Acidemic's Best Films of the 1980s

Jack Torrance wants to say hi - but you have to see him first. See him in there - dead center?

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and I found one --the past! Thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s, a time when American became, once more, tragically uncool. NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. And now skate parks... I'm watching, in soggy despair. They're missing so much!

To me, the 1980s begins the now-forgotten Betamax vs. VHS war. Before there were video stores, when you rented tapes from the appliance store back room, and it was split half-and-half with Betamax and VHS formats. That's how it began.

My generation, the non-film critics, are currently trying to assemble a Best of 80s canon, mostly crap that evokes nostalgia to them, like Ferris Bueller (which I loathe on principle) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (or acts of admittedly brilliant but manipulative bromide pap like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment.  Someone, me, needs to step in and take the best-of list pencil away before these nostalgia-bewitched old yuppies hurt themselves.

Don't think I don't love some of the aforementioned too, in my fashion. I can quote them endlessly (because of the VCR), namely, Tootsie and Raiders (we had them both on tape). Here, can you guess which lines are from which movie (these all off the top of my head): Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed; Blow it up! Blow it back to God; That is one nutty hospital; Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them; I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company; Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, ah right now?; Michael, I begged you to get some therapy; The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around.

Wait, that last one is Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated that damned voiceover. We hated everything about the 80s, aside from the rise of the advent of the VCR. That was a miracle and we were saved by it. Then, in 1987 of course, when--in college sophomore year-- I discovered another miracle.

 We could escape the 80s altogether.

With the right set and setting we live in the 60s.

But now, in the 10s, the 80s, especially its cinema, which now glows with tactile pre-CGI analog 35mm celluloid brilliance, having been converted flawlessly to Blu-ray... for-widescreen-HD-TVs.

(the below descriptions are taken from past posts or are new - links appear where applicable). 

Top 15 of the 1980s (in reverse chronology)

15. PASSION  (1982) Dir. Jean Luc Godard

...Godard assumes his audience has seen many films, and so comes to his with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography (and that includes the meta-iconography of 'a film about filmmakers')--he riffs on these the way Ornette Coleman might riff on "Melancholy Baby." We're made aware of how dogmatically we're conditioned by a lifetime of filmgoing and story hearing. When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, we have cliche, When a film deliberately screws with them we have Godard: a medieval knight on a horse is seen trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden while racing a horse around a circular spinning scenery wheel --thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: Will we see this chick being carried off? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense, used to a thousand permutations of the same immanent virginal violation. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera; the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman; the knight rides after her; she climbs up into the lighting rigging to escape; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke.. The Stunt Man is suddenly as bound up in linear single-line narrative reality as DW Griffith by comprison... (more)

14. AKIRA 
(1988) Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira occurs in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe and peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, riots, flying vehicles, telekinetic mutants, and teddy bear hallucinations, all so gorgeously illustrated that time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and HDMI-ready flesh tendrils reach out, connecting your tongue directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between differing misfits (one of whom goes crazy) but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse involved this time, as the government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in Akira's crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode deep in a bunker beneath Magic Mountain. 

13. MOONSTRUCK 
(1987) Dir. Norman Jewison

Does a mainstream ethnic humor rom-com film like this really belong on a disreputable but oh-so artsy list like mine, you ask? How dare you? What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but I saw it recently and it hasn't aged as well. We've grown hipper about patriarchal subtext so we're wise to Dustin Hoffman's whole 'better woman than a woman' schtick, now (re: Molly Haskell). But Moonstruck eschews stealth-patriarchal pop and instead looks to the great Italian operas (and Dino) for its soundtrack, and Cher is luminous. If you never quite 'got' the appeal, see her in this and be a believer. Her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles right through the cast iron skillet. She has the best walk of shame ever; watch how she comes wafting in to her mother the next morning and as soon as she hears her fiancee has returned, starts taking off her make-up and dressing back down from the opera and into a frumpy (but still glamorous) sweater, all while engaging in several layers of dialogue with Olympia Dukakis as her mother.

A relative unknown at the time, Nicolas Cage brings so much mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "Get in my bed!" that we all would have fallen off a cliff for him if he asked and given us one of those hooded stares. Never before had we laughed at and with and swooned over someone at the same time. Between this and Raising Arizona (also 1987) and The Vampire's Kiss (1988), Cage became instantly iconic, akin to what Brando must have been 30 years before but harnessed to wild John Barrymore-in-Twentieth Century level lunacy: that infectious mix of madness, heat, wit, beauty, and ferocity, unleashed at the right time, electrified the house like Castle's tingler. Interestingly enough, all three of these Cage films from that era are dark comedies, though Jewison's is only dark literally. Its beautiful palette of black clothes, red roses, perfect clothing (was there ever a more beautiful--uniquely Italian/New York City-dressed couple at the Metropolitan Opera?) and silvery  giant moon-lit nights helps balances the comic-earthy hues of the characters and brings tension without need for animosity and comedy without slapstick. It all climaxes in a family breakfast where all grievances are aired, love declared, and Olympia Dukakis steals all her scenes with little more than a series of resigned sighs. Forget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating overlapping Italian-American chicks at the time. Seeing it today, it holds up way better. The more viewings the richer its mythic sweep, allowing all the myriad details to seep in. 

12. MATADOR 
(1986) Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Already his fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodóvar from a post-Franco celebratory shock cinema queer anarchist to something infinitely darker, yet more tender and compassionate and above all, more brave in gamely crossing meta-borders vis-a-vis intertextual cinematic reference. After a disturbing credit sequence involving a toreador (Nacho Martinez) masturbating to a a tape editing together death scenes (from Bava's Blood and Black Lace and others I'm not familiar with), we find him lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring, intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) killing her lover in just such a way, piercing him in the back of the neck with a hatpin. Almodovar tacks on plenty of other links between serial killing, bullfights and sex, so we're not really sure if this is his attempt at a sun-drenched horror film. But then Bernardo Bonezzi's small minor key piano motif plays over it all and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level romantic melancholy reverie. Suddenly we want, we need, these two sick fucks to meet. Avoiding last second 'life wins' interruptions we're in the zone between Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951 - also set in Spain with bullfighting allegories) and 1934's Mediterranean-set Death Takes a Holiday. With Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, and a solar eclipse, Almodovar strews roses on the path forward to a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores one's faith in cinema. Dub it a downer if you want but then you'd best run back under the censor's skirts for protection, because cinema's true heart is darkness, not sentiment, no matter how remorseless beats the Spanish afternoon sun.

A very young Antonio Banderas plays Diego's psychic, vertigo-stricken protege; Eva Cobo is Diego's model girlfriend who dresses in red like she wants to be the cape waved by this once-star toreador; Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave also appear in memorable bits, and the astonishing drag-ilicious Bibi Andersen is a flower girl; Almodóvar himself cameos as a fashion designer. Great as they are, though, the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and the very sexy Serna's femme fatale, so voluptuously bloodthirsty Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast. Most American fans of Almodóvar started out with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000, but rich, hilarious, brilliantly acted and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador... to the bloody grave!

 11. EXCALIBUR 
(1981) Dir. John Boorman

Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few dozen viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it only on a second generation pan and scan VHS dupe for 20 years. But thanks to the beautiful Blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, and even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the natural magic. A mythic interpretation of how lust can wreck the noblest intentions, it has something close to the stirring manly grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide, and may be John Boorman's most perfectly realized film, once you unscramble what kind of masculine Jungian shizz he's after. He also stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry, all drinking the same Wolfram von Eisenbach-laced Kool-Aid through glistening glasses that make armor gleam like mirrors. See it and become a fan of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Ring cycle forever and ever. In homage, it made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).

10. POSSESSION

(1981) Dir. Andrzej Zulawski

Perhaps the only way to really understand and love this film is to be temporarily insane yourself, or at least to remember what it's like to have the terrifying freedom of flying fast and loose atop the ever-inward spiral of the maelstrom and have the experience now forever etched in your Silver Surfer memory. I'm thinking of Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelstrom," wherein a sailor finds himself on a damned ghostly boat hovering ever on the edge of a vast never-ending whirlpool wave. Our hero eventually escapes and is rescued only to find his ship mates no longer recognize him: "My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed." Sometimes that change of countenance has to happen: you've seen too much; you've peered beyond the veil and the veil has left its gnarly mark. 

Such things happen all the time, to those who dare to take the voyage into the maelstrom or walk that yellow "brick" road. Some of us are called to the curtain and bid look beyond, and some do, and they get white hair, if not a diploma. I've never seen a film before or since that made white such a violently post-modern wrenching force (not even in Kieślowski's WHITE or Argento's TENEBRE) except maybe in a humorous and romantic way, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, wherein white swallows up whole bookstores and kitchens of Jim Carey's memory. (MORE)

9. CONAN THE BARBARIAN 
(1982) Dir. John Milius

Fuck it, I'm putting this in. We now know that 1982 was the single greatest year for sci fi and fantasy, giving us Blade Runner, The Thing, Road Warrior, Cat People, to name just a few. But of them all, for me, Conan has best survived the winds of change and become a classic as enduring as that ancient king's sword. The dead set opposite of many of the artier films in this list, it uses all the narrative tricks modernism eschews but brings such a heady focus, such an enraptured attention to even the smallest details, that repeat viewings just continue to reveal facets--especially in beautiful widescreen anamorphic and with some cut scenes restored. And best of all, surprisingly enough, is the love story between Valeria and Conan, one so touching it's been making fanboys of a certain age weep for the last 30 years. (more)

 8. REPO MAN 
(1984) Dir. Alex Cox

Long before it split into a dozen subsets--straight-edge, goth, emo, and hardcore, etc--we alienated teens were all just one thing: punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. It had alien conspiracies (with roots in the real conspiracies rather than made up for the movie), oblique "lattice of coincidence" Greek chorus TV commentary ("He is risen!"), Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody (everything's 'generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, a Modern Lovers cover, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and that great legendary T.A.M.I Show with James Brown and the Stones, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "let's go do some crimes" when going off to score booze or weed, and "I blame society" when we failed. When we went to work instead at our very first jobs, our very first taste of the grinding real world, Repo Man guided us like a drunk but cocksure shepherd. The Criterion Blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic, each shot is like a piece of found object junkyard art. I still write within this film's kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on Blu-ray just because Harris is in it in kind of a similar role. It could almost be a prequel!

7. PLATOON 
(1986) Dir. Oliver Stone

It's impossible to describe the effect this had on America and me at the time but I'll try: I was a sophomore in college in 1986, in upstate NY, where psychedelic molds and tie-dyes grow wild and my hippie-ish posse and I were all in the class America in the 60s (which PS- I failed). We had to see it while it was still in the theater, as homework. We called for a cab, piled in, smoked a joint with the driver at his request -- and the mushrooms we'd taken an hour earlier were kicking in by the time we sat down in the dark - our heightened sense giving the amazing jungle foley work an extra 3-D surround boost. Every humming bug and footstep dripped with possible ambush menace; humanity's potential for raw violent evil felt palpable in the jungle shimmer. We howled with relief when Sheen finally finds some a tent where everyone's smoking weed. Later, my buddy Jason had to leave for awhile when Bunny says those immortal words, "Sarge, did you see the way his head busted open like that?" But by then, I was enthralled, the psilocybin in my brain giving me rare access to the feeling of "hell yeah kill 'em all!" like I was channeling the madness of Colonel Kurz as a kind of rationalizing druggy courage, the mushrooms short-circuiting my pre-set empathic response, making everything I saw seem brand new and sans social sermon. The soul fear terror of the jungle was so palpable to me that the soldiers' level of sociopathic anger and violence seemed the only way to stay sane, if that makes any sense. If you ever took 'too much' of anything maybe you know the feeling: without a warrior howl, a game face, courage screwed sticky side-down, you'd wind up strapped down to a gurney, or freaking out your parents at dinner.

and his hair was perfect.

Seeing it later, on VHS, over and over, zonked out on whiskey and 3' graphix, was never quite the same as that magical afternoon in 1986, but I still have sympathy for the hardened Tom Berenger character and think Dafoe's hippy sarge is way too naive. Some elements are downright racist, (the Asian characters are all extra-alien and inscrutable, though that works for creating paranoia there's no excuse for making the black soldiers mostly cowardly and the first to fall asleep on guard duty) and Sheen's tacky voiceover ("They're the best I've ever seen, grandma") is almost as bad as the one, now excised, from Blade Runner.

But I'd heard of vet's cathartic reaction to the film, and I actually saw a sobbing vet-age man in the audience on the way out of the theater that afternoon, and even in the low house lights I could see he'd been crying, a cathartic wave of inky aura was fizzling around him like a fading wall of gnats, replaced by a pink light. He'd clearly been keeping a dark secret venom up in his nervous system for the last 15 years, and it was now broken open, leaking all over the sticky floor. I walked out on rubber legs and gave him one of those overly compassionate shroom looks. With Platoon, the horrible secrets of a nation seemed at last exposed to light as if some glorious combination award ceremony and drug intervention. This wasn't some silly Russian roulette gambit, a Willard going up river, or a paraplegic Jon Voight, this was maybe something like what the kind of low-to-the-ground eye view only a writer-director who was there at the time, with a gun in hand and people actively trying to kill him, could tell. The last time we were graced with such a survivor's eye view was the 50s, with Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets and Steel Helmet. --each of which made a comparable, if less publicized, mark on a generation of vets struggling to unpack their own collective traumas. But those boys had always been heroes; before Platoon, the Vietnam vets had been outcasts. Now, at last, we could begin to welcome them home. If that sounds corny, I guess you had to be there... or emerged within a convincing facsimile.

6. RAGING BULL 
(1980) Dir. Martin Scorsese

I remember hearing a WBNC talk radio review of this film (I would have been 13) on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower and I was trying to think of a good illness to feign so I could stay home from school. The way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to crack open the world. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.

Flash forward a decade, Seattle, 1990: my girlfriend coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache; me loafing in front of our tiny TV, drunk; LaMotta in a Florida jail pounding the wall shoitng "Dummy! DUMMY!" over and over while I drank; her raincoat angrily dropping onto the floor; I was hoping La Motta would stop beating the wall soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But he kept pounding and screaming, and our apartment was too small to escape it. On and on the pounding went, breaking our relationship apart. I was to drunk to defend Scorsese's choice, or to find the remote and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on from past (also drunk) viewings.

We broke up. I drove to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back to get my shit she was already dating a jackass hippie whose claim to fame was that he curated an open mic at the O.K. Hotel. He whinnied like a horse when he laughed and danced arms akimbo when he walked. But he was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted. Come 'eah!

Sure, despite it breaking up my relationship, Bull is a towering masterpiece but it's not fun, or perfect. And after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years, Scorsese's inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away) and his over-reliance on manly violence rather than exploring his castration anxiety head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, the bullshit, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything except lines, coke or poetry - makes no difference; they're the same, ain't they? Come 'eah!

The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from paranoid derangement brought on by consistent head trauma. One last thing I remember from that relationship: trying to sleep at her place while I was in the midst of a terrible fever (Syracuse = always sick). She was in the other room, painting (VPA). I got up and in my delerium accused her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I knew he was under the bed, I looked there too, nothing, but then I knew he was back in the closet. I kept looking in the closet over and over. I knew he was there even if he wasn't. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice, even though it was just a Billie Holiday album. I heard males whispering about me, laughing quietly with her about how easily they could snow me.  So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.

That's no excuse though, and either way, the film is certainly rich enough with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy it doesn't need great psychological insight, and yet... there's Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as in any other movie on this list, .

Aside from Valeria's of course. DUMMY! 

5. BLUE VELVET 
(1986) Dir. David Lynch

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found the violent thuggery disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek helped me unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, that attitude began to change. Turns out the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't merely his anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to shut him out of the bedroom at a whim. The problem was mine not the film's - I myself was Frank as much as Kyle. Damn, that's deep. It prepped us all for Twin Peaks, and therefore the '90s.

Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell, lip syncing Roy Orbison as a nightmarish gay stereotype (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl, all for the very first time. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their loving abuse. Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart - though that too is open to debate and changes as a viewer's psyche). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open,' his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. It endures and like a dream you'll find that it's never the same movie twice.

4. LOLA

(1981) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

There can be no sleep for the German people unless they take Naziism as a bump in their record album and return to track one: the glory of the Weimar era of the post-WWI era. Fassbinder digs that and, for this candy-colored econo-comedy (set in 1957), he takes the mythos of the The Blue Angel (1929) and wraps it like a sticky carmel apple in a post-war restoration/corruption sagas, so that--as we do in Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)---we're watching the booming neo-Weimar weeds spring up from the WW2 rubble, leading to a whole new kind of Warners pre-code/Columbia-post-code Babrbara Stanwyck opportunity for the right kind of sauced neo-Dietrich seductress who doesn't mind pretending to be interested in Asian art if it means winning a bet for 30 cases of champagne. She just might fall in love with her mark's world-weary wisdom; he was a WW2 officer and still hasn't found a country to come home to (could she be it?) but can he forgive the way everyone already knows she's a slut?

It's perfect casting with gorgeous Barbara Sukowa as naughty Lola, whose drunken resentment of the incorruptible (but totally progressive pro-capital) Von Bohm ( Armin Muller-Stahl) leads to a typical night caught in the storm and spending 'some time' in an old barn (a pre-code hook-up spot) and a heartbreakingly sweet bit of church singing that takes them both by surprise. One of the most quietly disarming characters in the Fassbinder lexicon, Von Bohmm's gentle wit and limitless tolerance proves a perfect match for Lola, whose sloppy drunken abandon is always real and beautiful to see. A perfect third in the romance is her pimp /club owner/building contractor boyfriend Shukert (the delightful Mario Adorf) and the three of them somehow rebuild Germany through their 'only-in-the-Weimar' era level of tolerance (ala Rudi and Marlene). It's all for the best; nobody dies and everyone can get rich as part of the New Deal here in the West side of the Wall. Von Bohn gets to avoid having eggs smashed onto his forehead and crowing like a jackass; he winds up married to the lady with "the sweetest ass in all of NATO." Even the insufferably idealist protesting drummer accepts an expensive cigar and realizes there is no bad here, so where is Fassbinder aiming his cynicism? The neo-Weimar flowers are sweet with dolorous savors! (See Peter K. Tyson's great piece on Lola here and my analysis of the German economy, prostitution, the post-war black market and Blue Angel hier)

3. THE LITTLE MERMAID 
(1989) Dir. Ron Clements

If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, it reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time. The voiceover work is uniformly strong (the congested kid playing Flounder the only exception) especially Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll as a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Margo Channing and Ethel Mermen. And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes in the currents of the deep and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth since The Wizard of Oz. It's universal, yet we all feel it belongs only to us, that it's about us, and that's what myth does when it's working.

2. THE SHINING 
(1980) Dir. Stanley Kubrick

This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary devoted to critics exploring myriad paranoid deconstructions. (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby). The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrence family each falls into a separate cabin fever --no direct link to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds, which are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from reality, and from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel... if any. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing). Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack-- in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy'--can't figure out how to erase enough RAM and so is compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can reboot; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' connection from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).

1. COME AND SEE
(1985) Dir. Elem Klimov

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.

As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our shared humanity. We knew they were human too because they felt the same soul-crushing trauma liberating the camps. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound almost the entirety of the world together in a common cause. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted Munch scream, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema, so haunting I can't even post a pic (except for below and top, folded into collage - can you guess which face?).  Still relatively undiscovered either here or overseas, Come and See dwarfs the more highly praised Hollywood offerings of Citizen Kane and Vertigo, or at least standing rightly amongst them, at peer-level, as the crazy genius cousin, the one whose mad artistic gifts threaten to tear the fabric between history and the present, life and death, art and reality, until it's all one giant X-ray eye.

So that's the 80s. It can be summed I think in the above collage - all those crazed purple stares into camera, the rationalization for greed and monstrous evil creating itself like Escher's sketching hands.

Sullivan's Jet Travels: Rich Kid Cinema

A recent post by the unique and sensational Cinetrix, pulling the otherwise unstoppable Dan Callahan in The House Next Door to the curb over a piece about 'rich girl cinema' reminded me I had this semi-self-righteous rant tucked away in my 'drafts' file.  Too snobby and self-righteous? You decide!

I'm not prejudiced against rich kids, they're some of my best friends! But if they've never been slumming for a substantially Sullivan-ish length of time, or bummed around Europe for a summer, or whatever, it becomes pretty obvious when they go to make a film about 'real life' that they've no idea what it is!

Being rich gives kids like J.L. Godard, Sofia and Roman Coppola, Wes Anderson, M. Night Shamylan, Alex Payne, and Jason Reitman a strange obsession with the non-jet set, and a vague hand-that-feeds-them biting self-loathing disguised as knowledge of 'common people' and their 'real' problems. What was it William Shatner 'sang' about 'common people?' Anyone who's dallied in their midst knows they suck.

I have no problem (or only a sporadic one) with Wes Anderson as he deliberately avoids 'real life' - preferring the eccentric rich (like the respectful objectification of the brothers in DARJEELING UNLIMITED,  j'adore). And Sophia Coppola is exquisite at capturing first-class Tokyo hotel ennui with Harrison Ford while Spike was off with Cameron Diaz, so the story behind LOST IN TRANSLATION goes.  There's also a stretch of 20 minutes or so in VIRGIN SUICIDES that's totally awesome, you know the stretch I mean... but then Sofia thinks she can pull off MARIE ANTOINETTE just by gathering some of her friends together on location with fancy wigs and her favorite 1980s music on the anachronistic soundtrack. America recognized a boondoggle when they saw one.

No offense to him personally, but Jason Reitman to me is the worst of the lot (I hear he's a lovely fella in person). I've not been able to wade more than a reel or two into either UP IN THE AIR or JUNO, and that's weird since I love Ellen Page and Vera Farmiga. It seems to me Reitman is the type of filmmaker who hasn't flown coach in his entire life, who's never had to wait in line for a bagel, or change a light bulb, and without those valuable life experiences, what qualifications has he to tell stories about 'life' at all? His view on how people act and even walk feels not even observed, let alone lived. This again would be fine if he was making a Godardian polemic or Wes Anderson doll house, but not if he's going to get at anything like a 'real' truth.

As a recovering alcoholic for example, I can tell when the actor portraying an alcoholic onscreen doesn't know shit about what being alcoholic is like. Similarly, when an inexperienced rich kid makes a film 'about real life' you feel like you're being taught sex techniques by a virgin. And I have been! I know all sides of it. I know a thing. And even if not, will gladly mansplain it.

Anecdote Time:

When anti-Apartheid campaigning was all the rage in the late 1980s, I remember being at an anti-Apartheid rally at the outdoor theater up in Syracuse that was run by this beautiful blonde girl, Christena (not her real name), a rich, blonde, pampered Single White Female type from Connecticut who proceeded to lecture a largely black, Rastafarian male audience about what it was like to be non-white in South Africa ("Imagine.. row after row of shanty towns."). I don't know if the rows upon rows of Rastafari felt as embarrassed for her as I did, but it was kind of emblematic... of something.  And then a band came on after her and the bassist was 100 x better than I was, and my band was next... and I freaked out and ran home to take an 1/8 of mushrooms on the off chance it would make me 'play' music better. It didn't work, and that's why I blame society, and Jason Reitman.

Hey - does anyone remember that movie CQ (2001, above, and top)?  Roman Coppola directed it, and man oh man, is it excruciating. And yet, it's so almost good it hurts, kind of like BARBARELLA, a film CQ clearly apes around the edges; and as a director he has all the worst qualities of Roger Vadim. Roman's cousin Jason Schwarzman is hilarious as a faux Jean Rollin, but the protagonist is a horrifically pretentious dullard played by hand-talker Jeremy Davies. Rather than blow our minds with a De Laurentiis-ish sci fi sex epic, Davies wants to make a tedious documentary of his cliche'd ex-pat Paris life, in grainy black and white, so we can all bask in the mundanity of his spoiled film student existence. Jean Eustache should be rolling around in his untimely grave!

Tout va Bien - (1972)

The main offender in all this--to my mind the classic example--is Godard, who comes from a silver spoon Swiss family, a source of income he's returned to throughout his career when he needs 'help' to finish a film (one presumes). Meanwhile, what are his films about? The evils of capitalism!  I love, love, love Godard, don't get me wrong. And he's brilliant enough that he didn't let his 70s Maoist phase derail his deadpan absurd comic genius. BUT - I do question the motivations behind his attacks on consumerism, especially as film costs money, honey. Is his Commie phase a kind of French filmmaker equivalent to a rich girl bringing home a black guy over break to freak out her parents, so that they wont complain when she later brings home a deadbeat white kid musician the way my drummer's girlfriend once did? Or is he like Charles Foster Kane answering Thatcher's question about what he would have liked to have been ("Everything you hate")? Has a member of the proletariat ever watched a Godard film all the way to the end, even if they appeared in it?

Then again, America never did have a Guy Debord or Brecht to call its own (unless they fled here to escape the Nazis). Maybe that's why we're so stuck when it comes to unpacking the difference between acrid satire and sour sermonizing. We deny class exists, with the result our art compels us to illuminate our own even while depicting another, like a guilty conscience.

Another anecdote:
For around a year or so I knew a quintessential Park Slope co-op kind of guy who freaked out if his roommate set the heater above 65 degrees in winter, or used the AC at all in summer, no matter how hot it got. Every day he'd bicycle every day across the Manhattan bridge to school, even in the rain, all the better to lecture everyone who'd listen about greenhouse gasses. He'd drone on about organic food at the Park Slope co-op, the evils of money and the NWO, and then, once a month, he'd go home to his super wealthy upper crust WASP family to get his allowance. Hilarious!

When being a film critic/theorist/ranter, it's important to keep all that in mind, as it illuminates the underpinnings of what I call trust-fund Marxism. Do the trust-fund Marxists care about 'the people' or are they like Sturges' Sullivan, merely idealizing the poor out of repressed guilt (the urge to 'give something back to the poor unwashed to make one's own diamond swimming pool less shame-soaked) or in order to covertly piss off his parents (or parent corporation)? I mean, it's fine to do that, just be aware of the glaring irony. The blue collar guys ain't gonna see yer pitcher. They think your artsy sermons are bullshit. They want to see cartoons.

I recall this quote from Sullivan's butler:

You see, sir, rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches - as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned

In short, my rich kid cinema critique isn't mean to champion the working class, or the unemployed, homeless, etc., in fact like Sullivan's butler, I hate them. I hate the characters of directors like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and John Sayles, those critically-lauded filmmakers that try and 'justify' their use of national endowments by patronizing the proletariat with that 'Barton Fink feeling.' Also, just because they can afford to keep meddling producers at bay, ensuring the true stamp of auteur (rather than the committee second-guessing that comes with too many producers), doesn't mean they don't need script doctors. It seems to me that since they didn't 'earn' their budget, they have this need to prove their 'stories' worth telling, and cinema is a hard thing to fool. We fancy-ass expensively-educated critics can deconstruct a blazing hole right through the curtains of any auteur's big wizard style. We'd know you were a rich kid filmmaker even if you signed your name 'R. Mutt' or Alan Smithee. We can tell because you think poor or lower middle class people are noble, humble and saintly, rather than loud, boorish and filthy. This is because you clearly have never had to fly coach. The closest you've come to meeting 'common people' is when your usual drug dealer isn't answering his pager.

As I say, except maybe for the preppie wankery of Whit Stillman, I like films by rich folks to be about rich folks. In general I'd much rather roll with the rich kids in cool parties like the ones in Bertolucci's STEALING BEAUTY than mope around some rich snob's idea of working class Bristol. And besides, to get films finished you need money, and since cinema has a respect for finished films and without a fall-back income source, budding auteurs can get slammed into the dirt by budget issues, even inches from the finish line, having to crawl into bed with litigious distributors who tie up the DVD rights for decades. It happens to Abel Ferrara all the time, which is why half his movies are unavailable in the States... ever!

Not all rich kid auteurs are bad: there's a purity of voice in Wes Anderson, for example, a unity of taste and mood that you can't get in a film that's leveraged to the hilt with a dozen different film company backers; Noah Baumbach brings strong doses of scathingly honest bitchiness and bravely hilarious moral ambivalence to his loosely autobiographical skewerings, the sort that nervous execs would probably never greenlight if they were paying the full bill; Alexander Payne is one of Middle America's true Swiftians, and if he does depict low income protagonists it's clear he'd rather dump them into a sea of embarrassment and watch bemusedly as they drown, rather than romanticize their mundane suburban prefab ennui.

Darjeeling Limited (2007)

But then there's M. Night Shyamalan, whose parents funded his early films, like TO SLEEP WITH ANGER. Now that he's surely lost most of his SIXTH SENSE and SIGNS money with his string of bombs I wonder if they're helping him again, because he's still churning out the shit. Alas, Hollywood is very forgiving once an auteur's name reaches the collective consciousness. You can recoil from Shyamalan's AmEx commercial which posits him as the hippest purveyor of trick ending spookiness since Rod Serling, or you can just guffaw at his amok ego. One thing you can't doubt: the man has no real life experience to bring to his films, just the right 'twist' - one inevitably cobbled from other earlier sources.

The thing is, ultimately, if an auteur has enough money and is a recognized name, he can easily surround himself with sycophants for whom is every lame idea he expounds is exclaimed as brilliance. The result? THE HAPPENING and THE LADY IN THE WATER (below).

I call attention to this not to blame these aforementioned rich kids for the silver of their spoons, but  to point out that these kids might benefit from some time out on the real bread line, ala SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS or the very least, a trip on a public bus. Let John Sayles get conked on the head and do time in the chain gangs, so he can realize that the average 'worker' is a boorish  thug; let Reitman be thrown into one of those David Fincher's THE GAME experiences, or a serious iboga trip. Send Roman Coppola to the ayahuasca communities of the rain forest in San Paolo and make him clean the vomit buckets. Most of all, make these punters realize that what they think of as 'normal' is to us as rarefied as a bird with crystal plumage. Would we try and teach them how to party at Ibiza? Or how to ask their parents for money? Then they shouldn't try and teach us how to suffer and yearn for self-expression as they fly around the world in their first class haze, romanticizing the poor like some one-man amateur mendicant society. Then again, people seem to love Jason Reitman... so maybe I'm the rich yob after all. Hmmm? I am, after all, pretty deft at asking my mom for money.

CQ (2001)

Soooo let me backtrack: as long as your pampered innocence doesn't result in the kind of black and white self-indulgent wankery that Jeremy Davies makes in CQ, who am I to judge? As the great Woody Guthrie once sang, "It takes a worried man / to sing a worried song." And sometimes even then, who wants to hear it? Not the worried man, that's certain. You know what I want to hear? Kathryn Bigelow singing about bomb disposal in Iraq; Darren Aronofsky singing about the madness of the one performance that truly makes it; PT Anderson singing about the dawn of big oil. Sing, in short, of subject matter and stories that fascinate and impel you.. not what you think you 'owe' to the little people your grandfather swindled so you could have a $25K a month trust fund. Being true to yourself doesn't mean filming a mirror, Roman! Such surfaces--for all their shiny luster--doth distort, warp, and drown all meaning in a sea of empty gestures.

Somewhere (2010)

Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE (1963) on Blu-ray:

The release this week of Godard's 1963 uber-artsy Vivre sa Vie ("My Life to Live!") should mean a lot to fans of French New Wave cinema, even the poseurs like me who just like it because all the women are beautiful and everyone smokes and never shows their teeth when they smile, and not without good reason. And of all the beautiful women of the new wave, Anna Karina stands out for her unconscious savvy and button-nose cute meets existentially adrift persona (and her rarely exposed teeth browner than the Rio del Plata). The hipster intellectual's Bardot, Karina is a mythic archetype for the ages, the poster girl for Godard's most appreciated and legendary output of the early 1960s, including Band of Outsiders, Pierrot Le Fou, Alphaville, A Woman is a Woman, and Made in the USA. She's beautiful in all of them but only in My Life to Live is she elevated truly to the special realm of sacrificial object--the ultimate screen goddess set upon the altar of, forgive me for using this word, the "gaze."

On the new Blu-ray disc from Criterion, you can notice abundant new and shatteringly depressing things: the dust and emptiness of the run-down pool halls; the rickety realness of old phone booths, sun-faded scotch tape marks on pinball and cigarette machines, real coffee cups glittering with thumb prints, dirty spirits in the cigarette smoke; the terrible flatness of Parisian life witnessed through cafe windows; the narrow, sloping streets that seem to have no sky over them; provincial and ancient architecture encumbered with urban exhaust fume grime made so Blu-ray clear in Criterion's excellent restoration that you can smell the unregulated car emissions; you can smell too the inky tang of fresh newspapers, croissants, and coffee; the acrid haze of the Gauloises strata, and most of all, Anna's big round head, shorn of her girly tresses in a smart bob, like a castrated Samsonette, crowding out the filmic space at every turn, as if we can never quite escape the perfect isolation of her cranium.

This is the most literally heady of all Godard's films, cinematographer Raoul Coutard cuts off Karina's chin rather than miss a centimetre off the top. The result is we often feel like we're impatiently standing behind her in a line, our restless eyes eventually fixating on the round blackness before us. Eventually we do see through it, like a hair canopy parted by Carl Denham to spy a forbidden Kong-summoning dance, and we see things--such as the males gazing away--through her Kong-sized sockets. It's as if she's seeing herself being seen directly from within her shadowed skull, a brain that sees, through the thick black bob, a mirrored object of the camera's interest, 24/7; and she's always aware of how she might look related to who might be looking. Her black smooth hair fills up the foreground of the screen at least half the running time, flattening out the depth until we "literally" cannot breathe. I never really noticed this on the crappy Koch Lorber DVD, which I thought way back in the early days, was the bees-knees. Now I wretch when I think I ever found any of it beautiful. Blu-ray makes this foolishiness shockingly apparent. The lunch naked on the fork still twitching now gives me the bird; the cold duck whose beauty and ugliness shall never disentangle, we now see its aura flutter and then vanish in the flames of a banal Paris street shoot-out.

No matter how many times you've seen a film like this, seeing it anew on a well-restored or remastered Blu-ray is like seeing it for the first time. And this new first time, Vivre sa Vie depressed me like never before. One feels with this flattened image and black hole of a hair-style, trapped. Rarely does Godard show off Karina's figure in any leering sort of way, preferring to focus on her button-nose face, the shockingly tobacco-stained teeth that sometimes appear when she laughs, the way she tries to hide them when she can but isn't ashamed either, the way her eyes dilate in and out with a mix of fear, excitement, attraction and queasy dread when she's interviewed by her new pimp.

The issue of prostitution is very hard to deal with in a cinematic frame, especially when the woman being lowered into the seediness of it all is so beautiful and regal. It's easier when she's made up to look like Aileen Wuornos, as I wrote in 2004 about Monster: Prostitution is itself "acting," as in to not just engage in sex for money but also (assumedly) to seem to enjoy it. Indeed, a prostitute may actually enjoy herself during the contracted sexual act as long as she pretends she is just a good actress pretending to enjoy herself. There may be a moment during the paid-for sexual act when the prostitute is completely "herself," which is to say, completely subsumed into her role as a sex worker pretending to enjoy sex. An actress onstage is likewise 100% safely hidden as far as drawing attention to her own enjoyment. She can rest assured that no one onstage is going to break character and remind her she owes them money, or is gaining weight. In the entrapped stage with its dialogue already written she is free to actually become her character, in perfect safety, with no one to know when and if she crosses over into the sublime, perfect freedom from bondage of self that is every artists' true reward.

It is ultimately then, the lack of access to a camera or theater critic that makes the prostitute "worthless" as an actress. For an audience of one there can be no Oscar.

 With an artsy self-reflexive intellectual like Godard, prostitution will naturally function as a metaphor for cinema. Coutard's camera leers over Karina's shoulder, sympathizing with her sadness even as it causes it, never sure what's an act and what isn't. Is she just drawing us in to ask if she can borrow 2,000 francs? In a meta way, it's even true that her character's dreams of being a film star are realized, right there in the act of being in the movie you are now witnessing, and yet even that is not enough. Godard is forcing us to realize how our own hunger for cinematic beauty is itself responsible for the problems of exploitation and sexual commodification. We destroy the characters we love, our eye is cinema's one true shark. But whereas the similarly distant Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion reacts to the encroachment of our gaze with delusional homicidal madness, Karina's prostitute just stares back, almost bemused, as her freedom and life are crushed up in the jaws of the Other's tepid desire.

 It's Godard's most terrifyingly existentialist movie. With Blu-ray you can feel the cold chill of recognition in Karina's tears when she watches La passion de Jeanne D'Arc (1928) with some random date at the cinema. On a blurry VHS in the late 1990s I found the Jeanne D'Arc scene to be "post-modern" but uninvolving; on that Koch Lorber DVD I thought it was just a cliche' - you couldn't even tell she had a date with his arm around her in those two blurry versions. I thought she was alone! On Blu-ray, you can see some sleazy dude has accompanied her, bought her ticket, and put his arm around her. This adds immeasurably to the pain of the scene, the date's expectations for an after-film tryst mirrored in bizarre way the mix of sympathy and voyeuristic expectation in the face of Antonin Artaud onscreen as he hears the verdict Joan is to be burned at the stake. With this new clarity, both the screen within the screen and the terrible empathy and sadness in Karina's face are made chillingly immediate. This isn't just some 1928 silent film about an old trial for heresy, it's a staggeringly perfect moment - two brides stripped bare for their bachelor audiences, Karina's eyes mirroring every tear of the actress onscreen, and sensing not some erotic catharsis but the cold, horrific panic one experiences in early middle age as they realize their parents are withered and gray, their grandparents are dead, and you're next, the pirates of time making your chained together lineage walk one by one--in usually genealogical order --off the mortal plank into the whirlpool maelstrom abyss.

Like Joan's, Anna's sad lonely fate/face is all but set in stone, and she seems to realize it at the same time we do, and Joan too. She will die or get old and pushed aside for the next generation of doomed pretty Parisian faces--Isaballe Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, for example (both of whom appear while very young in early 1980s Godard films)--but also be enshrined forever in the silver screen pantheon, an altar where her virginal beauty can be sacrificed again and again, in clearer and clearer digital reproductions, long after all of us, too, have stepped off that pirate plank into that swirling sea below.

The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: Andrzej Zulawski's "L'Amour Braque" (1985)

Niche film fans of all nations and genres can rejoice with the release of three borderline hysterical (in all senses of the word) Andrzej Zulawksi films onto DVD, via the amazing Mondo Vision. The first of them I've seen is 1985's L'AMOUR BRAQUE, an insane, coked-up little miracle which prefigures the anarchic Joker scenes in LE CHEVALIER NOIR (below), including the maniacal burning of mass amounts of money and gleefully lysergic/anarchic assaults on the conventions of the bourgeoisie and capitalism! Did Chris Nolan and Heath Ledger see this movie? Or are they and Braque's director Andrzej Zulawski birds of a feather? Or is Zulawski way beyond even BATMAN? I'd normally never mention Batman and Zulawski in the same sentence, but times have changes. Post-modernism has erase the borders of high and low, regardless of what the petit-bourgeois may think. Also, the Ledger Joker is, like Hannibal Lecter before him, something new -- almost legitimately dangerous, threatening to grab us and pull us into the screen at any moment. Being European, an ex-pat Parisian out of Poland (?), Zulawski seems a slavering psychedelic/crystal meth poet, known for either hypnotizing (or maybe drugging?) his actors and driving them to and beyond the brink of madness for their performances. L'AMOR BRAQUE is kind of an 'if an ensemble of meth-addled actors from Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty crashed into a Luc Besson French crime film, thinking they were still doing Artaud's adaptation of Dostoevsky's THE IDIOT and that the crime film mise-en-scene around them must be 'the drugs talking'. 

Or  to put it another way, is Zulawski's yen for heedless kineticism, surfeit de style and spastic physicality rooted in something, or did someone just dump LSD into the Parisian water supply?

Any way you slice him, what a real treat to find such a worthy yet under-explored canon, all presented so lushly we can go excavating in air conditioned style. A whole catalog of Zulawski's awesome films-- few of which (other than POSSESSION) have been seen at all here in the US-- are coming our way on beautiful DVDs. MondoVision plans on releasing nine in all! Jokers, start your burning!

Though L'AMOUR BRAQUE carries a 1985 French action movie glossy punk style (ala the violent late-80s/early-90s nocturnal neon decor of films you might know like SUBWAY or LA FEMME NIKITA) it's actually an art film, or a drug film, Brechtian... of course, with great gobs of classical Russian literature references that, I don't mind saying, were partially over my head. Tcheky Karyo stars, or co-stars! SUBWAY! It may look on the surface enough like a normal 80s French action movie movie, but it would probably weird out a whole room of relatively un-intoxicated bros if they were expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity in addition to the Luc Besson-ish glamor, especially with the subtitles off. And action fans who wondered--as I did--if Karyo was just a dud actor with his stone-faced performance in NIKITA can now know for sure, as his character in BRAQUE is wayyy out there. Not even the same guy, if I can paraphrase William Demarest in THE LADY EVE. 

I glean what I can get, and figure I'll finish the Karamazovs when I can. Until then, those cheesy 80s synth stabs and and Mondo Vision's lovely transfer and well-written subtitles all fuel the rush of Zulawski's poetic post-structuralist approach in a way that echoes the accidental poetry of old HK movies, the old kind of fractured English subtitles and plots so rapid and crazy that to even think about what's going on for a half a second means to be lost for the next two minutes, but if trust your instincts, stop reading the subtitles and 'hear' the dialogue (using the subtitles in tandem with the language) and let go of the rails, you just may experience a giddy and unique cine-high. See, Zulawski has a weird way of feeding you his movie plots subliminally. Somehow or other, you're pulled along by the scruff of your neck. With no time to get your bearings, you realize that, if you don't think about it too much (as with the aforementioned HK films), you know what's happening on an unconscious level if not a conscious one. This is especially true if you had to read Dostoevsky's The Idiot once. Or even did intentionally. 

Francis Huster is the hero, a down-for-whatever Czech refugee named Leon, who finds himself spontaneously adopted by the drunken (coked up?) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of laughing, joking, Nietzsche-quoting Arab terrorists on the run after robbing a bank dressed in Disney masks. Huster and Karyo bond on the train, but then beautiful Sophie Marceau shows up as Mickey's--and soon Leon's--obsession, ensuring neither man can ever leave the other alone for a minute for the rest of the film, lest he gain ground in the race to her bed. 

A perennial 'lost soul" rich girl using Micky and his terrorist friends as dupes; acting coy and lost and doomed so they practically kill each other jostling to be the one to wipe out her enemies; cockblocking and seducing right and left; the two men chase, and are chased by, and adore each other as Marceau proves more and more sociopathic and manipulative. 

And then there's Leon's only slightly-less-hot-than-Marceau (who isn't) cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean, below) who competes for Leon's attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull".

Zulawski loves the Russians, even if they indirectly ruined two years of work on his would-a-been masterpiece On the Silver Globe. 

Meanwhile, a strange cop follows the gang around, and in one sun-dappled grilling scene, notes that Mickey and company carry on with the "luxury of desperate gamblers", a telling phrase I bothered to write down and thought a most clever title, because it describes most of the film--indeed most of Zulawski's blade-running / hot tin roof-dancing output. There's very little stopping to regroup or fortify positions here. If you've ever been on a manic high for any length of time--basking in a spiritual awakening, blessed with an almost supernatural level of good fortune--you know implicitly that if you to go to sleep or nurture negative thinking, your luck will change; your whole holy mindset will crash into nothingness and despair (and hangover). So you drinking, gambling and laughing like a maniac, desperate to keep the the wave alive enough to surf upon, even after it breaks and recedes along the shore. Until there you are, standing on your surfboard on the beach while kids make sandcastles around you and the tide goes out. Finally you've no choice but to pay the kids to dig you a hole, then crawl inside and sleep the rest of the day, until the evening tide comes in and mercifully drowns you.

If things get rough with this film, may I suggest good way to get through the weirdness of the onscreen action (if you're not going to 'roll' along on the last of your Pervatin stash) is to ground it in other movies you may be more familiar with, like bizarro world remakes in a vein of post-modern ultra-violent satire we Americans have hardly seen except for Kathryn Bigelow.  When you see the robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of POINT BREAK, but when you see them horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, they're like a dozen Harpo Marxes on a blood bender or the Groucho-guerrillas in the films of Emir Kusturica. But these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework, because otherwise, goddamn it, this stuff is so fucked-up in its deconstructed avant garde madness, so far ahead of the Luc Besson curve, even your bourgeois art film expectation of a night of modernist subversion may be frustrated. Just where do you situate Zulawski and his panic-attack-meets-ecstasy-overdose clenched jaw freak-out in the canon of 80s filmmaking?

Also, it's very long: two hours of nearly nonstop shouting, kicking over vases, affronting the mores of capitalism and frothing at the succulently lipsticked mouth. You'd think it would grate on one's nerves, but Zulawski is such a master of pace and rhythm that he never gets you too worn out or cranky. And what works too is that, though these guys are all insane--and maybe this is just the French way--all the passers-by and authority figures go along with their gags, like it would be rude not to, the way the bourgeoisie in Bunuel movies look upon their children's destructive savagery with bemused tolerance. Etiquette dictates that when a crazy Marxist sticks a gun to your temple after crashing your dinner party, it's considered declasse' to panic or plead. One must do the right thing and smile and pat the man's hand in encouragement and calmly ask if he would like some wine. When sudden gunfights erupt, cars get smashed and people run around throwing smoke bombs and breaking windows, all it gets from the gendarmes is that famous Parisian shrug. They crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion; they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash; they spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear; and it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. When you're wading deep into a well-crafted, lit, Parisian street corner, man, you're into some fucked up architecture. If you're seeing it on a good HD screen, you can see right up into the cobwebbed corners between the gargoyles. 

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was in QUEEN OF DISKS (2007), when a Clare Horgan as the Queen of Disks stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee I missed a chance to do a spit take! My innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting it spill all over me and crash to the floor and break. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try?

These guys in this film? They don't have that problem.

It all makes you realize that while someone like Godard's a great one for deconstructing genre, he's a bad one at capturing the momentum of genre itself-- poor Jean Pierre Leaud or Belmondo, for example, always seemed to carry an inherent decency that stops them from peeing on people's trousers or throwing grenades into dining rooms or dropping coffee cups full of coffee on themselves and letting the cup shatter on the linoleum floor. If they did, it was often just to a picture of a comic book "Bang!" or riot footage that exploded. Not in this film, baby. That's action like Van Damme! Zoot alors!  A+