vulnerable, exposed bellies of sixteen-year-olds and the way high school can make you want to crawl inside a sleeping bag and not emerge until college, Waters understood, to put it plainly, the way high school can make you want to poison someone.

Waters understood how the overt bullying and covert sadism among high-school students is, at times, so brutal and relentless that if it took place outside the high-school context, you'd probably classify it as psychotic, or at least indicative of a very unquiet mind. Hughes understood how all the resulting anger can be turned inward; Waters understood how it might be turned outward -- and while they both wrote for laughs much of the time, you can tell that they both meant it.

Little Nicholson, why it's your friends who will kill you, and the color red, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'Heathers'" >

by Linda Holmes

Given that he's a guy who takes a lot of abuse and a guy almost everyone will gamely impersonate if given the chance, Keanu Reeves has had a much more interesting career than you'd think. In fact, if you look at his resume, he's bounced around from genre to genre as much as almost any actor you're going to encounter.

He's done action movies (Point Break, Speed, obviously The Matrix), he's done overwrought dramas (The Devil's Advocate), he's done romantic melodrama (Sweet November, The Lake House, A Walk In The Clouds), he's done highly respectable award-winners (Dangerous Liaisons, My Own Private Idaho), he's done Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing), he's done goofball farce (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), he's done light romantic comedy (The Replacements), and he's done middlebrow crowd-pleasing comedy (Parenthood, Something's Gotta Give).

He's actually kind of a fascinating guy, even if I'm as fond as anyone of yelling, "Cans! There was no baby! It was full of cans!" (Thank you, thank you.) (See here, starting at about the 6:20 mark, for the original.)

And the first movie where people really talked about him was River's Edge, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film in 1987, beating out not only The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid, but also John Sayles' Matewan.

How does it look more than 20 years later? Well...it looks, for lack of a more precise word, very, very weird.

In fact, it's appropriate that this is the movie Crispin Glover was promoting when he made his famous apparently unhinged appearance on what was then Late Night With David Letterman on NBC, because "unhinged" doesn't even begin to describe it.

A kick in the head, advice from a fashion genius, why Dennis Hopper didn't need a blow-up doll, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'River's Edge' Needs Coco Chanel's Best Advice" >

by Linda Holmes

The latest in the Summer Of '80s Movies series is 1987's Wall Street*, which won Michael Douglas an Oscar and guaranteed that "greed is good" would live on in our grab-bag of overused cultural cliches forevermore. It was also a major step in the rise of Oliver Stone, who had won an Oscar for Best Director the year before (for Platoon) and would, in the next few years, make films including Born On The Fourth Of July, The Doors, Nixon, and -- of course -- JFK.

And what's shocking, seeing Wall Street 22 years after its release, is how aggressively bad it is.

Huge cell phones, Spader problems, unlikely speeches, and lots more, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'Wall Street' And The Gargantuan Cell Phone Problem" >

by Linda Holmes

It's a little bit of a cheat that Edward Scissorhands, which was released in 1990, is part of an '80s movie series at all. But in the same way that the cultural '60s actually extended into the early '70s, the emergence of Tim Burton with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Batman and Beetlejuice is a late-'80s phenomenon, and it's not unfair to pull in Edward Scissorhands as a critical step in that process.

Besides, 1990 was Johnny Depp's breakout year -- including both this movie and Cry-Baby -- after a history as an '80s TV heartthrob on 21 Jump Street and a permanent position in the pages of Tiger Beat, so let's go with it.

Edward Scissorhands is so visually intricate and so famous for being so -- not just the way Depp looks, but the sidewalk-chalk color palette of the neighborhood where he's brought down from his ominous stone castle to live -- that it's easy to forget that it's also a very intense story about isolation. The symbolism is so blunt as to be either remarkably guileless or remarkably clumsy, depending strictly on how it strikes you at a given moment.

A man with blades for hands, capable of brilliant blasts of heartfelt creativity but not normal human contact, justifiably afraid of touching anyone, constantly accidentally-on-purpose turning the weapons on himself...it's so simultaneously rich and corny, as a concept, that it's the kind of tenderly simplistic thing that could have been conceived by the most tortured but talented ninth-grader at a creative-writing camp.

Why it still works, and what it might make you pine for, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: On 'Edward Scissorhands' And Using Real Things" >

Now with more Boogaloo: We've reached one of the most notorious sequels of the '80s: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Courtesy of the AFI Silver Theatre.

 

by Linda Holmes

This is, I am telling you sincerely, the thought I had during Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, the latest entry in our Summer Of '80s Movies series: "Boy, the quality really slipped from the original Breakin'."

Several things happened between the original and the Boogaloo. The first is that somebody decided it would be better to have less acting and more dancing. In theory, this is a good idea, because the acting in the original was of a caliber usually reserved for seventh-grade plays. Written by seventh-graders. For seventh-graders. The dancing, on the other hand, was Shabba-Doo-lightful.

But for some reason, instead of seeing intense, quasi-realistic break-dancing smackdowns in clubs, as in Breakin' Classic, there are a lot of large-scale production numbers. You know how "Dancing Queen" was performed in the movie of Mamma Mia!, where all the townspeople gathered and gradually migrated to the docks in order to celebrate togetherness through the dance? This is more like that.

Overall, the production numbers have gone over the Oklahoma! barrier, if that makes any sense to you. Oklahoma! often gets (only moderately accurately) described as one of the early musicals that became really successful in spite of totally defying reality -- in other words, in many prior musicals, people danced and sang in dancing-and-singing situations, which is why you had so many musicals about stage performers and so forth. But in Oklahoma!, people will just start randomly warbling and leaping about right in the middle of, say, a serious discussion about fidelity.

What I'm saying is that Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is kind of like Oklahoma!.

[deep bow] Thank you. This shall be my contribution to the culture.

The dance-off, the draw of Paris, girlfights, and saving the community, after the jump...

Continue reading "Friends, Romans, Electric Boogaloovians: Lend Me Your Ears" >

by Linda Holmes

I have to say, until last night, I didn't even realize that the star of an '80s movie about break-dancing would be a girl who looked like Sheena Easton's Mini-Me and was once the third-runner-up for Miss Kansas.

It's easy to see how it happened: "You know who we need to get for our break-dancing movie in which we defend the artistic importance of the pounding rhythm of the authentic dance of the streets? Shabba-Doo and the woman who was three heartbeats away from becoming Miss Kansas."

Believe it or not, Wikipedia claims that Breakin' is a retelling of West Side Story. I assure you that this is not true. (Just when you think Wikipedia is an impeccable source of information!) I did notice during the movie that Miss Kansas' agent -- we'll get back to him -- had a West Side Story revival poster behind his desk. Given that this movie is so cheap-looking that they clearly wouldn't have paid for so much as a plastic ficus if it didn't have a specific reason for needing to be there, it's certainly not an accident. It's a (rather overly ambitious) hat-tip. But this is not even meant to be a retelling of West Side Story. There is not enough death. At least not enough literal death.

The movie starts with Kelly (played by the aforementioned former almost-Miss Kansas, Lucinda Dickey) working as a waitress in a cheap restaurant, where she runs into a friend. The friend despairs that Kelly isn't dancing at the moment (Kelly is very talented, a piece of information that must be passed along as exposition, as it will not necessarily be self-evident at any point during the movie) and encourages her to get in touch with an agent who can get her some work.

Meanwhile, Kelly is taking jazz classes with Franco, a teacher who looks a little like Luke Perry plus ten years, four divorces and a DWI. Franco clearly is not to be trusted. He wears his super-intense Sexyface all the time, forever leering at Kelly in her classic '80s dance look of a black unitard and what appears to be hot pink underwear worn outside it. He cannot resist her. He says things while they are dancing together like, "Caress me! More passion!" (He says "Caress me." I swear.)

Can Kelly fight off the skeevy dance teacher? What will happen when she encounters street dancing? And what is with the pants in this movie? More, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer of '80s Movies: 'Breakin',' Hold The 'Boogaloo'" >

by Linda Holmes

Today's big question is this: As between mid-'80s special-effects monsters and mid-'80s puppet monsters, which are more menacing?

Ghostbusters, of course, has more of the former. While you get some "real" monsters as well (mostly in the "Okay, so she's a dog" depictions of the gargoyle-ish creatures), you get a lot more of the straight-up drawn-on-the-screen guys, like the one Bill Murray encounters around the five-minute mark here.

Gremlins, on the other hand, has primarily puppets. And they're very puppety-looking puppets, too. About half the time that Zach Galligan, who plays Billy (a weirdly ageless character who has a job as a bank teller but still lives at home and acts like he's fourteen), is carrying around little Gizmo, they look quite a bit like a ventriloquism act from Star Search.

It also must be said that the gremlins in Gremlins are a lot meaner than the ghosts in Ghostbusters. In spite of all the damage done to a perfectly nice Central Park West apartment building when the (to put it generously) perplexing plot of Ghostbusters leads to the opening of the pathway between Sigourney Weaver's refrigerator and the Temple Of The Demonic Aerobics Instructor, the ghosts aren't really that malevolent. In fact, it's kind of quaint, the way their opening gambit consists of, "I am a GHOOOOOST! I will go to the library and PULL ALL THE DRAWERS OUT OF THE CARD CATALOG BOOGEDA-BOOGEDA! I will EAT ALL YOUR HOT DOGS NOM NOM NOM!"

The gremlins are worse.

Puppet-on-human violence, a Santa tragedy, giant men made from marshmallows, dogs and cats living together, self-defense with a canister-vac, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'Ghostbusters' And 'Gremlins'" >

Ghostbusters: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis will be welcoming us (and you) to The Summer Of '80s Movies. Courtesy of Sony Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

One of the advantages of living in the D.C. area is access to the AFI Silver Theatre And Cultural Center in downtown Silver Spring. They run current movies, but also old movies, and this summer, they're running a series called "Totally Awesome 3: More Films Of The '80s," which I'm taking advantage of for a summer-long nostalgia explosion called The Summer Of '80s Movies: A Possibly Terrifying Look Back.

Interestingly, this third installment is the first one I'm in town for, but it's also the one I'm happiest to get to see, having looked at the previous lineups. They've now sort of burned through the most overexposed and overdiscussed movies (This Is Spinal Tap, The Breakfast Club, Say Anything, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, etc., all of which many of us have discussed to death) and are moving along to ones that, in some cases, haven't been so ubiquitous on cable.

Tonight, I'll be seeing a double-shot of adorable monsters: Ghostbusters and Gremlins. Over the rest of the summer, I intend to revisit River's Edge, Footloose, Edward Scissorhands, Heathers, Some Kind Of Wonderful, and others.

(I withhold comment on Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, for the sake of my dignity. I mean, even if I were going to do that, you wouldn't want to know now, would you? It might keep you from taking me seriously.)

So come back tomorrow, when I will tell you all about cute monsters and Bill Murray, and will undoubtedly make some seriously ridiculous jokes involving the question, "Who you gonna call?" Because I'm pretty sure that's the law.