Raging Bull

Raging Bull (1980) is probably the most overrated movie of the last 50 years, from probably the most overrated director, Martin Scorsese. Admittedly, I’m a biased reviewer. (Who isn’t?) I don’t usually respond to movies about boxing, and in the last few years I’ve developed a real antipathy for films that are about men and men only, with only marginal roles for women in them. (When half of the population is women, and when there are so many good women who act, why are movies so man-centric?) That’s probably why the only thing I liked about Raging Bull was Cathy Moriarty’s performance. She plays the wife of the film’s subject, boxing legend Jake LaMotta, who’s played by Robert De Niro.

Movie-lovers often bemoan the fact that Robert Redford’s suburban-family-coming-apart-at-the-seams drama Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980, beating the obviously artistically superior Raging Bull. I’ve bit my tongue until now because I hadn’t bothered to watch Raging Bull. Now that I have—an endurance test if ever there was one—I remain securely tethered to team Ordinary People, even if Raging Bull is cinematically superior. It’s incredibly well-made, technically speaking. The stark, naturalistic black-and-white camera-work and the editing are truly masterful.

But the film’s technical achievements do not change the fact that its subject matter and its execution are monumentally unsatisfying and truly disturbing. This is a film about the emptiness of a New York prizefighter who’s consumed with jealousy and reduced entirely to his physical powers in the boxing ring. He’s a piece of meat. There’s no depth to De Niro’s characterization. Pauline Kael (I’ve never been so happy to be in agreement with her on a movie) put it best when she argued in her review that Raging Bull is looking back to the films of Brando and Coppola, trying to top them. Movies that scratch and claw their way to greatness can sometimes be fascinating—especially if they fail—but Raging Bull’s quest for greatness works against it.

Beneath all the showy cinematography and the showy acting of Robert De Niro, there’s very little humanity. Critics have repeatedly used this argument against De Niro (most recently for The Wolf of Wall Street), but not necessarily for Raging Bull, perhaps because they’re convinced by its technical style and De Niro’s macho machinations that the film is a brilliant piece of art. What Martin Scorsese achieves is a really well-made film about terrible people, but the film’s seriousness and its grandiosity make it seem like we should find these people interesting, or redeeming, or worth our time in some way. But that’s not true about any of them except for Jake LaMotta’s wife, whom he beats up on, accuses of infidelity, and then woos back with sweet nothings in a constant vicious cycle. Watching self-destructive men beat up on their women just isn’t that gratifying, especially when the women don’t get to fight back much. (There is one scene where Moriarty stands up to him, but he socks her in the face, and not long after, she’s back with him and all is apparently forgiven. She does eventually leave him, but years later, and the dramatic effect of the act is underwhelming.)

Joe Pesci, as Jake’s brother and manager, is admittedly very good in his role. But like De Niro’s performance, the acting he does turns into a tired, repetitive schtick. He, just like LaMotta’s long-suffering wife, seems always to be coming back to his brother even when Jake abuses him physically and accuses Pesci of sleeping with his wife. (Jake LaMotta’s mood ring is a constant volcanic red, and his absurd jealousy becomes tiresome, maddening and eventually infuriating.) I don’t want to make definitive statements about movies, but in this case, I really do not have any desire to see a movie about these kinds of characters. (And again, boxing.)

Used Cars

It's a comedy about rival used car dealerships somewhere in the Southwest, run by constantly fighting twin brothers (both played by Jack Warden). Used Cars (1980) has some clever ideas in it, but as a comedy goes, it's lazy. The funny scenes are never particularly focused, and they don't develop the movie. It's episodic and haphazardly conceived, and then there's a race-against-time kind of finale tacked on at the end to try and maneuver the audience to root for the characters--and the movie--when both have just fumbled through the motions for nearly two hours. That's one of the biggest problems for this movie: it has a breezy style that seems contradictory to its ugly production values and its cynical sense of humor. (This is, after all, a comic exhibition of the worst of consumer culture: the junkyard.) I think it's an intelligent movie, but one that hardly deserves to be called a comedy. The comic scenes are never as funny as they are intended to be, and when the movie goes for cheap laughs (such as a car model's clothes being ripped off during a commercial that's preempting a football game), you feel like you're being played down to a little bit.

Kurt Russell is believable as one of the used car dealers, who's always trying to lure unsuspecting customers across the street and away from his competitor. In one scene, he fastens a ten-dollar bill to the end of a fishing line and casts his net across the street. The ending is somewhat enjoyable, but it comes too late, after the movie has gone on too long, and the characters never quite gel. It's almost as if the writers--director Robert Zemeckis and producer Bob Gale--were too familiar with them to bother to flesh them out for us. With Gerrit Graham and Frank McRae as Russell's assistants (who were my favorite characters in the movie), Deborah Harmon, Joe Flaherty, David Lander, Michael McKean, Michael Talbot, Al Lewis (who is very amusing as a judge), and Dub Taylor. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg. 113 mins. ★½

Superman II

Three criminals sentenced to eternal imprisonment by Jorel (Superman's real father) are inadvertently released from their confinement. They eventually make their way to Earth, where they have the same powers as Superman (Christopher Reeve). Superman II (1980) isn't as exciting or as fun as its predecessor, but the villains are entertaining, particularly Sarah Douglas as Ursa, who of the three bad guys is the most amused by her new-found strength. As General Zod, Terence Stamp looks a bit too ridiculous in that costume with the black, shiny boots and the V-neck, like he just walked out of an altogether different kind of movie. Gene Hackman gives the film some levity as Lex Luthor, although without his bumbling assistant Otis (Ned Beatty, who has little more than a cameo), he doesn't have anyone to make fun of. The director, Richard Lester, is constantly thinking of ways to make light of the situation, but the humor doesn't lift the film out of its funk for long. The film suffers from being too heavy-handed at times. And it's hard to believe anyone could beat Christopher Reeve up, as tall and large as he is, even after he briefly gives up his Superman powers to be with Lois Lane. Still, there are some entertaining scenes, such as Clark Kent trying to rescue Lois at Niagara Falls, and the three villains turning Metropolis (a.k.a. New York City) into a playground for their own amusement. With Margot Kidder, Jackie Cooper, Susannah York, Jack O'Halloran, Marc McClure, E.G. Marshall as the President, and Valerie Perrine. 127 min. ★★½

Union City

Hardly the debut you would want for rock 'n' roll's sexiest icon, Deborah Harry. It's a dreadfully dull, plodding, cheap-looking film noir drama from a short story by Cornell Woolrich. Harry plays a frumpy housewife whose husband (Dennis Lipscomb) accidentally murders a homeless man, and then conceals him in their Union City, New Jersey apartment. It's 90 minutes of pure nothingness, and it isn't even the kind of bad movie you can laugh at. It's just painful. Harry proved she could be a lot of fun on the screen in movies like John Waters' Hairspray (1988), but in this, she plays down everything that's hip and self-parodying about her. Even the blonde hair is eschewed in favor of her natural brunette color. When her character decides to go blonde at the end, it's a remarkable transformation that comes too late to be of any help to this mess. (The smartest thing Debbie Harry ever did for her career was buy a bottle of Peroxide and embrace a campy, mock-dull attitude.) A movie that tries to go against the best attributes of its cast is almost certainly doomed for failure. The bad filmmaking doesn't help either. It's poorly lit and visually unimaginative. With Everett McGill,  Sam McMurray, Irina Maleeva, and, in a small role, Pat Benatar. Directed by Marcus Reichert. The undistinguished music score is by Chris Stein, Harry's Blondie co-founder and one-time boyfriend. 1980.

9 to 5

9 to 5 was one of the movies I watched incessantly as a child. What red-blooded American boy wouldn't want to watch a workplace comedy about three secretaries played by Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda? Watching it now, I'm apt to be a bit more critical of it, but it's very hard not to like the three leads, who work well together. If you're even remotely aware of movie history from about 1968 to 1979, you'd be surprised to see Jane Fonda, the Oscar-winning star of Klute and The China Syndrome, and, for a time, the most hated celebrity in America (because of her anti-Vietnam sentiments and her subsequent journeys to Hanoi in the early 70s), so subdued, so easily forgotten amidst her co-stars. Surely no actress was more capable of making a big impression in a movie about women's rights than Jane Fonda.

Fonda gets overshadowed by Lily Tomlin,
who has an amazing air of confidence when it comes to doing funny scenes, and she seems to be completely in touch with her character and her character's frustrations about having to deal with a sleazy boss, Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman), who passes her up for a promotion in favor of a man with less experience. Fonda is pinched and cold and unappealing until her character loosens up mid-way through, but even then she's already established as sort of the drag of the three. Dolly Parton, in her film debut, has a natural amiability that shines through her performance as Hart's good-natured assistant. Unbeknownst to her, Hart's been spreading rumors about them, and she has accrued the reputation of "office slut."


One problem is that most of 9 to 5's comic suspense is generated by a very contrived, easily avoided, mistake. (This was something that rendered the more recent comedy The Hangover absolutely ineffectual as a believable comedy.) Tomlin's character accidentally puts poison in Mr. Hart's coffee (the box oh-so-closely resembling his favorite artificial sweetener), and when he falls and hits his head, she mistakenly assume he's been poisoned by the loaded beverage, and proceeds to steal a corpse, which believes to be that of Mr. Hart, from the hospital. She ropes the other two girls into her panicky misadventure, and this sets up the progression of the rest of the movie. There are funny moments, and as mentioned before, the three ladies are fun to watch, but all of this seems contrived, on a sitcom level. And there are so many ways 9 to 5 could have avoided such a mistake.

Nevertheless, it's a fun comedy that has found its way into the pop culture memory bank. At any rate, Parton's song, "9 to 5," is remarkably catchy and still fun to listen to, and she even adapted the film into a Broadway shot several years back. Directed by Colin Higgins. With Sterling Hayden, Elisabeth Wilson, Henry Jones, Lawrence Pressman, Marian Mercer, and Peggy Pope.

Dressed to Kill

Brian De Palma's most lascivious thriller (with the possible exception of Body Double), Dressed to Kill (1980) shamelessly explores the transgressive nature of human sexuality and the propaganda side of horror movies that depict sex as a death wish. One woman's spontaneous tryst gets her slashed to death in an elevator by a platinum blonde murderess, and a high-class prostitute witnesses the slaying, positioning herself as both prime suspect and prospective victim.

De Palma structures the film like a bad dream, pulling the viewer into a voyeuristic session of gender-bending cheap thrills. But the whole thing's an intentional tease: the murderess with her cheap wig and black trenchcoat and shiny razor is a comical fright figure impersonating a truly terrifying menace, and the victim is punished twofold for having an unexpected affair with a stranger she meets in a museum: she finds out he has a venereal disease (too late), and then meets her death minutes later.

De Palma turns the slasher film into an erotic comic melodrama. He borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (particularly the idea of killing off the star early in the movie). De Palma had already ventured into the Hitchcock canon with Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976). Dressed to Kill is his most sustained shocker. It's like the Id of Psycho's Ego, because Psycho, for all its chilling power, holds back in a lot of ways that Dressed to Kill doesn't.

It would be too easy to dismiss De Palma's work entirely as ripping off Hitchcock, because De Palma always explores a different side. He uses similar conventions of plot and theme as Hitchcock but there's always a sort of cinematic irony underneath what he's doing, as though the joke is that he's turning Hitchcock inside out.

The Pino Donaggio score is appropriately grandiose--it's the symphony of a grand love scene, full of highs and lows and subtle ironies and dramatic swellings that punctuate the set pieces, turning them into sudsy, sensationalistic camp. You'll either revel in its majestic hyperbole or feel indifferent to it all.

With Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, and Dennis Franz.

The Fog

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) may be ludicrous as a thriller, but as an exercise in creepiness, it's wonderful fun. Carpenter and co-conspirator Debra Hill had just come off the phenomenal success of their low-budget thriller Halloween (1978), so by comparison The Fog seemed tame to audiences who were by now growing accustomed to more shocks and splatter, and less patient with an atmospheric, deliberately paced ghost story.

The plot involves a cadre of vengeful spirits bent on doling out vengeance (and murky weather) to a small California town on its 100th anniversary. The founding fathers of the community apparently betrayed a group of lepers, leading them to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. Now the lepers have come back to celebrate.

Carpenter relies too much on plodding slasher-film death sequences as the film progresses, but overall it's still one of his best mood-pieces. You find yourself enjoying all the little stories being weaved together throughout the film.

Carpenter imitates two masters in The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The movie feels like a noirish, supernatural re-imagining of The Birds (the setting reminds you of that film's coastal locale, Bodega Bay, and the fog serves as a stand-in for the birds, creating a similar feeling of apocalyptic doom). Simultaneously, Carpenter invests his scenes with a Hawks-esque film noir feel. That feel is best developed in the scenes of the main character, a local deejay named Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau). Stevie sits solitarily perched in a lighthouse, from which she runs a radio station that plays old jazz standards. From the lighthouse, she has a bird's-eye-view of the whole town. As she observes the fog and begins linking it to a series of deaths, Stevie becomes a voice of warning to the community. Barbeau is perfectly cast as the heroine: she's gutsy and smart, and carries the film well, especially since she's hardly on screen with any other actors.

The Fog deflates a little at the end. The whole movie is a big buildup, layering the scary atmosphere with relish, but there's not a whole lot beneath the atmosphere. Evidently, there were attempts to punch things up by adding a little more violence to the movie after the first cut was finished, but the movie's problem isn't lack of violence but lack of a genuinely scary threat. Fog almost always adds to a horror film, but when the things in the fog are only moderately scary, fog ceases to be effective.

Most of the cast members compensate for the movie's lack of follow-through. Janet Leigh makes a good impression as a local busybody who's spearheading the town's centennial anniversary gala. Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter in real life) returns to Carpenter-land, this time not quite as helpless as Laurie Strode was in Halloween. However, she's not memorable in this movie. Her part feels unnecessary to the story, and because there are stronger female characters around her, she fails to stand out. She's even overshadowed by fellow Halloween co-star Nancy Loomis, who plays Leigh's droll assistant in this. The two have an endearingly irritated-with-each-other relationship. With Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook as an alcoholic priest, Charles Cyphers, and John Houseman, in a creepy bit at the beginning, giving us the town's dark secret in perfect ghost-story fashion.

It might be thinking too deeply to call The Fog an indictment of colonialism, but it certainly points out the irony of celebrating people who murdered and stole to get what they wanted.

The Beyond

Last night I went to the Five Points Horror Movie Fest and saw Lucio Fulci's 1980 shocker The Beyond. My familiarity with Fulci's body of work extends only to his 1979 walking dead flick, Zombie, which was marketed as a sequel to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead in Europe (Dawn was released to European audiences under the title Zombi, and so Fulci's film was appropriately titled Zombi 2, although it has no real connection to the Romero film aside from the common bond of zombies walking the earth).

I knew from my viewing of Zombie that I was in for two things: lots of gore and very little logic. The Beyond delivered these in spades: it's set in Louisiana where a New York woman (Katharine MacColl) inherits a creaky old hotel that apparently serves as one of the seven gateways of Hell. Such a foreboding curse should be enough reason to vacate the premises, but MacColl's feeble-minded character seems intent on staying, despite some strange deaths that occur rather soon after her arrival.

Fulci and his technicians aren't big on subtle horror: everything is glaring and pulsating from the synthesizers to the the oodles of blood and gore. The movie fetishizes violence and dismemberment (particularly to human faces and eyes even more particularly), and the camera seems like a vehicle through which Fulci can revel in the ecstasy of shock.

The drunk guy sitting behind me actually bolstered my enjoyment of the movie. Most of us in the audience were laughing at it, shaking our heads, making comments to friends about the idiocy of the whole spectacle. However, the guy sitting a few seats to my left --adorned in a Beyond shirt-- probably left the theater shaking his head, exclaiming to himself, "They just don't get Fulci!"

Sweeping generalization: American audiences want logical movies. They want things to flow succinctly, smoothly, and clearly from one shot to the next. Italian audiences seem less interested in this kind of composition if their horror filmmakers are any indication. Fulci, Dario Argento, and Mario Bava all seem to forgo the necessities of plot for the galvanizing display of gore.

It might be acceptable if the characters weren't so stupid. David Warbeck, as MacColl's half-hearted love interest, must shoot ten zombies in their torsos before finally realizing that only head shots will destroy them. And yet, he continually wastes ammo making below-the-head shots. This happens so often that you throw up your hands in exasperation at the ineptitude of the movie and its characters.

The worst part is the death of the guard dog...he's the only character in the movie you care about, and the only actor who didn't volunteer to be in this crummy enterprise, so you feel rather cheated that Fulci would do the dog in. Alas, the only justice of this movie is that the dumb characters get what they deserve for being so dumb, and the audience is able to have a good time laughing at their stupidity--and the film's. ★