1980s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[bamwc2]

Sausage, I'm obligated to point out that you forgot the atrocious Full Moon High in your list of 1981 werewolf films. Sadly, Neil Jordan's vastly superior The Company of Wolves wouldn't be released for another three years. Wolfen is a few spots down in my Netflix queue so I'll weigh in on it before the project is over.

[colinr0380]

The other strange semi-successful trend in 1980s cinema was the subtitled, prehistoric caveman one! I guess it is all coming from the Hammer films int the 60s and 70s (One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth and Creatures That Time Forgot, and so on) but presumably the trend got re-kicked off in the 80s by the incredibly goofy Ringo Starr film Caveman in 1981 (although you could also throw in William Hurt briefly regressing into an ape-man ancestor and terrorising a local zoo in Altered States, in a strange American Werewolf In London-reminiscent scene!), but then the idea spread out into a number of different fruitful directions.

Also in 1981 Jean-Jacques Arnaud starts his run of international films focused on characters in extreme historical situations with Quest For Fire, which is also Ron Perlman's first film, with its prehistoric language created by Anthony Burgess (adept at created languages after the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange).

1984 has Fred Schepisi defrosting John Lone and keeping him locked up in faux-natural landscape inside an Antatrctic research facility in Iceman.

1986 features the adaptation of the much acclaimed Jean M. Auel novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, starring Daryl Hannah at the height of her fame. Unfortunately plans to film the follow up novels appear to have stalled after the first film wasn't the hoped for success, which might be due to the way that the first film is really just our heroine Ayla being treated as an outcase and regularly raped by members of her adopted Neanderthal tribe for being an ugly human! It is faithful to the novel in that sense, as this is providing the abusive childhood (and feeling of being torn between two worlds) that turns first into isolated self-sufficiency (plus animal companions!) and then a move into human relationships with Jondalar later on that arrives in the later books.

My recommendation for the best, and least known of all these films however is the 1988 film Missing Link. This was written and directed by a husband and wife team David and Carol Hughes, who had previously made two nature documentary films for National Geographic Films, Rain Forest and Lions Of The African Night. Missing Link, despite being a narrative film, is very much in a nature documentary mode too, to the extent of not including any dialogue except for a narration by Michael Gambon. The film is almost distressingly tragic in showing a 'Man-ape' who finds his tribe massacred by what appear to be humans from their footprints and then embarks on an epic trek across the landscape on a kind of aimless quest for meaning, until the inevitable but heartbreakingly bleak ending, only emphasised by Gambon's professionally callous but slightly emotional quiver in his summing up.

There is a heavy handed ecological message here about the cruelty of humanity as something inherent in the species (we were killing off species to ensure our own survival from the very beginning) and the film is intentionally aimless and unfocused in the way that our 'Man-ape' character is just wandering, but it still packs a heck of an emotional punch at its low key, unresolved finale. In fact it could be seen both as the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey expanded into an entire film, as well as finally being a kind of reaction against the celebration of learning to use tools and kill with them, that pushes humanity to the next stage of evolution, at the end of that sequence!

The whole film is up on YouTube at the moment. I think some praise must also go to Peter Elliott's great performance as the main, grunting character, expressing a lot through body language! He also turned up in a role in Quest For Fire, and notably was also in a gorilla suit in a significant role in the Charles Dance drama mini-series about a human-ape hybrid First Born!

[Mr Sausage]

Sausage, I'm obligated to point out that you forgot the atrocious Full Moon High in your list of 1981 werewolf films. Sadly, Neil Jordan's vastly superior The Company of Wolves wouldn't be released for another three years. Wolfen is a few spots down in my Netflix queue so I'll weigh in on it before the project is over.

Sounds like I did well to forget it. Far from trying to be comprehensive, I didn't even realize that all three were from the same year until part way into my little marathon. I picked them solely because they were the most famous. I also ended up watching one from the 90's, Bad Moon, because I initially mistook it for an 80's film. It's the one where the family dog is the main character and spends half the movie exchanging pregnant stares with the guy who's the werewolf.

[bamwc2]

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out 1985's Teen Wolf. I have a high school friend who watched it every day for an entire year when stoned. He's now a tenured professor of English.

[ArchCarrier]

Also in 1981 Jean-Jacques Arnaud starts his run of international films focused on characters in extreme historical situations with Quest For Fire, which is also Ron Perlman's first film, with its prehistoric language created by Anthony Burgess (adept at created languages after the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange).

You sure?

[...] So the voices of the Ivaka - that's all Inuit in the film?
Entirely, yes. And Anthony Burgess never knew that! He kept telling everyone he invented that language. He didn't. It was Inuit! [Laughs] Now for the best part of the story. I'm scouting locations in Greenland several years later and I discover that in most houses people have only a few videos but thev usually have Quest for Fire! So I'm very flattered. I'm big in Greenland! [laughs] But then, after a while, I see so many of them I'm intrigued, because even in small Inuit settlements near the Arctic Circle, if there is a television set and a VCR, the one cassette they seem to have is Quest for Fire. So, I start to let it be known, diplomatically, that I'm the guy who made that film! And then I start asking around.

Why all these people are so interested in Early Man...?
Exactly! Well, I find out why and I realize something: that those guys, those Inuits, I brought down to Toronto to do my looping had a great time! What they looped was not what I had told them to say, but the worse possible insults and dirty language you can imagine - in Inuit! And that's why everyone loves Quest for Fire up there. It's the only movie they've ever seen that has Inuit in it, and all the Inuit is about fucking seals!

[Mr Sausage]

The Ivaka are one of the tribes in the movie. Burgess created the language for the neanderthals, who are the main characters in the story.

[Dr Amicus]

Just to add another werewolf film from the period, Cry Wolf (1980, Leszek Burzyinski) was an amusing short black & white spoof on B Movies. I remember seeing it a couple of times - firstly as the support to Airplane and then when it turned up one night on TV - and liking it, but I have no idea if it holds up.

[zedz]

Where Is the Friend's House? - So I finally plugged one of the last major canonical gaps in my film viewing (maybe it's one in yours as well?) It was starting to get ridiculous at this late stage, like not having seen Bicycle Thieves or Tokyo Story. I actually had a chance to see this back in the 90s, on a truly wretched VHS dub of a dub of a dub, but it really was unwatchable and I didn't want to see such an important film under those circumstances. Then, in the DVD era, I kept expecting that an English-friendly release was just around the corner. I think DVDBeaver even reviewed one at some point, but I could never track down that shadowy edition, and nothing else materialized. By the time I learnt about the decent French DVD, rumours about Criterion sniffing around the Koker Trilogy were starting to circulate, and other prime Kiarostami from the period was trickling out in the UK and US, so I held off on that as well. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, so I grabbed the French disc just so I could watch the film for this project.

I have to admit that I was a little tentative about diving in. The film's sequel, Life and Nothing More, is one of the greatest films I've ever seen, but the very nature of that film forewarned me that Friend's House would be nothing like it. However, I did expect it to be in a similar vein to the Kiarostami-penned The Key, which is another truly great, if very different, film. My expectations proved to be dead-on, and this is another pre-meta Kiarostami project in which children shoulder the burdens and anxieties of adulthood while the adults around them are oblivious or ineffectual (Experience, The Wedding Outfit, The Key - Traveller is a little different, but it's also a case of a kid biting off more than he can chew).

The film is direct and straightforward (in contradistinction to the parallel universes of the subsequent films in the trilogy) but beautifully staged and acted, with a sure grasp of its locations, which are rendered as iconic shorthand images like the zigzag path carved into a hill of dirt with a tree on top. It's clear from early on that we are going to be watching an extended shaggy dog story, but the beauty and mystery of the sequences it throws up provide continual gentle surprises and aesthetic revelations. The film culminates in a beautiful, eerie sequence (mild spoilers follow)

Spoiler

in which the boy accompanies a stranger through the darkened streets of a strange town, lit only by the second hand light of houses that are closed to them. I'm only marking this as a spoiler because it's slightly surprising that the boy is still engaged in his quest after night falls, in an alien place.

It's Kafka for kiddies!

It took me a while to adjust to the kind of film this is, compared to the other films of the trilogy, but it's hard to imagine a better film in this mode. It's the work of a master filmmaker transforming what could have been didactic educational fare into something with genuine metaphysical and existential heft and great physical beauty. One of my favourite narrative details is the weird doubling that leads to Ahmed seeming to find the correct house, only to be told that his friend and his father have gone to Koker, which leads Ahmed to return to his home town, track down the father, then have to follow him back to the distant village only to see him return to a different house and a different son (the second doppelganger of the film). Identities and geography are treacherous.

Technical details: the transfer on the French disc is fine (but could well be improved upon when an HD version finally surfaces), and certain sequences of the film (see spoiler above) would be completely obliterated by anything less. As befits a film targetted partly at children, the language is simple, so the French-only subs are pretty easy to follow if you know a little French. When the dialogue gets more complicated (adults talking about doors, for instance) it's not really important to the story. One detail I found a little elusive was the manner in which Ahmed's friend's name seemed to change. I gathered that Nematzadeh was his family name and Mohammed Reza was his given name, but at some point he seems to be called Hossein. I don't know if this was some local subtlety, or some plot point I missed, but it did add to the Kafkaesque atmosphere!

I have no idea why the unidiomatic English title has stuck all these years, and whether it's a somehow more accurate translation of the original, but for the record the French go with the more natural 'Where Is My Friend's House?' (Ou est la maison de mon ami?).

[knives]

Not having seen the film, maybe the title is in connection with the Kafka thing you're talking about. It is not so much his friend's house, but that of a friend for some unknown other?

[Gregory]

It's a truly wonderful film, which I hope others will seek out before our deadline.
In it, the main character Ahmad is certainly seeking his friend's home, so it'd seem more natural to use the possessive, but Kiarostami took the title from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri in which the first line is usually translated as "Where is the Friend's house?" because in Sufism, God is often referred to as "the Friend." I'd have to say the French title is a well-intended error.

[knives]

That makes a lot of sense. Is Kiarostami sufi? It's kind of weird, but you never really hear any of these big middle eastern directors referenced in regards to the religion of their culture and so I have a mild curiosity on that account.

[zedz]

It's a truly wonderful film, which I hope others will seek out before our deadline.
In it, the main character Ahmad is certainly seeking his friend's home, so it'd seem more natural to use the possessive, but Kiarostami took the title from a poem by Sohrab Sepehri in which the first line is usually translated as "Where is the Friend's house?" because in Sufism, God is often referred to as "the Friend." I'd have to say the French title is a well-intended error.

Ah, it's great to have that finally explained!

[Gregory]

That makes a lot of sense. Is Kiarostami sufi? It's kind of weird, but you never really hear any of these big middle eastern directors referenced in regards to the religion of their culture and so I have a mild curiosity on that account.

Here's an article that explores the implications of the film referencing poem that evokes or invokes Sufism.

[knives]

Thanks a lot for that essay. It's very illuminating.

[Michael Kerpan]

All we have is a passable video of Friend's House (which can't be watched until we get our multi-system VCR fixed). But my recollection is that it is just as wonderful as zedz's comments suggest. It really is a shame that no English-subbed DVD has been released (though a really excellent Blu-Ray would be even better).

[Mr Sausage]

I really should've been watching Kiarostami instead.

Cobra (George P. Cosmatos, 1986): Fearing perhaps that Dirty Harry was too subtle, Cobra gives us lines like: "As long as we have to play by these bullshit laws and the killer doesn't, we're going to lose! [hold for pregnant pause]" See, Marion Cobretti is one of those cops who doesn't play by the rules. Yet when the smirking journalists outside his latest incident berate him, accuse him of using excessive force, and claim he tramples on people's rights, it comes after he's engaged in the most justified police shooting in history: the guy has shotgunned one hostage, is threatening to shoot another, and has a bomb. This allows Cobretti to stare dead-eyed into the camera and utter lines like "people who shoot kids don't deserve rights." I'd have thought "he had a bomb!" would've been a better argument than admitting to criminal abuses of power, but hey, Cobretti gets results! These scenes are only there to stack the deck against anyone who'd criticize what Cobretti embodies, and yet the movie is wary of showing Cobretti actually doing something questionable. If you're going to take that attitude, go for broke. Anyway, Cobretti is obviously a John Woo fan because he wears aviator sunglasses, chews on a matchstick, and likes shooting people. He's protecting Brigitte Nielson from a cult that seems to spend all its time in a warehouse basement banging axes together. Cobra is a stunning assembly of every eighties action movie cliche you could want, down to a montage set to synth-pop. It's so goddamn serious, too. No one ever smiles. Even the jokes are said po-faced. I half wondered if Aki Kaurismaki hadn't secretly directed this as a send-up of these kind of movies. By the time we enter Cobretti's office and see a gigantic picture of Ronald Reagan framed on the wall, I decided to treat this film as a comedy either way. Funniest part: Cobretti can't bring himself to shoot the villain (who's carrying a shotgun and a knife) because "murder is against the law," even tho' not one minute earlier he'd stood over an unarmed guy blinded by gasoline and set him on fire. Hilarious. This movie would have to climb a lot of rungs just to make it to 'dumb.'

Gorky Park (Michael Apted, 1983): Interesting that the film overcame the problem of needing some characters to be obviously American in a film where everyone, Russians included, speaks English by having all the Russians speak in British accents. Except for William Hurt, who affects this unplaceable, regionless accent I've never heard before (but which works) and Joanna Pacula, who speaks in her native Polish accent. I like conspiracy/murder-mystery films, and this one was slickly done: plenty of momentum and lots of attention to the details of the investigation. The situation is appropriately sinister and suggestive: three bodies found in Gorky Park with their faces and finger tips removed. The sequences of the identities being pondered and the faces reconstructed were thrilling, but in the end there didn't seem to be much purpose behind those reconstructions given they adds nothing to the investigation. Some last minute choices render Brian Dennehy's character pointless. Rather good, above average film, but its political overtones and slick production values don't disguise that it has no intentions beyond being an entertaining pot boiler. In that, its situation and characters are wasted.

The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987): Who was coming up with the creative choices in this movie? A villain who dresses up as a goalie (ie. the least mobile player in hockey) and skates around dispatching people with his hockey stick? Another villain who sings opera while shooting lightening bolts from a suit that looks like cardboard with LEDs all over it? The movie's about a futuristic game show where prisoners are hunted down for the amusement of the masses, but plainly no one behind the camera actually cares about engaging in any real satire or commentary. It's just one ridiculous, juvenile bit of nonsense after another, shot with all the care of daytime tv. A bland, ugly, silly movie that couldn't even bother to give Arnold some good one-liners. The action scenes are boring, too. Also, why put Yaphet Kotto in your movie and have him do nothing? Even Jesse Ventura got more to do than him.

Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981): I'm divided on the film. The situation the movie engineers is perfect for an action film, and indeed it mostly works as an action film, with the cajun hunters as an unseen natural force crowding in our heroes and forcing them to combust. However, I'm reminded of domino's earlier comments about Hill's tendency to push his actors to obnoxious levels. The characters here are all loutish, screaming idiots, every one of whom annoyed me. Half of Keith Carradine's dialogue consisted of telling Powers Boothe that everyone else is an idiot. He's not wrong. They're all just unpleasant people, and this is true well before they're put through the wringer. Hell, Carradine, our hero, is introduced telling everyone else how he has six prostitutes lined up for everyone when they get to their rendezvous. Seems like every scene is caked in spittle and flop-sweat, with everyone screaming and bickering and hitting each other--it's all too much. Even so, I have to admit I believed every bit of it. I know guys just like this, and I have no illusions that they would behave exactly the same were they in the situation the movie places its characters in. But that doesn't erase the fact that I was irritated with everyone to the point that I was rooting for the cajuns. I half expect that was the point, but, intended or not, it made for an ambivalent viewing experience. I have to heap praise on the final twenty-minutes of the movie, tho'; they were masterful.

[jindianajonz]

It really is a shame that no English-subbed DVD has been released

Not true!

[Michael Kerpan]

It really is a shame that no English-subbed DVD has been released

Not true!

What's this release look like (other than the cover)?

[zedz]

I noticed that, but I think it's a bootleg. There's a Korean box set that includes the trilogy plus Taste of Cherry, but according to Yesasia it has only Korean subs. The information on Amazon that this release carries Korean and English subs, but is supposedly issued by Kanoon, makes me very suspicious. There isn't an equivalent standalone DVD available from Yesasia, at any rate, so I suspect somebody's ported the Korean disc and added English subs. And then charged top dollar for it.

[swo17]

As long as you're getting a bootleg, there's also this. PQ is not great, but hey, it's on a shiny, round disc!

[Michael Kerpan]

Perhaps foolishly, I keep believing that a legitimate (and good) release is "just around the corner". ;~}

[jindianajonz]

Yeah, I had wondered if it was a bootleg, but the new/used sellers all have pretty good feedback, which is unusual for stores that deal in pirated goods.

DVDBeaver also has a review of a different english-friendly DVD, though I can't find anything about this release beyond this review.

[zedz]

Yeah, I had wondered if it was a bootleg, but the new/used sellers all have pretty good feedback, which is unusual for stores that deal in pirated goods.

DVDBeaver also has a review of a different english-friendly DVD, though I can't find anything about this release beyond this review.

Yeah, that's the review that had me perplexed for years. I never saw this for sale anywhere.

EDIT: Oh, and the French disc looks so much better than those caps.

[flyonthewall2983]

Cobra was on television a few years ago and I thought I'd give it a try with fresh eyes. The opening was alright, but honestly all shades of bad-ass go away when he's seen at home chilling to the sounds of Gloria Estefan and The Miami Sound Machine.

[Feego]

A few 80s films that will be airing on TCM (U.S.) in May:

May 2
Breaker Morant (1980, Bruce Beresford)
Gallipoli (1981, Peter Weir)
Road Games (1981, Richard Franklin)

May 3
Ten Violent Women (1982, Ted V. Mikels)

May 15
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986, Woody Allen)

May 16
Starstruck (1982, Gillian Armstrong)
Sweetie (1989, Jane Campion)

May 17
Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)

May 18
My Life as a Dog (1986, Lasse Hallstrom)

May 19
Fatso (1980, Anne Bancroft)
84 Charing Cross Road (1987, David Jones)
The Doctor and the Devils (1985, Freddie Francis)

May 20
The Elephant Man (1980, David Lynch)
My Favorite Year (1982, Richard Benjamin)
To Be or Not to Be (1983, Alan Johnson)

May 23
The Year of Living Dangerously (1982, Peter Weir)

May 29
Someone to Love (1987, Henry Jaglom)
My Dinner with Andre (1981, Louis Malle)

May 30
Lonely Hearts (1982, Paul Cox)