YEAH, SO REMEMBER WHEN I WAS WATCHING ALL THOSE 80S MOVIES?: Of course I crapped out on it, but I managed to finish seeing nearly everything from 1980 I wanted to at least. Ah, half-completed ambition, the Internet is littered with it.

Anyhoo, Hollinger is finally getting the DVDVR 80s Project moving again, so I might start recycling movie review content again. Note: I will not be watching every movie I want from 1981 through 1989. I will not even attempt this. I have learned my lesson. Hollinger says the deadline is November 30th, so I pretty much cannot watch--say--every Dabney Coleman or Stacey Keach movie ever. But I'll do what I can.

GRINDHOUSE REVIEW: AKA recycled message board content, but if you're coming here from Henleyland or something, I want you to know I'm still alive.

Good Grindhouse linkage:

The Outlaw Vern review.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich debate Tarantino.

The Dennis Cozzalio appreciation.

As for me--I thought the whole thing was fantastic. Planet Terror is closest I think Rodriguez has ever come to making a movie involving, and evoking, actual human emotions (so of course it makes sense that he legit fell for Rose McGowan while making this thing.) Something about that final scene, with Cherry and the baby on her back, and her in the role as leader of her people, sealed the deal for me. Plus he succeeded admirably at calling up the feeling of watching a very good Carpenter film, down to the Carpenter-esque scoring which was really perfect. Something about the restraints of the Grindhouse project really helped Rodriguez here, I think; he couldn't just sit down at the computer and play around because he had to think about recreating that cheap 70s aesthetic. So most of his CGI choices were in melting people, something that looks just as good using 70s technology as it does with computers, and Rose McGowan's leg, which--on the one hand--is way too impressive an effect for an actual exploitation movie, in the sense that it just looks too perfect. If they did this in the 70s, there'd be angles where you'd see Rose's leg tied up behind her to acheive the stump effect or whatever. Or they'd hire an actual legless actress. On the other hand, it's such a perfect image for the kind of movies they're trying to celebrate--hook for hand's been done--let's do leg for gun!--I can see why they cheated on the specifics. I think I read somewhere that "girl with gun for a leg" was one of the first ideas they had in mind when they were creating this thing, so there you go. Anyway--I dug Rose, I dug Rose and Freddy, I dug the scene with the one brother finally giving up his barbecue recipe to the other brother. Don't get me wrong, Planet Terror is in large part drenched in that persistent (and annoying) Rodriguezian sense of unreality (which is some combination of Bob Clampett minus the exuberance and Carpenter minus Carpenter's empathy for his characters) but there's enough of the former kinds of moments to make me think Robert is finally learning how to make movies that might mean something.

Trailers: Zombie > Roth > Wright. None of them were perfect, but Zombie had Nic Cage as Fu Manchu and seemed the most respectful of the (actually nonexistent) source material. Roth's had a lot of the details right (washed-out look, bad camera angles, ridiculous premise) but the narration was so, so wrong--it sounded like Roth himself was doing it in a really deep voice and thought that would be funny. Ugh. Wright's started strong but got too self-knowingly goofy towards the end. Perhaps it didn't help that I already knew what the gag was.

Ah, Death Proof. What a beautiful conundrum you are. If Kill Bill was his Leone I think Death Proof is his De Palma, or at least the Dressed To Kill/Blow-Out De Palma: killing off lead characters half-way through a la Psycho, exposing the guts of how a movie gets made as part of the movie (the tour inside Stuntman Mike's car, and, less plausibly in terms of the point I'm making, casting an actual stuntwoman as one of the leads; and don't forget Monica Staggs, the driver of the doomed car, is also a Kill Bill stuntwoman), just the general hey-let's-tear-a-genre-film-open-and-see-how-it-works sense I got from it. It's got the De Palman ambition of confusing the audience while entertaining the audience. But De Palma was riffing off Hitchcock (not only Hitch, of course)--Tarantino is riffing off a whole different set of genres and directors, many of which I'm sure De Palma never took seriously. Nick Schager says Death Proof is a synthesis of the serial killer movie, the "dragster flick", which I guess is where he's accounting for the Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry namechecks, and the cheerleader film, and the latter two are nowhere in the De Palma filmography. But here's Tarantino, grinding (HA!) them all together into a pretty hearty meal. The serial killer and car movie markers are obvious; the cheerleader thing is stated twice: literally in the second half (Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing an actress dressed as a cheerleader) and functionally in the first half (all the short-shorts and ass shots of women who are not cheerleaders, but it functions as T&A.) Plus the opening credits that introduce "The Girls" are like the credits of a sexploitation picture. I would argue that there is a fourth genre at work here (and I know the female revenge picture is in there too, but I haven't seen any of those so no comment,) kind of a Shaw Bros-style morality play with martial arts replaced by stuntwork, where bullies are always exposed as cowards and where the need to humiliate and defeat a villain is unquestionable. This narrative takes over right about the time where Zoe Bell says "Let's go get 'im," and I think that final freeze frame--victors raising their hands in celebration just as the villain lies defeated--is straight out of Shaw Brothers. Of course, Tarantino has to put his own little twist in by having Rosario Dawson crush Kurt Russell's face right after the freeze frame, but that's Tarantino--there's always that little nudge in there to make you think to yourself, "Say, why am I enjoying this?" Like, when Kurt Russell gives that grin to the camera and we're like, "Yay, Kurt Russell!" at the same time we know he's going to go kill Vanessa Ferlito, not too mention Rose McGowan's Pam who was the only person in that bar to give him the time of day. So, is it OMG KURT RUSSELL!!!! or is it "Stuntman Mike is an evil bastard who would rather kill girls than get lap dances from them" (the Ferlito lap dance actually exists, allegedly, but Mike is supposed to not enjoy it), or (later) is it "poor Mike, he's crying like a baby and those girls won't leave him alone"? Knowing Tarantion, it's both, or all three. His is the cinema of contradicting ideas and conflicting genre traditions presented at the exact same time, and that is why I am a Tarantino fan.

Two things "took me out of the movie," as they say: First, Tarantino's cameo in Planet Terror. All I could think of was, "any reasonable character actor/formerly famous person/70s icon would be a better choice than this." Because he was a bad, bad choice for that role, but I'm thinking now it was just part of the general mirroring between Planet Terror and Death Proof--double Tarantinos, double McGowans, double Earl McGraws, Sheltons, whatever more there were. Plus I'm sure Rodriguez enjoyed CGI-ing the hell out of him, and Tarantino returned the insult with the absolutely non-computerized car chase in Death Proof. Second, in the Tracie Thoms versus Kurt Russell duel she completely masculinizes herself--the dialogue is all "tapping that ass" and "busting a nut in that ass" and so on and we get it, she's a woman saying the lines of a male porno actor and she is strong and Russell is the real wuss, it was just too explicitly calling attention to the general role reversal of Kurt Russell from hunter to hunted. A lot of things Thoms said were a little off, but this was the most jarring to me.

(As an aside--Sydney Poitier seems to be getting all the press, but Vanessa Ferlito's Butterfly seemed to be the most fully-rendered of the doomed women, and was the only one who had that little closeup as the accident happened--the quick shot of her closing her eyes when Stuntman Mike turns on the lights at the last second. Poitier got all of the foot fetishizing--which is part of the huge self-parody undercurrent in Death Proof, along with the extra-long diner scene--but Ferlito got the massive closeups and the whole "iconic" treatment. At least where her face was concerned, and of course she was the only one of the girls who had her face destroyed, just like Poitier was the only one to be dismembered. David Edelstein mentioned something about Tarantino getting off on the contradiction between loving onscreen mayhem and being revulsed by his own reaction to it--wait, here's the exact quote: "It's also a small masterpiece, dredged up from the psyche of a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence." And that idea is pretty vividly illustrated by the buildup to the crash and the crash itself.)

So. Best time I've had at the movies in I don't know how long. Hopefully the Weinsteins release it on DVD as it was in theaters, in addition to the split versions; I really think it functions well as a total cinematic experience. Which obviously you can't replicate at home, but it would be nice to have the option to try.

JUST IN CASE MY PARENTS STILL READ THIS BLOG SOMETIMES: See--I haven't totally left the flock!

You know the Bible 88%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

And that's without having consulted the Good Book in what feels like five years. I thought I was going to get a 50%.

(Via cleek.)

WINTER ASIAN GAMES FEVER!: Catch it!

THE IRONICAL THING ABOUT FLORIDA'S BASKETBALL AND FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS: Is that both were overshadowed by historic wins by semi-unheralded teams--George Mason and Boise State, respectively. Well, I thought it was worth mentioning.

[1981] MAN ON THE BRINK: Hey--New Wave undercover cop drama! Infernal Affairs twenty years ago! Or one half of Infernal Affairs--poor Ah Chui, an undermotivated cop mysteriously picked for undercover duty. (Mysteriously because I found it mysterious that they picked a guy who was shown thinking about quitting the force in a previous scene, and let an old lady get away in the opening scene because he felt bad for her. Wouldn't you want somebody completely committed to police work for your undercover guy?) He doesn't turn out to be a particularly good thug, either--he's not quite brutal enough--but just being with the thugs begins to turn him rotten. He drives his girlfriend away as he gets more casually violent, and then he's fired from the force when he organizes a hit on his ex's new lover's jewelry store and is left a thug in name and in deed. That's just the one-sentence summary, there's a bunch of twists and turns, plus some unfortunate moments of bad comedy and errant sentiment. But overall this is an unusually character-driven film, not an exercise in plot one-upmanship or style like a lot of Hong Kong crime movies. Ah Chui isn't a bastard, but he isn't noble either; he's kind of a cop everyman who gets his girl and eventually his life stolen from him because he's forced to walk between two worlds (there's your title) and in the process of falling between the two and staggering back to his feet he gets run down to nothing. In the end he gets beaten to death by a bunch of vindictive apartment-dwellers after a botched raid, his final words something like "Is this a heroic death?" And the final freeze-frame is a friend of his screaming in rage at his friend's death--a raw ending for a generally raw film, aforementioned tonal lapses aside. A lot of the New Wave was powered by raw anger, wasn't it?

[1981] TRAGEDY OF A RIDICUlOUS MAN: Mild Bertolucci movie about the owner of a failing cheese factory (Ugo Tognazzi) whose son gets kidnapped. Or does he? Doubt begins to creep in about whether the son staged the whole thing to finance his leftist buddies, and when there's a rumor that the son has been killed that's doubtful too. All the owner knows is--if his son is dead, he can reinvest the ransom money back in his factory. His wife (Anouk Aimee--and Bertolucci loves the Anouk Aimee closeup) is of course constantly erring on the side of hope and constantly has to prod her husband into following the ransomer's wisher. And there's two of his son's friends who may be part of the kidnappers, or may be acting in his son's best interests--who can say? Bertolucci makes sure everyone's motivations are muddled or opaque (with the possible exception of Anouk Aimee, who--if she wanted anything other than her son's safe return--I didn't see it) and so when the son turns up alive in the end we have no clarification about the particulars of his kidnapping. All we know is that Ugo Tognazzi's character is one confused, passive-agressive dude. And that's what we're left with, Tognazzi running from the camera like he evaded thinking hard about anything throughout the movie (he's the ridiculous man of the title.) Like I said--it's a mild film about a mild little man that you'll enjoy but not especially rave about. It's, like, the safe artistic foreign movie retired people see at the local arthouse matinee.

[1981] ENTER THE NINJA: What?? Directed by Golan and produced by Globus? Of course that's a must-see! And it's plodding and artless and terrible, one of those things that doesn't function as trash or as art or as trash-art. Well--there are comically exaggerated death scenes, but that's the only thing this movie does well. I don't know how this thing launched the ninja craze and Sho Kosugi's career, but it did and I'm mystified. Reviews I have read have seen something menacing in his performance that I did not see at all. What kind of ninja cackles maniacally while doing a job? Maybe just the very idea of a ninja was enough in 1981? Ninjas and blood and cockfighting and Franco Nero saying "I'll be back." I will say that the variety of death dealt by Nero in the final fight was entertaining, if badly executed due to his lack of martial arts talent. And the Golanian love of nutshots was in full display in this film. But some decent death is not enough to make this even close to good trash.

[1980] FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES: Decent enough and entertaining Bergman film about nice, unhappy Peter Egermann (Robert Atzorn) who has a sudden moment of violence and kills a prostitute to the shock of everyone who knew him. Marionettes starts with the murder and spends the rest of the movie jumping around between the police investigation and sessions with Peter's psychiatrist (back when Freud was still taken seriously) and scenes from Peter and Katarina's marriage (Katarina played by Christine Buchegger--and the Egermanns themselves are supposed to be characters from Scenes From a Marriage.) Everything scene is presented--I don't know--formally with title cards indicating where they took place in relation to the murder, like Bergman was stringing together pieces of evidence and leaving it up to you at home to determine why Peter kills. And there's blame for everybody--Peter, Katarina, his mother, the psychiatrist, Katarina's business partner who introduced him to the prostitute. Their marriage was a big culprit too, one of those hate each other/can't get enough of each other kind of deals. There's almost too much evidence; in the end, all that matters is that Peter has been trapped by life, wiling away his days in a locked room in a sanitarium playing chess against a computer. I liked this more than I thought I would, given Bergman reputation for being depressing--not that this wasn't depressing, but it was pretty vital too. It's a very watchable little character study--not must-see by any means, but if you run across it give it a try.

[1981] MARTIAL CLUB: Another great little movie from Lau Kar Leung--not like My Young Auntie was great, this is simpler and probably more successful for it (though also less ambitious.) The whole of the conflicts of the movie are provided via different kung fu schools defending their honor--nearly every fight stems from Gordon Liu's school (he's playing Wong Fei-hung in this) or Kara Lui's school or the somewhat villainous school where Johnny Wang is employed. Except for once he isn't the villain--he's a visiting Northern master out to broaden his horizons by travelling among the Cantonese. He actually ends up tempering the more dishonest ambitions of the master of the school he's visiting, since he really believes in obeying the rules of kung fu. So the fights are exhibitions for the most part, nobody's out to kill each other and there's no blood coming from people's mouth and I'm pretty sure nobody got killed in this, but this made the martial action sort of more purely enjoyable for me. The final bit of sparring between Liu and Wang was incredible, and it ended in a stalemate, because kung fu isn't about winning anyway (I think that was the lesson.) And the opening had lion dancing on top of a platform carried by four or five guys, who were on top of a platform carried by eight or ten guys, who were on top of a platform carried by twenty guys--just an exciting, well-composed bit of cinema. Oh, and Kara Hui gets multiple chances to kick ass, including a couple of fights with Gordon. And it's all pure kung fu done for the sake of kung fu, so it doesn't always have the emotional impact of other kung fu movies, but Liu and Hui and Johnny Wang just on their own are a pleasure to watch.

[1980] LOULOU: This was strong stuff and not exactly enjoyable stuff, and as a tale of sexual obsession it's no Bad Timing. Pialat's Loulou is a lazy, womanizing ne'er-do-well (Gerard Depardieu, apparently the only actor in France capable of the young leading man role in the year 1980) who unaccountable becomes the object of the very middle class Nelly's (Isabelle Huppert right before she shipped off for Heaven's Gate) affections. Nelly, in turn, is loved by Andre (Guy Marchand), but the picture leaves him behind fairly quickly--it's Huppert and Depardieu's film. And they each are throwing each other into the emotional minefields, and you can't always tell who's being manipulative, or hateful--Pialat is careful to not give either one of them anything like a moral upper hand. It's practically a documentary in terms of the way Pialat never takes either Nelly or Loulou's sides for very long. It's also documentary-like in the sense that it's an observation of how a process unfolds (in this case, the process of two people inexplicably bonding together) than a dramatic narrative. We stick with these two characters until the point that they can't do anything else to each other, and then the film ends. I can't say it was the most pleasant thing in the world to watch, but it really did do a good job in making Nelly and Loulou (not so much Andre) into real, living people. It's a small, deeply realized character study of two not possibly mismatched people and you may appreciate it without loving it, as I did.

[1981] ADIEU, GALAXY EXPRESS: I'm guessing this is not the movie to watch in isolation, but I was never going to delve into the works of Leiji Matsumoto anyways, so I'm just going to be stuck with my lack of nuanced appreciation of this film. And watching this has not gotten me interested in seeking out other adventures of Captain Harlock or Emeraldas or even the original Galaxy Express. At it's best this was something like an anime Baum--well, a militarized, apocalyptic Baum where the characters pass through a variety of fantastic settings where the threat of death is always present. But the insistence of mixing constant death with whimsical fantasy does not sit well with me. When our heroes get to their destination (the heart of the empire of the machine people--and I didn't enjoy this enough to want to get into any plot specifics, it's just a kid on a space train touring the universe for mysterious purposes) it turns out the machines survive by stealing the life forces of people, and people are ran through a factory and turned into corpses so that the machine people can survive. Then, like five minutes later, a passing "machine life stealing comet" (no, it makes no sense) passes by and eats all the screaming, flailing machine people. So you have two genocides for the price of one! There's some attempt at a moral about eternal life has to come at the cost of someone else's life, and an additional one about the hero-child turning into a man because his machine princess-companion-girlfriend keeps ditching him, but it was really slight and borderline stupid. This is the kind of well-animated (really well-done in some places) but incoherent and close to spiritually empty anime that is not going to sell you on anime if you're already biased against it.

[1981] ZOOT SUIT: This was very much on the mediocre side of things, not awful but too flat to be good. Somehow Luis Valdez ended up directing the movie version of his play Zoot Suit about the Sleepy Lagoon trial (which was botched and biased and resulted in the imprisonment of several Mexican-American youths, who were freed within a year and a half.) And it's like he couldn't figure out how to make it a movie, so he threw his hands up and said "fuck it--I'm just going to film the play." And he pretty much literally did that, right down to including an audience which he goes to for reaction shots on occasion, and at one points lets the action of the play spill into it. It seemed like purposeless fourth wall-breaking to me. Maybe it happened in the actual play as well and Valdez felt like he had to leave it in? But up on the screen it just served as another reminder that what we're watching is a filmed play. The play itself isn't too bad--it focuses on Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez), who's one of the defendants and has Edward James Olmos' idealized pachuco character living in his head and egging him on to bad decisions and an embrace of cynicism. Olmos' character is all the things Reyna thinks he wants to be, and the substance of the play is Reyna wrestling with how much he wants to become like the glowering, mean, zoot-suit-cool Olmos. So it's basically a smallish character study set during a period of actual social injustice (the trial in 1940s Los Angeles) and the social justice stuff frequently smothers the character stuff, muting the impact of both. Yeah--the play is passable enough, but as a movie it's got no reason to exist.

[1980] PHOENIX 2772: It's an adaptation of the future portion of Tezuka's Phoenix series, produced by Tezuka himself, and it's really quite good. Obviously in 1980 it predates the whole "overpowering visuals" style of anime (for lack of a better term, and I'm sure there is one, unknown by me) and gets by more on character design (and everything looks like Tezuka sketched it out before hand, it's a very true representation of his style, down to the always-jarring "graphic death visited upon cute little cartoon characters") and lush orchestration (nearly the entire film has the orchestra booming away in the background.) Storywise it's in the mystic science fiction tradition: The Earth is dying, there's this mysterious "space firebird" that can provide the energy to bring the planet back to life, or something, so space pilot Godoh takes it upon himself to get out there and bring back the bird. He's accompanied by robot-girl Olga (who raised him and is in unrequited love with him) and assorted comic relief characters both alien and human. It's a very busy movie, and that would be my biggest complaint--it tosses you from the Godoh-Olga story, to the sidekicks being goofy, to the power of the phoenix (or the corrupt dystopian government back on Earth) and back to Godoh and Olga again, without giving you a chance to take anything in. But though it moves around a lot the constant orchestration helps to give everything a consistent tone (and maybe a consistent tone was what director Taku Sugiyama was going for, as opposed to a fully coherent narrative.) The opening sequence was wonderful, though, a lengthy dialogue free sequence showing Godoh being raised by machines, including Olga. And the ending was a bit of a riff on 2001 and Pinocchio as Olga is transformed into a real woman and Godoh is reduced to infancy (a bargain he made with the phoenix to save the Earth) and they are left to reprise their roles from the start of the film. This movie isn't going to blow you away, but you're going to enjoy it because it's so solid and well-done. A movie doesn't have to blow you away in order to be really worthwhile.

[1981] WOLFEN: The other movie by Michael Wadleigh! It's not exactly a werewolf picture--the wolves here are these ancient godlike creatures that only the Native Americans remember and respect. Like Edward James Olmos' character, who's the only person who can clue cop-with-a-past Albert Finney onto what's been killing people in a very bombed out and desolate version of New York City. There's this amazing scene where we first meet EJO's Eddie Holt and Finney has to climb up to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge to meet him and they're both really up there on the top of the bridge. And Finney looks terrified and Olmos is calmly walking about without a harness and I really hope it didn't take them too many takes to get that shot because it looked like it was excruciating to film. Wadleigh sort of overuses the steadicam point-of-view shots--we almost always know where the monsters are, so there's not much reason to be afraid unless you scare easy (like me.) But I think that was intentional--Wadleigh wants us on the monster's side, to understand why they're killing both old Dutch New York aristocrats and homeless people, and he does do that pretty well. Some of the other murders--the wolves' rationale was less convincing, like when they killed a zoologist who seemed like one of the few people in the film who was on their side. Other negatives: way too many fake scares, too much of the "Native Americans equal nature undespoiled" hokum. But overall it's a quite fine account of the conflict between civilization and the eroding natural world that still wants to survive. It just takes up the natural world's side as much as it does civilization's, and is a more interesting picture for giving us the point of view of the "monsters." So: not hugely terrifying, and way too intelligent to be exploitation (despite the occasional gore.) A very different horror picture.

[1980] UP THE ACADEMY: Yeah, so Midnight Madness was worthwhile trash and this pretty much is useless trash. This was supposed to be Mad Magazine's foray into movies (to keep up with National Lampoon) and Gaines and the rest of The Usual Gang of Idiots ended up disowning the final product. I can sort of see why they did--this isn't the most awful thing ever committed to celluloid, it's just pretty blah, and pretty much unacceptable for a magazine that was still trying to be on the cutting edge of a certain type of humor. (Adolescent male humor.) And I guess Ron Leibman must've been a real Mad fan to have wanted himself removed from the credits of a film that he starred in and where he gave the most entertaining performance by leaps and bounds. And the only competent performance, as the deviant, lonely, sociopathic academy instructor Major Liceman. He was one of the few good things in this movie, along with a somewhat dignified Barbara Bach cameo (doing a terrible Southern accent, though) and Rick Baker's Alfred E. Newman mask. Oh, and the soundtrack is this amazing grab bag of 80sness. Blondie! The Stooges! Nick Cave! Lou Reed! Pat Benatar! Cheap Trick! But the movie isn't worth watching for the soundtrack (it's the only thing that keeps it interesting sometimes) or for Ron Leibman's efforts or anything else. It's just a pretty indistinct piece of cinema.

[1980] MIDNIGHT MADNESS: This was mindbendingly, transcendentally stupid--a whole new dimension of stupid--but it works so hard at being stupid that it really grew on me as it went along. I mean, the plot isn't much of anything--a Los Angeles-wide scavenger hunt between five college-age teams--and the performances aren't on their own much of anything but somehow collectively they're charming. I think, for me, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the idiocy of this thing because director/writers Nankin and Wechter are ultimately very kind to their characters. There's nerds and fat girls and the movie isn't especially mean to them like it could be; even Eddie Deezen has some kind of dignity within the Midnight Madness game. The closest any of the characters get to being irredeemable villains is the spoiled rich kid Harold (Stephen Furst) who's more irrational than anything else and is saddled with a nagging father and a nagging girlfried, and the mean old landlady Mrs Grimhaus (Irene Tedrow) who calls the cops on the game. Which doesn't work since the game is so much fun the cops want to watch too! Yeah--it makes no sense. But scenes like the nerd team extending their moped antennas in unison or a fratboy hearing a choir of angels outside the Pabst brewery (and is this the origin of Pabst hipsterism?) and the much-ballyhooed "FAGABEEFE" (don't ask) lend it all a breezy charm. I don't want to overpraise it--it's no Caddyshack, though it shares that film's flaw of dull protagonists (in Midnight Madness, it's David Naughton's forced conflict with his brother, Michael J. Fox before he figured out how to act.) As a Disney production it obviously could not be Caddyshack. But I think the Disney restraint forced it to be goofy when it should have been vulgar, and made a it a lot more memorable than it should have been. Put this with Watcher In The Woods as the interesting 80s Disney experiments--Watcher the bloodless thriller, and Midnight Madness the sexless teen comedy.

[1981] LION VS LION: Kung Fu Cinema praised the heck out of this thing but I found it to be very much a mixed bag. I think it may be a good title for the kung fu purists, in that the fights are really excellent but the plot is quite hard to follow--it's something to do with a secret list of rebels against the Manchus that winds up in the hands of conman Ah Cun (Wong Yu) and his dumb-but-noble partner Ah Yue (Lo Meng.) Johnny Wang gets to play a hero for about three-quarters of the picture, but turns into his usual Shaw villain near the end. Directors Chin Yuet-sang and Hsu Hsia really knew how to do an action scene--and Kung Fu Cinema says they were both longtime action directors before this movie, so that explains that--but building a movie out of the action they're less good at. I mean, the lion vs lion fight of the title (a lion dancing fight, to be specific) was incredible but they also stuck it in more-or-less randomly, like they had an idea for a lion fighting scene and just pasted it in there where they could. But it's a great fight, you could see this movie for that sequence alone and it'd be completely worthwhile. There just wasn't enough holding the fights together, and I'm not enough of a kung fu fan to love a movie on the basis of the fighting alone.

[1980] THE NINTH CONFIGURATION: This was quite good, like a more intelligent One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without those pieties about the crazy really being the sane or whatever. No, sane or insane, we're all in the same boat in The Ninth Configuration's universe, utterly alone in a cruel, capricious universe. Directed by novelist and screenwriter William Peter Blatty, it's definitely the work of somebody who's got literary sensibilities first and cinematic sensibilities second; for a large part of the opening of the film the dialogue dominates everything, in the form of witty monologues and back-and-forth between the guards and staff of a military hospital for the insane. I had the feeling of one of those very heavy, idea-drenched and fast-paced science fiction novels, like Bester or Harness, where people say things normal humans wouldn't necessarily say but you don't care because it's intelligent and clever and tossed off quickly, one after the other, so you don't have time to think about it either. But there's also moments of incongruity where you get the sense Blatty was trying too hard, like when astronaut Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) dreams about seeing Christ on the moon, or when a couple of the inmates decide to put on a version of Hamlet with an all-dog cast, or weird blackface solo with an actual black guy nodding approvingly. Yeah--it's definitely in that late 70s tradition of works of overweening ambition, and stands with The Stunt Man as the great lost auteurist classic of 1980. (Like Rush, Blatty went on to direct one more movie--The Exorcist III. Kids, a compare-and-contrast essay between The Color of Night and Exorcist III would make a great topic for your Films of the 90s seminar, let me tell you.) It's hard to talk much about Ninth Configuration without giving away the more important twists; suffice it to say that Stacy Keach's Vincent Kane, army psychiatrist, has a big bad secret. And the big secret isn't that great, and there's some explanatory psychobabble thrown in and the circumstances are pretty implausible, but I can forgive it, it gave Blatty the right framework to put Kane through the metaphysical ringer. Keach was fantastic as Kane, too; it's a really great portrayal of a guy torturing himself with past sins to the brink of insanity. I dunno--I think this approaches must-watch status for the year 1980. It's not entirely successful, but it's a failure of too much ambition and I can't fault Blatty for trying to stick in as many of his Deep Thoughts as he could.

[1981] SHAOLIN AND WU TANG: Yeah--easing my way back into the 80s project with a little kung fu. This was on my list because it's Gordon Liu's directorial debut (though Kung Fu Cinema says this is Lau Kar-leung joint. And IMDB has him directing another movie eight years before this. Who knows? The kung fu filmography is jacked beyond measure.) Gordon is Shaolin and Adam Cheng is Wu Tang and Johnny Wang is the DIRTY CHING! who forces them to fight. Johnny needs the Wu Tang and Shaolin secrets to ensure the continued rule of the Manchus, lest the two schools combine and become dangerous. Of course, Adam and Gordon remain friends despite the interschool conflict, and end up teaching each other the opposite school's secrets during their final fight (which is actually pretty good.) Once they've swapped styles they're both good enough to teach Johnny a lesson and win the day and give the audience a nice little take home message about kung fu being for everyone, whatever school or style they happen to enjoy. But before their last fight it's a fairly cretinous movie, though it's consistent tonally (i.e., no Shaw-style sudden bits of comedy.) And there's this bizarre scene where Adam is locked away in prison with a bunch of crazy women until he reveals the Wu Tang sword style (or something,) and the women are shrieking in bad dubbing and Johnny's planted his sister there to collect Adam's secrets, and Gordon ends up infilitrating the prison and teaching her the Wu Tang fist--it's hard to describe but it was a nutty scene, in an annoying way. The DVD didn't help--it looks liked somebody took it off a VHS tape and when it's a night scene you can't see anything. English dub only, too, so it at least has the curiosity value of being the source of quite a few of the Wu Tang Clan's samples. Aside from that--it's not anything you need to seek out if you're not a kung fu head, even with the unconventional final fight (in terms of there not being a winner or loser--kung fu itself wins!)