[1981] MY YOUNG AUNTIE: This was right on the cusp of greatness. Clearly Lau Kar-Leung was trying to do something different with this one--it's a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie with a strong female protagonist, Kara Hui's Jing Dai-nan, and that's different right there. Dai-nan's been rushed into the Yu family in order to keep the family's wealth out of the hands of the philandering 2nd Uncle (Johnny Wang)--so she marries the family patriarch so she can inherit his wealth and pass it onto the good-natured 3rd Uncle (Lau doing the director-star thing.) Which puts her in the position of being the "elder" to a bunch of guys in their mid-50s and being the same age as her grandnephew Ah Tao (Hsiao Hou.) Hijinks ensue; Dai-nan is a backwoods country girl, first of all, and Lau puts her in a bunch of fish-out-of-water situations in a newly Westernizing Guangzhou--wearing heels for the first time, for example (and fighting in them.) And there's a attraction between Dai-nan and Tao, which they're both too immature to acknowledge openly (never minding that she's his great-aunt) so they frequently engage in contests of one-upmanship: whose kung fu is better, who can beat up more villains quicker, etc. Hou Hsiao's comedy really grated on me in the beginning, but I think it was intentional--he was supposed to be acting like a wild kid, in contrast to Dai-nan's acting like a wizened elder. Neither persona turned out to be true as the story went on and they got more comfortable with each other. Now most of the reviewers I read singled out the following as the film's major flaw: Dai-nan gets captured, and the film turns into a bunch of middle-aged dudes (the good uncles) vs another middle-aged dude (Wang) as they fight to free her. I think it probably is a flaw, even if the final fight is a great bunch of action and wraps everything up plausibly (2nd Uncle and 3rd Uncle are an even match, but--according to Ah Tao--3rd Uncle had to lose because of his guilty conscience. And the family wealth goes to 2nd Uncle as the patriarch intended.) But it keeps Dai-nan out of the action and you keep waiting for her to get in there and kick some ass and she never does; you notice the lack of her, even when Lau and Wang are fighting. Plus it strays away from the most interesting subplot, the Kara Hui-Hou Hsiao non-romance. Like I said--it's right on the verge of greatness, but not quite sure if it wanted to be Kara Hui's movie or your regular brother-vs-brother picture. But highly recommended all the same. (The scene where everybody goes to a masquerade ball dressed as white people and they go through every foreign dance style they can think of is priceless.)

[1980] RUDE BOY: So I decided that anything that had been on Night Flight was worth watching, and I'm kind of rethinking that after watching Rude Boy. It's an attempt at a documentary-style film where The Clash play themselves and friend-of-Strummer Ray Gange plays aimless youth Ray Gange. I get that they were trying to make some overarching statement about the state of Britain on the eve of Thatcher's ascendancy to the prime ministership, and so there's racist cops and neonazis and anti-neonazis and general malaise. The problem is that the live Clash stuff (both on and off stage) is more entertaining than all of the rest of the film. I think Gange had honest intentions in writing and starring in this thing, but everytime the film cuts to him in the midst of a Clash performance--just to remind us he's in the movie--it starts to look like narcicissm. Especially when his performance is so anti-charismatic; when Strummer asks him at one point what he's going to do with his life Gange is so incoherent and not in a good way that it's almost embarassing. Luckily Strummer launches into "Let The Good Times Roll" solo on the piano right after that, which reenergizes the movie. Yeah--if you plotted the energy of Rude Boy you'd get big peaks where the various Clash members are performing and huge valley when Gange has the movie to himself. So this movie has the rhythm of a sine wave. Huh. But yeah--this one's for the Clashophiles. As the document of its time it was trying to be it's pretty incoherent (and maybe that was on purpose, but it committed the additional sin of being dull.)

[1980] SPETTERS: It's good to know that even Verhoeven's small-scale Dutch-language movies are still completely trashy and pervy and entertaining. Spetters is a little coming-of-age story about three middle-class kids who mainly want to race bikes and idolize motocross champion Gerrit Witkamp (Rutger Hauer in a small though crucial part.) And there's a girl (Verhoeven favorite Renee Soutendijk) whom they all fall for in varying degrees, and there's tragedy, and comedy, and people growing up and moving on as they do in this genre. But there's undeniably Verhoevenian touches as well; copious nudity, for one (the male member should've gotten a costarring credit.) Over-the-top yet empty male bravado. A blonde woman (Soutendijk) who's perfectly comfortable using sex to get whatever she wants, and Verhoeven forgives and celebrates this character--she's the star of the picture and the rest of the cast sort of passes through it. And--I'm remembering what Pauline Kael said about Woody Allen, that only he could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values. Well--to paraphrase her--only Paul Verhoeven could imagine an anal gangrape to be an effective way to drive a gay man out of the closet. But that's what he does! And it works somehow (just like Allen's perversions work.) My main problem is the way the movie dispatches Hans von Tongeren's character Rien, who gets crippled and left a paraplegic in an accident, and isn't able to race or perform sexually anymore, and I get the feeling the latter is more important to Verhoeven. So of course Rien has to kill himself, and half the characters don't seem to care even though they've been best pals for most of the movie. Verhoeven doesn't seem to care either--unsexuality means you're as good as dead in the Verhoevenverse. So it works in terms of the directors' instincts, but in terms of this movie and this plot it was about as necessary as Cherie Currie's death in Foxes. Yeah--Foxes and Spetters, your one-two "coming of age" punch for 1980, both flawed but very watchable.

[1980] DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE: I'm still digesting this one. Like We're Going To Eat You, it eschews traditional narrative in favor of shifting points of view where you can never quite be sure who is the pursuer and who is the pursued--it changes constantly. In We're Going To Eat You almost everyone in the remote village was a cannibal; in Don't Play With Fire almost everyone in Hong Kong is a sociopath, or a potential sociopath. Almost everyone's guilty of something, and that's why almost everyone dies in the end. So it's certainly as nihilistic as advertised, but in an energetic, entertaining way somehow, with the usual Tsuian emphasis of visuals over narrative--or using the visuals to tell the narrative, I should say. I agree with the reviewer at Hong Kong Cinemagic that the movie loses a lot of steam once Pearl (Lin Chen Chi) dies--she was it's heart, alternately sympathetic and hateful, and even though after she dies there's twenty minutes of movie and a huge apocalyptic shootout to go it just isn't as much fun anymore. I'm having a tough time summarizing this thing--it's a lot of things at once, unsettling and amusing and depressing, without being self-contradictory and while maintaining a consistent tone. You really should check it out--I bought mine here.

[1980] THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS: I loved this little movie from the post-Walt pre-Eisner era of Disney--it's like if Argento did a Disney movie, a completely bloodless supernatural thriller that still does all the scary stuff with P.O.V. shots where you don't know who's watching and a few jump scares and little girls with creepy voices. Lynn-Holly Johnson is your star of the picture who is in contact with....something, out in the woods. I knew she was a former figure skater going into this and if there's such a way as acting like a figure skater, she does it here--attractive and asexual at the same time and really, really earnest (with a cute little Chicagoland accent.) She's perfect for a Disney horror movie; she never gets too scared, so there's never any reason for anyone in the audience to get too scared, even when weird shit is happening to her like her sister's sudden possessions and a blindfolded girl begging for her help every time she looks in a mirror. Her performance keeps a damper on everything and makes this kid-safe--that's my argument--even though the director (John Hough--the Witch Mountain auteur!) is doing his best to shoot this like a traditional scary supernatural movie. Poking around the web it seems like quite a few people had a problem with the ending, which is very science fictiony (the watcher in the woods is some kind of extradimensional being trying to get home) but I didn't. It didn't have the traditional leave-the-theater-with-a-scare ending (like The Fog) and it settled everything without explaining too much, but you'd expect that from a kid's film. Yeah--this was like Carpenter or Argento or even De Palma (like with the obsession with viewpoints) with training wheels.

[1980] PRIVATE BENJAMIN: Yeah--as far as female empowerment comedies from the year 1980 go, this hasn't aged nearly as well as Nine to Five. It's not nearly as sharp, or as consistently funny. It's a weird two-act movie, a wacky basic training comedy in the first half and a light character study in the second, as Benjamin has to decide if she's going to be a princess all her life and put up with the things the movie is suggesting princesses have to put up with (like philandering husbands and a life limited to the home) or be the person who grew to enjoy army life (and the movie isn't at all clear on why that was a good thing for her--it just sort of asserts it.) You hear the term "star vehicle" tossed around a lot and this is a pretty clear example of it: it exists so that we can see Goldie Hawn do physical comedy, and a princess act, and fall in love, and stand up to her parents, and so on, and it succeeds as that--Goldie Hawn is presented in as positive a light as possible. But as a comedy or a drama (it can't decide which) it's pretty meh. (Watch for Keone Young--Storm Shadow himself--in the nigh-racist "Asian guy unsuccessfully picks up blonde white woman in bar" comic relief role.)

[1980] BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS: I'm pretty sure this is the best-looking Corman movie I've ever seen. The ships are all distinct-lookng (it's The Seven Samurai in space, you see, and every one of the seven gets their own ship) and they did a good job of approximating the Star Wars style of spacefighting (though this is a Corman movie, so of course at least one of the shots was reused about five times.) Plus there's character actors out the wazoo--George Peppard, Robert Vaughn (Fukasaku and Corman the same year!), John Saxon, Sybil Danning, John Boy Walton. (Vaughn is probably the best, or his character is the most interesting: a supercriminal who's so wanted by the authorities that he just wants a place to live like a normal person.) But even with all that and John Sayles doing the dialogue and it generally being a pretty coherent movie in terms of plot and visuals, it still never got unbland enough for me--it's not bad or tasteless enough to be super-enjoyable trash, and it's not original enough to be one of those amazing B-pictures like the original Star Wars was. It's more like the Star Wars prequels in fact, a mixed bag of entertaining visuals that gives you a a bemused blah feeling when everything's over.

[1980] GEHRAYEE: BOLLYHORROR! Well, sort of--it's a Hindi riff on The Exorcist, but there's no gore or spinning heads or anything. But there are weird noises on the soundtrack, and explosions of music when something mystical is happening, even if from the point of view of the characters there's nothing out of the ordinary. The plot was a leetle hard to follow (the subtitles were creative on the disc I got from Netflix) but basically a servant had his life turned upside down when the farmland he'd sweated his whole life away on was sold off to be turned into a factory--the current head of the family--a guy called Chennabassapa (Shreeram Lagoo)--who owned the land crushed this guy's loyalty like it was a bug. And so he took vengeance! And hired a shaman (the subtitles said "god man") to possess Chennabassapa's daughter Uma (Padmini Kolhapure) and scare the crap out of everyone and dredge up some nasty business in Chennabasspa's past. So like I said, no gore, but this is much more of a family drama than American horror movies tend to be; in our movies you can certainly read a slasher picture as embodying sublimated sexual tension or something, but the movie is ultimately about teenagers getting stabbed to death. This movie really is about a stubborn, thickheaded father ordering shock treatments for his daughter because it's something someone in the well-to-do middle class would do, and a traditional, weak-willed mother (Indrani Mukherjee) who can't stand up for herself or anyone else because that's not something she's supposed to do, and a son (Anant Nag) who as a result lacks anything like a clue about what to do when his sister starts going crazy. Yeah--it's the story of these three people's distinct failures in response to Uma's crisis, because they all end up hurting her in the attempt to reclaim her. The possession stuff is entertaining but it's not the reason for this movie's existence--it's more a device to put this family through the metaphysical wringer. Check it out if you're both in the mood for horror and in the mood for something a little different.

[1980] INSIDE MOVES: Dopey yet endearing--let's call it that. Roary (John Savage) tries to kill himself, fails but is left with a permanent limp, and winds up hanging at Max's Bar (in Oakland, according to Wikipedia) with a bunch of other handicapped people--a blind guy, a guy with hooks for hands (Harold Russell from The Best Years Of Our Lives), a guy in a wheelchair, and bartender Jerry (David Morse), a former basketball star who got in some kind of accident and can barely walk straight now. So Jerry and Roary become best pals, but then Jerry manages to get an operation done to fix his legs (through a really preposterous set of circumstances, let me tell you) and starts to taste success and leave his old buddies at Max's behind. And the movie is Jerry acting like a bigger and bigger jerk and Roary feeling betrayed until the inevitable reconciliation and happy ending. Savage is really good, though, and his performance as this wounded, yet hopeful, sad sack made me forgive some of the ridiculousness of the plot. Like Jerry getting an operation and suddenly becoming an NBA player (even if it was for the Warriors--and I hope the Warriors figuring prominently in a movie about lovable losers was completely intentional); I know the league was near its lowest point back then, but come on. But Savage is good and the weirdos are funny and there's a moral about not forgetting your friends that is close to being heavyhanded but Donner manages to be just restrained enough to make sure we're getting the message without smacking us in the face with it. It's a gentler kind of message movie.

[1980] GALAXINA: Jeez, it's low budget and everything, but it's successful at recreating parts of the Star Wars and Alien aesthetics when it needs to, and combining it with general weirdness and softcore porn and both broad and usually ill-conceived humor. It's like one of those sleazy, corny, entertaining Heavy Metal serials. Directed by William Sachs (of The Incredible Melting Man fame; the same giant power station hallway from that movie makes an appearance), who definitely didn't have much money for space stuff but made the right investments on stuff like creatures (recreating the Mos Eisley bar scene as a brothel and as a frontier saloon) and interiors and shooting in weird color stocks and doing long slow takes of the Stephen Macht-Dorothy Stratten romance (where the film becomes almost genuinely romantic.) Avery Schreiber is singularly goofy as Cornelius Butt--and it's a stupid joke but the way he says "butt" is always funny. And naming a character "Cornelius Butt" is the level of the humor in this movie, though there is a very good version of the "to serve man/It's a cookbook!" gag. I liked it, it's an endearing little piece of cheapo pop filmmaking and the 2.3 out of 10 it has at the IMDB is either a perfect score or completely backwards. (The commentary by Macht and Sachs on the DVD is super entertaining, by the way. Listen for Sachs taking shots at Peter Bogdanovich at about the 100 minute mark.)

[1980] NINE TO FIVE: It's a mainstreaming of feminist ideals into a really successful entertainment. Like Fame, it kind of globs a 70s aesthetic onto what would become 80s feel-good exuberance--both those movies began to define 80sness, in fact. And it's a women's revenge movie--another 70s staple--but the vengeance is either a fantasy (the set of scenes where Tomlin, Fonda and Parton all dream about killing Dabney Coleman) or a huge mistake. Like when Tomlin poisons Coleman, or Dolly ties him up, or Fonda ends up shooting at him, nobody's really effectively vindictive. The worst they can do is chain up Dabney in his own home--that's the extent to which he is stripped of his manhood. So it's half-assed as a feminist fable, is my argument. But it's so well-cast. Tomlin is the genuinely funny, acerbic one; Fonda is the stiff, formal, unintentionally funny one; Parton is Dolly Parton and that's the only role she ever played but she's trying her hardest here (it was her first movie.) And Dabney treads the line between masculine bluster and manly fear-of-women (misogyny is too harsh a word) really well, and the bit part characters are perfect--the office lush, the office snitch, the eccentric company president. The commentary on the 25th annual DVD is really entertaining, by the way (the "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot edition;" Jane Fonda has aged into your crazy spinster aunt, by the way, but you probably knew that already) and really gets across how much everyone involved enjoyed making this thing. And it really shows up on the screen, too--everybody's having such a good time and the film is just out to enjoy itself (watered-down feminism aside) and it's a pleasure to watch.

EDIT: Well--the commentary kind of degenerates into a string of silences and narrating-the-action after about an hour. But it's good for that hour.

[1980] THE BIG BRAWL: This has to be the oddest film in the Chan catalog, right? It starts off in a Prohibition-era Chicago that entertained itself with an early form of roller derby--which is of course not dramatically weirder than (say) the day-glo street gangs in Rumble in the Bronx. But the fights are so unlike any other Jackie Chan movie, since he's either fighting character actors or professional wrestlers. So the fights are slow and ungraceful without being especially brutal, and there's little opportunity for Jackie to do his thing. On the other hand you have Jose Ferrer (complete with foul-mouthed mob grandmother) and Mako chewing the scenery with gusto. It's not nearly as bad as its reputation suggests, but its also the most atypical Jackie Chan movie that I've seen. Clouse could not quite figure out what to do with him.

[1980] CHEECH & CHONG'S NEXT MOVIE: For the first half hour I was completely writing this thing off--all of the stuff with Cheech and Chong at home or in the van is painfully unfunny. The schtick with their straightlaced neighbor is awful. But from around the time where Chong goes off to meet Cheech's cousin (Cheech doing like a Texan (?) version of the Cheech character) and Pee Wee Herman enters the picture the film becomes surreal and sort of interesting. Chong (who directed) shot everything pretty evenly, there's no hint from the direction about when you're supposed to laugh, or even if there's something funny going on. So you get these lengthy static shots where they're doing their gags and the other characters totally have the giggles at whatever they do and one gets the idea the movie is not about being funny, it's about accurately representing the stoner experience. And I like the movie during these parts. There's this amazing scene in the welfare office that's mostly in one take where Cheech is seducing his girlfriend in the background and in the foreground Michael Winslow is breaking out the sound effects and Chong is bemused and there's a crazy old man who won't stop laughing--bizarre stuff. But the obvious gags mostly fell flat for me--I think they're really bad at slapstick.

[1980] BREAKER MORANT: I looked this thing up before I started watching it and it's based on a play, and I hope I didn't let that fact prejudice me too badly because I don't think this movie ever quite stops being a filmed play. Some of the shots are cinematic, like the execution of Morant (Edward Woodward) and Handcock (Bryan Brown.) But it's mainly a courtroom drama and it's probably hard to get too cinematic with this sort of material. I've read (in Wikipedia; standard disclaimer) that they show this in Australian history classes, and having seen this it makes sense: it's nothing too daring visually, but conveys the lesson of men being sacrificed to empire while mixing in the ambiguities of Morant's character as well (was he killing Boer POWs for revenge? Was he ordered? Was it both?) It works very well as a history lesson. And Woodward and Brown are awesomely sardonic as the doomed men. It's just not a hugely different movie in terms of style; it's better than your average teledrama but not by a lot.

[1980] ATLANTIC CITY: Hey--it's a noir about the geriatric versions of characters in old noirs. Burt Lancaster is a lifetime hustler who ekes out an existence in AC as a number-runner and manservant to the widow of a gangster, played by Kate Reid. Both of them very much think they're still what they used to be--Reid drops her husband's name at any given opportunity, even though she and Lancaster seem to be the only ones who remember him. And Lancaster--evidently a failed gangster--still thinks the good times are right around the corner. And he turns out to be right! I kept waiting for something awful to happen to the people we like in the movie and it end up with that noir everybody-loses ending, but Malle and John Guare (the screenwriter) showed their characters a lot of kindness by letting them get away with their ill-gotten gains. Most of them, anyway; Susan Sarandon's husband dies in the first half hour. I'm skipping over the plot here--Lancaster comes into possession of a lump of cocaine and it's like the first big score he's ever had, and he's selling it off and finally in possession of some easy money, and of course the underworld wants its cocaine back. Add in Sarandon as an aspiring casino dealer and Lancaster's fantasy object--he keeps wanting her to be his moll or something--and there's your movie. The dialogue was tremendous, especially Reid as the gangster princess and Hollis McLaren as Sarandon's flower child sister. Definitely a must-see for the year 1980; maybe not the most hugely important movie but it told its story very well. And as a New Jersey Studies major it was great to see a movie 1. that looked like it was filmed entirely in New Jersey (thanks for nothing, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) and 2. actually posited New Jersey as a place people want to go to, not get away from (while also positing Saskatchewan as the place people want to leave. Just as unfairly, I'm sure.)

[1980] HOME MOVIES: Hey--more De Palma! Like Gates of Heaven I am sure this only a 1980 film by some obscure technicality, but whatever. It's a De Palma comedy, which means it isn't laugh out loud funny (for the most part), more an exercise in absurdity. Like when Keith Gordon dons blackface as a disguise to catch his dad in the act of cheating on his mom so he can finalize their divorce. Or when Nancy Allen's evil alter ego turns out to be a rabbit puppet (like the Ventriloquist in Batman) who wants her to go back to being a stripper. Kirk Douglas is wandering through the picture as a film director who has made Gordon's family his subject matter--there's frequent cuts between Douglas' movie-in-the-movie and the movie itself, but there's no clear dividing line between the two. And Gerrit Graham (the Gordon character's brother) is an insane Iron John-like men's empowerment cultist. Supposedly De Palma made this with a class on independent filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence, and it definitely has a student film aesthetic to it, no split screens or crazy crane shots. But it's also supposed to be the closest thing De Palma ever did to an autobiography--Keith Gordon's Denis Byrd is supposed to be a stand-in for young De Palma (he's nerdy, technically apt, unable to get a fraction of the attention from his mother that she showers on his older brother (Graham), and he has a major crush on Nancy Allen.) Basically, you'll love this if you're a De Palma fan, and if you're not it's an amusing little curiosity.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the opening credits is done over animated versions of the actors done over as horrific caricatures--which actually is a possible metaphor for the rest of the movie. Nothing is creepier to me than creepy animation for some reason.

[1980] CADDYSHACK: You know, I always avoided this movie--I mean, I've seen it in snippets at like two in the morning on TBS or USA and I always thought it was just Bill Murray versus that stupid frigging gopher and Chevy Chase being an ass. But it's much better than that--I think Ramis was aspiring for Marx Brothershood with this, and he more or less succeeded. But it's also got that Marx Brothersian need for a straight man (though Danny Noonan is probably funnier than Zeppo was) and a rambling plot that frequently drags the movie down. The good: 1. Chevy Chase's zen golf scene. 2. The female characters, who never got to do that much in Marx Brothers movies, are at least as amoral as the men here (though less funny.) Both Lacey Underall and Maggie O'Hooligan sleep around unabashedly, and there's no point at which the lower-class and very Irish Maggie becomes more or less morally virtuous than the WASPy Lacey. 3. Class issues are sometimes front and center--note that an Irishman (Noonan) and an Italian (Tony D'Annunzio) are in competition for Lacey. 4. Rodney Dangerfield was amazing in the noveau riche role. 5. Ted Knight was amazing in the overstuffed Margaret Dumont role. The bad: 1. They had people laughing at Rodney Dangerfield's jokes in-movie. C'mon--trust the audience to know when to laugh. 2. And having Kenny Loggins songs be the musical cue for Dangerfield's populism has not aged well. 3. Oddly, I felt the film fizzled whenever they paired comedians together--Dangerfield and Chase had little chemistry, and the Chase and Murray scene in Carl Spackler's room....I know some people like it, but I found it pointless. But overall--jeez, this is a great comedy. It probably won't replace Airplane! for me for the year 1980 (which I've seen much more, but I also think it's a faster, sharper movie) but it's still a really good comedy.

[1980] URBAN COWBOY: The first hour or so of this is a trashterpiece, with the escalating craziness between uber-Texans Bud (New Jersey's own John Travolata) and Sissy (Cleveland's own Debra Winger.) She's flirting, he hits her, they marry, she keeps flirting, he's still hitting her, he wants to ride the bull, she wants to ride the bull, he's threatened by that, she's got issues herself, et cetera. Travolta is good--I can't judge his accent, though--and Winger is phenomenonally unselfconscous as the tomboyish Sissy, caught between idolizing cowboys and wanting to be one herself. She's really the movie's dramatic motor, even if it's Travolta in the starring role. Or at least she's more complicated than Travolta's mix of jealousy, hubris and a dash of aw-shucks style humility. But once they leave each other we linger too long on each of the bad relationships they're using to make each other jealous, and the climatic mechanical bull-riding isn't much of anything drama-wise. See it for Travolta and Winger at the top of their games.

[1980] IRON SWALLOW: This is Lady Snowblood told in the kung fu metaphor, sort of. Chia Ling is maiming old guys, apparently without purpose, but it turns she's taking revenge for the rape of her mother and the murder of her father. The lead villain (Yee Yuen) hires a paid killer to bump off the old men (his old associates) and make it look like Chia did it. Plus his son is secretly Chia's sister and he strongly suspects his father is up to no good. And there's the conflicts that drive this movie. Honestly, this is quite a good little kung fu flick, with a few moments of jarring brutality. (Somebody on the web said it was a Kill Bill movie, but since it has an ear cutting scene maybe Reservoir Dogs is more likley.) But the DVD was terrible--copied off video, badly dubbed (and there's no Hong Kong release I could find), panned and scanned. It's a tight, enjoyable movie but I wish there was a decent version.

[1980] THE ELEPHANT MAN: I've heard this described as either minor Lynch or "normal" Lynch and I guess it's kind of both, because I'm not sure there's a whole lot going on here. It's definitely not weird like a David Lynch movie is supposed to be--oh sure, there's the freaky opening scene with the elephants attacking John Merrick's mom (I think), and the trippy, out-of-nowhere ending with John ascending to the heavens and his mother's voice and image (sort of the similar return to the womb via death to the end of 2001.) Merrick is definitely physically weird, but there doesn't seem to be much weird about him on the inside, besides an overweening commitment to politeness--I kept waiting for him to tell people to stop patronizing him, which never came, and I guess that's the point, that Merrick is as ugly as possible on the outside and as kind as possible on the inside. So is the movie as testament to that immense good natured-ness from a guy who got a shitty deal from the world and chose not to hate it? I don't think it's much more than that. And that's not a put-down or anything, more of a testament to the focused way Lynch told this story. Yeah--it's a simple story about being good-natured in situations where nobody could reasonably be expected to be good-natured, shot beautifully in black and white.