Cinemaniac Reviews

Believe it or not, you may not want to see that movie.

Archive for the tag “1986”

02 Mar 2013
2 Comments

Hoosiers

Review No. 422

hoosiers

The Bottom Line: Hoosiers: A True Underdog Story.

Directed by: David Anspaugh
Written by: Angelo Pizzo
Coach Norman Dale: Gene Hackman
Myra Fleener: Barbara Hershey
Shooter: Dennis Hopper
Cletus: Sheb Wooley
Jimmy Chitwood: Maris Valainis
Merle: Kent Poole
Rade: Steve Hollar
Buddy: Brad Long
Ollie: Wade Schenck
Also Starring: Brad Boyle, David Neidorf, Fern Persons, Scott Summers

Distributed by Orion Pictures and Hemdale Pictures on November 14, 1986. Produced in English by the United States. Runs 115 mins. Rated PG by the MPAA (mature themes; violence; language).

Hoosiers was watched on February 17, 2013.

“Forget about the crowds, the size of the school, their fancy uniforms, and remember what got you here. Focus on the fundamentals that we’ve gone over time and time again. And most important, don’t get caught up thinking about winning or losing this game.” –Coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman)

It’s difficult to find a sports movie that’s not uplifting, even in the slightest sense of the word. I’ve seen more sports movies than I can physically count, and I can come up with merely two examples that go against this grain. One is Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s psychosocial shredding of an aggressive and dedicated boxer. The other, Bull Durham, a goofy but nonetheless straightforward sex comedy about the groupie for a minor league baseball team.

Hoosiers does conform, but it conforms like almost no other movie. In the end, I was left with one small but somewhat meaningful question:

Why were the stadiums so packed? We learn in one scene that there are 63 male undergraduates at the small town high school Hoosiers focuses on squarely, which probably means no more than 130 students total attend. My own high school has something between eleven- and thirteen-hundred undergraduates, yet the stadiums at our basketball games aren’t much more packed than the ones we see in Hoosiers.

Now let’s suppose the head count was lesser. Empty a single seat seat and I can’t imagine being so easily captivated by Hoosiers. The film tells a simple story that we’ve likely heard already, one you wouldn’t so easily cheer for if you didn’t feel the need to cheer. The year is 1951, and a basketball coach, Norman Dale (Gene Hackman), was fired twelve years ago for an aggravated assault on one of his students. Now he’s brought back–temper and all–to coach the crumbling basketball team at Hickory High School. And the team surely isn’t one to instantly skyrocket to the top. The renowned player of the team has left because his father has died. The coach has an anger issue that keeps him from a good number of games. The team can’t function as one unit.

Yet despite all this, there’s no question that Dale will succeed in coaching the team to win, win, win. It’s the plague of nearly every sports movie. Without overly spoiling too many endings: You watch Jerry Maguire, and you know from the moment Tom Cruise lays eyes on Renée Zellweger that they’ll be a couple by the end. You watch Rocky, and every training scene only makes you more sure that he will beat Apollo. Hell, you watch Dodgeball–which I do, deep down, consider a “sports movie”–and it’s always clear the Average Joes will win.

We all know that it doesn’t always happen this way. As I understand it, the majority of sports studies work by handing us weak underdog characters, and then moving forward to show how they are determined to succeed. A sudden loss at the very end would entirely kill off the message.

And despite ending on a predictable note, the climactic scenes in Hoosiers are some of the most dynamic a sports drama has ever delivered. I wouldn’t say I felt inspired by the film in a literal sense, since never would I ever play basketball by choice. I did, however, feel involved during quite a few scenes.

Hoosiers is flawed here and there. It’s not too unconventional in how it tells its “feel good” story, especially when that was “based on a true story.” But I do feel like I got something out of this one, and I did feel good in the end. The alternative is a story so banal and unrealistic that you feel cheated; Hoosiers offered far more slam dunks than technical fouls.

B

A Good Day to Die Hard

Posted in Drama, History, Sports, [Film Reviews] and tagged
19 Feb 2013
12 Comments

Top Gun

Review No. 414

top_gun_ver3

The Bottom Line: Oh the fun! Oh the flaws!

Directed by: Tony Scott
Written by: Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr.
“Maverick”: Tom Cruise
“Goose”: Anthony Edwards
“Charlie”: Kelly McGillis
Carol Bradshaw: Meg Ryan
“Iceman”: Val Kilmer
“Slider”: Rick Rossovich
“Viper”: Tom Skerritt
“Jester”: Michael Ironside
“Hollywood”: Whip Hubley
“Stinger”: James Tolkan
Also Starring: Adrian Pasdar, Barry Tubb, Clarence Gilyard Jr., David Patterson, Duke Stroud, John Stockwell, Linda Rae Jurgens, Tim Robbins

Distributed by Paramount Pictures on May 16, 1986. Re-released in IMAX 3D on February 8, 2013. Produced in English by the United States. Runs 110 mins. Rated PG by the MPAA (mature themes; profanity; war violence).

Top Gun was watched on February 9, 2013.

“I feel the need…the need for speed!” –Maverick (Tom Cruise)

Top Gun is a basic representation of director Tony Scott’s career. It’s lightweight, carefree, loud, and explosive. You can’t do any harm applying the word “fun,” but “fun” is not always “good.” With Top Gun, that’s the somewhat unfortunate truth. Should the film remain in my memory, it’ll be for the dogfights that kept me at the edge of my seat, not the hokey cheese that pressured me to get up and flee the theater.

I’m very grateful I had the chance to see Top Gun in IMAX 3D. I’m also relieved, however, that I wasn’t the one paying. The film clocks in at precisely one hour, forty minutes, but the plot is a log in the middle of the woods. It’s definitely there, but so are the termites, and they’ve eaten at least ten servings of it before the end is visible on the horizon.

Maverick (Tom Cruise) is the “cool cat” of a Navy training academy. He isn’t there to protect and to serve, but because he feels “the need, the need for speed.” Furthermore, he’s competing with those of his own league for the honorary title “Top Gun.” Clearly this is an action movie, not a solemn war drama. It’s also a bit of a corny romance. Somehow, Maverick meets his instructor Charlie (Kelly McGillis) at a nightclub first, not in training. It’s predictable at this point that no matter how much she tells him she can’t stand him, his persistence will win her in the end.

Perhaps substance isn’t as important for Top Gun as for most movies. Not only is the film poorly conceived, it’s poorly delivered and poorly written. Okay, I’ll cut some slack for a few of the film’s famed quotes, but color me surprised by Tom Cruise’s overacting ability. It’s a wonder the man withheld a steady career long after 1986, and that he’s now the highest paid actor in Hollywood.

Top Gun made me feel like an adrenaline junkie. I don’t avoid action flicks, but I don’t watch them religiously as some genre fiends do. Most of that demographic would say the action was what made The Godfather (a three-hour crime drama) a suitable experience. Truth be told, I’d say the same for Top Gun (a less-than-two-hour cornball action flick). I did get pretty excited by some of these rock music-fueled, airborne, high-flying sequences. At least these portions can force me to wolverine through nearly a tub and a half of popcorn.

C PLUS

The 1st Annual Cinemaniac Awards – Winners

Posted in Action, Cult, Drama, Romance, [Film Reviews] and tagged ,
12 Jan 2013
6 Comments

Blue Velvet

Review No. 383

The Bottom Line: Frightening. Weird. Demented. In two words, David Lynch.

Directed by: David Lynch
Written by: David Lynch
Dorothy Vallens: Isabella Rossellini
Jeffrey Beaumont: Kyle Maclachlan
Frank Booth: Dennis Hopper
Sandy Williams: Laura Dern
Also Starring: Dean Stockwell, Frances Bay, George Dickerson, Hope Lange, Priscilla Pointer

Distributed by De Laurentiis Entertainment Group on September 19, 1986. Produced in the English by the United States. Runs 121 minutes. Rated R by the MPAA (graphic violence; nudity; strong sexual content; profanity; substance abuse).

Blue Velvet was watched on January 4, 2013.

“She wore Blue Velvet
Bluer than velvet was the night
Softer than satin was the light…”

Blue Velvet is a chilling, perturbing, and macabre thriller. Starting up, this seems a harmless drama, touched lightly by elements of romance and crime. Then the true David Lynch takes action, and now it’s a morbid psychodrama with elements of romance and crime that are equally brutal, equally disturbed, equally unpredictable.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of his work; that I’m a recent inductee to the world of his intoxicating cult appeal; that I’m well into the second season of his crime-cum-supernatural TV saga Twin Peaks. Lynch’s consistency, however, makes this an equally mind-blowing criminal complex. He’s the cinematic embodiment of both genius and insanity, leaving no loose ends on either spectrum and tying them rather finely into one whole.

Before fifteen minutes have passed, and without giving even the most buried omen, he’s already spinning a graphic, twisted murder mystery. First it’s about the discovery of a severed ear, which leads to the possibilities of murder; then it’s about a detective’s obsession with a bipolar rhythm-and-blues singer/nymphomaniac, who has been thought to have certain aspects of involvement with the crime; then it’s about her increasing mania.

What’s most amazing—among the several hundred other factors that place directly below—about Blue Velvet is how rationally and all the more shockingly all those events are tied together in the end.

Blue Velvet is a definition of style. I do love Federico Fellini’s 8½ as well as Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, but just the symbolism of a single element (blue velvet), the way David Lynch proposes it, decimates just about any figurative intrigue in those two avant-garde masterpieces.

What’s even better is the cinematography. Most, if not all of the scenes set in the murderess’s apartment feature dimly lit point-of-view shots from the eyes of our detective, as he stares at her from inside a closet. It’s a voyeuristic style popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in films such as Psycho and Rear Window; David Lynch’s resurrection is much appreciated. Every now and then, the sensation of an approaching figure delivers an uneasy notion of fear.

Undoubtedly, Blue Velvet is strange in every unconventional sense of the word. Its graphic, psychotic, often paranoid look at humanity makes it difficult to watch (not that it doesn’t demand attention). But those same descriptors are also just why this thriller is so intensely and morbidly realistic, as if stranger than fiction.

A PLUS

Posted in Crime, Cult, Drama, Mystery, Thriller, [Film Reviews] and tagged
06 Jan 2013
7 Comments

Big Trouble in Little China

Review No. 379

big_trouble_in_little_china

The Bottom Line: John Carpenter’s silly, silly, silly, fun, fun, fun cult movie.

Directed by: John Carpenter
Written by: W.D. Richter
Based on: an early screenplay by Gary Goldman and David Z. Weinstein
Jack Burton: Kurt Russell
Gracie Law: Kim Cattrall
Wang Chi: Dennis Dun
David Lo Pan: James Hong
Egg Shen: Victor Wong
Miao Yin: Suzee Pai
Also Starring: Al Leong, Carter Wong, Chao-Li Chi, Donald Li, James Pax, Kate Burton, Peter Kwong

Distributed by 20th Century Fox on July 2, 1986. Produced in English by the United States. Runs 99 minutes. Rated PG-13 by the MPAA (comic violence; language).

Big Trouble in Little China was watched on December 28, 2012.

“I’m a reasonable guy. But, I’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things.” –Jack Burton (Kurt Russell)

Ask me not why Big Trouble in Little China is often recognized as John Carpenter’s work, sometimes even billed that way. Carpenter is known mainly for his work in the horror genre, with films like Halloween and The Thing. Big Trouble is a blend of the Chinese martial arts genre and American slapstick.

Knowing how absurdly this turns out, I wasn’t very appalled to find out that the story was originally set not in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1980s, but in the Old West, circa 1880s. Please note that the film’s tagline reads, “Jack Burton’s in for some serious trouble and you’re in for some serious fun,” and that “serious” is used to mean “absolute,” not “stern and straightforward.”

Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) is a truck driver who has picked up a hitchhiker named Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) and is driving him to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wang Chi is constantly preoccupied by the thought of his fiancé, Miao Yin (Suzee Pai), the only known Chinese woman with green eyes, and he has plans to marry her soon. But when she is abducted, their path brings them instead to the home of David Lo Pan (James Hong), a lonely, several-hundred-year-old sage with a spiritual belief in Chinese magic.

Is any of this sounding familiar? I began thinking it was something along the lines of The Gods Must Be Crazy 3. The same madcap, draw-an-idea-from-the-hat-every-ten-minutes-and-find-a-brilliantly-loopy-way-to-transition-into-it sort of humor was used to killer effect in the early 1980s by the first entry of that series, a South African comedy. Essentially, the only change here is what deus ex machina tactic just about falls from the sky to get the film going: ancient Chinese worship in lieu of Coke bottles.

Our story revolves, in part, around the importance of martial arts and inhuman magic in China’s spirituality. When this staple makes a flamboyant show of itself, it works with massively humorous results. When it’s forced just a “push over the cliff,” it falls flat on its face.

Big Trouble in Little China is two tons o’ fun. For a film that was rushed into production, with the directorial attachment of John Carpenter seeming about as random as golfball-sized hail during a blue moon, the results are no less than incredible. To any lesser extent, this is merely a whimsical, silly farce with equal parts cheese and class.

Oh wait, there is one huge surprise: Kurt Russell plays the impatient sidekick. We’re not used to him as the subservient Western man to the short, talkative Eastern man, but it’s the underlying source for the better half of the film’s comedy.

If you enjoy the classic comedy of the Three Stooges or Abbot and Costello, you’re guaranteed to enjoy this wildly chaotic and hysterical farce. Dare I say such individuals would be in “big trouble” having not seen it.

B

Posted in Action, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, [Film Reviews] and tagged
23 Dec 2012

The Color of Money

color_of_money

Bottom Line: It ain’t silver, but it’s worth summa’ yer silver.

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Fast Eddie: Paul Newman
Vincent Lauria: Tom Cruise
Carmen: Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

“I’ve got to admit it’s getting better,
A little better all the time.
I have to admit it’s getting better,
It’s getting better,
Since you’ve been mine,
Getting so much better all the time!”
–”Getting Better” by The Beatles

Had The Color of Money not been crafted in the hands of director Martin Scorsese, I may have easily given it a pass. This is (in technicality) the sequel to The Hustler, and there’s certainly a fear of a similarly slow work. But essentially, this isn’t a sequel. It has a different style, color cinematography, and it sets up two and a half decades after its predecessor. Sequels have certainly done this, but what we’re dealing with here feels like something more broad. If The Hustler is the appetizer, The Color of Money is the main course. Watching the two consecutively, the 1961 work feels as if it were produced for the sake of its own successor. The back story is a decent supplement (particularly during the opening twenty minutes), but it isn’t at all necessary to fully enjoy this later, slightly better work.

Read more…

Posted in Drama, Sports, [Film Reviews] and tagged | Leave a Comment
19 Sep 2012
10 Comments

Manhunter

Bottom Line: The original, low budget Hannibal Lecter.

Directed by: Michael Mann
Starring: Benjamin Hendrickson, Brian Cox, David Seaman, Dennis Farina, Joan Allen, Kim Greist, Michael Talbott, Stephen Lang, Tom Noonan, William Petersen

We recognize Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter just as much as remember Heath Ledger as The Joker.  Dare I say we tend to forget all the other characters who portrayed the doctor because of how outstandingly he performed in 1991′s The Silence of the Lambs.  Perhaps it comes as an even greater shock that Hopkins was not the first to portray Thomas Harris’s cunning cannibal for the screen, and we would never know him for such a tour de force performance if it weren’t for 1986′s Manhunter.  Generally, we would call a film such as Silence a sequel to Manhunter.  Oddly enough the films don’t seem to be too closely related; just at a starting point, this earlier Hannibal seems more like The Shining‘s Jack Torrance.  Whereas the ’91 film used Hannibal as the main source of increasing horror, among more of a crime thriller plot, the ’86 film uses an arranged low-budget technique for a thoroughly frightening experience…with a pretty sub par Hannibal.

Read more…

Posted in Crime, Drama, Horror, [Film Reviews] and tagged
01 Jul 2012
15 Comments

Hannah and Her Sisters

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Bottom Line: Now’s the time for a horrible pun: this film is “Han”-tastic!

Directed by: Woody Allen
Starring: Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Woody Allen

I’m a devout fan of director Woody Allen’s films, and I hold a higher respect for him than I do for any other filmmaker. After seeing quite a handful of his films, I’m well aware that his films are often structured very similarly. His scripts are mainly dramatic with romantic bits, wry and sarcastic humor, characters that are anything from narcissistic to hypocritical (especially the ones he himself plays), small assortments of jazz music, frank discussions of religion and politics, subdued endings, and black and white title sequences. Despite HANNAH AND HER SISTERS being no different in its structure–if anything, it emphasizes on each and every one of those components–it seems to be something we haven’t yet seen before. Clearly, structure isn’t everything.

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Posted in Comedy, Drama, Romance, [Film Reviews] and tagged
30 Dec 2011
2 Comments

Psycho III

Bottom Line: Too many bloodbaths, not enough back-story.

Directed by: Anthony Perkins
Starring: Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey

Disappointing third entry to the PSYCHO series holds the same premise that made the first film so phenomenal and made the second film ultimately watchable. This time around, we have an unstably pressured nun, Maureen Coyle (Diana Scarwid), who hitches a ride with rock-and-roll musician Duane Duke (Jeff Fahey). Soon enough, it begins pouring rain, convincing both that they cannot go any further. The following morning, the two realize they have stopped near a motel called the Bates Motel, owned by Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Duane, in search for a way “to earn a buck” anyhow, begins working for Bates, and Maureen begins her stay at the motel. Norman, still warring with “Mother” (who has now become both a cliché to the series and an easy choice for a character to lampoon in the next SCARY MOVIE), suspects that Maureen may be related to Marion Crane, the woman he murdered in the series’ first entry.

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Posted in Horror, Mystery, Thriller, [Film Reviews] and tagged
21 Nov 2011
3 Comments

Stand by Me

Bottom Line: Stephen King entertains, but not his best.

Directed by: Rob Reiner
Starring: Corey Feldman, River Phoenix, Wil Wheaton

Whether frightening (THE SHINING, CARRIE) or thought-provoking (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE), Stephen King’s adaptations have made me a total push-over for almost any work of his. As STAND BY ME is a coming-of-age adventure/drama, I expected it to feel like a late-’50s-set roller coaster ride. Little did I know I had accidentally hopped on the ferris wheel, and was from that point on at risk of falling asleep during this 87-minute film.

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Posted in Adventure, Cult, Drama, [Film Reviews] and tagged

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