The Year of Living Dangerously

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), directed by Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hunt in her Oscar-winning role, is proof that the 80s were capable of thoughtful movies about something more than eye candy and materialism. The film is a languid romance/political drama set in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1963 amidst a Communist coup and the political re-alignment of President Sukarno’s regime. Gibson plays Guy Hamilton, an Australian journalist who’s sent to Jakarta as a correspondent and who, with the help of a Chinese-Australian photographer named Billy Kwan (Hunt), accumulates some surprisingly good stories for his frequent radio broadcasts. Billy Kwan, a dwarf, is an idealist who wants more Westerners to take notice of the wretched living conditions of the people in Indonesia. As someone who’s spent his life on the margins of society, Kwan has developed a deep-rooted compassion for the oppressed and the disadvantaged. He thinks Guy can help bring awareness to the plight of people in Jakarta, but Guy is more interested in what a good story can do to advance his career than how he can help bring about lasting social change. He’s also distracted by Jill (Weaver), a woman working for the British embassy. Weir, who along with David Williamson adapted Christopher Koch’s novel, falters somewhat with the romance. It’s never passionate enough, and neither Gibson nor Weaver is given much compelling acting to do together. (But they are both very good, and Gibson--whatever one may feel about him nowadays--proves himself a strong leading man.) 

Peter Weir is far more interested in the social message of his film, thus making Linda Hunt’s character Billy the real heart—and conscience—of the movie. But Weir’s film taps into a genuine compassion, rather than a shallow kind of self-serving “awareness." The movie rings true and is very thoughtfully made, so the slightly under-developed (or maybe it's just unsatisfying) romance between the two Westerners actually fits; Weir gives a healthy examination of the Western presence in Asia (just as E.M. Forster did in his effective novel A Passage to India), and in a way, the Hollywood romance aspect of the film deflates the idea that Westerners will come and save Asia from themselves. The film isn’t that far off from Richard Lester’s Cuba, which pitted Sean Connery and Brooke Adams against the competing Castro and Batista regimes during the 1959 revolution in Havana. The Year of Living Dangerously is definitely worth seeing. (And it’s a fabulous title.) With Michael Murphy, Bill Kerr, Noel Ferrier, Bembol Roco, and Paul Sonkkila. The terrific, effective music score is by Maurice Jarre. Filmed mostly in the Philippines.

The Last American Virgin

The Last American Virgin (1982) is about 30 minutes of charm and an hour of filler. When the movie began, with an attractive wide shot of Los Angeles, I thought maybe it would be a totally enjoyable experience. And the prologue, in which three horned-up high school boys lure three girls to one of the boys' houses for a little make-out session, was well-staged and amusing. But when the story gets going, you find there isn't much to it. Gary (Lawrence Monoson) is in love from a far (with Diane Franklin), but before he can make a move, his best friend Rick (Steve Antin) snags her. For a while, the hijinks of the adolescent boys are funny, but then the movie gets serious, and sinks like a stone. Diane Franklin's character is pregnant, Rick is the father and unwilling to do the right thing, and Gary steps in to save the day: he'll pay for an abortion and maybe Diane Franklin will fall in love with him, you know, as a thank you. In fact, the movie completely shifts it tone in the last half-hour into a self-serious teen pregnancy drama. You don't see that coming. I guess it's good that movies made for a young audience are trying to address serious topics, but I kept wanting something fluffy, like Valley Girl. And there's a hugely distracting barrage of songs (no actual music score was provided) that is fun at first (Blondie, Devo, The Cars? Amazing bands!) But eventually it becomes a device, as though the movie can only express its feelings via music, because the songs sync up with how we're supposed to feel about each given situation. If a movie relies on music for feeling, you have to wonder if there's nothing authentic or interesting to feel in the first place. With Joe Rubbo, Louisa Moritz, Brian Peck, and Kimmy Robertson. Written and directed by Boaz Davidson.

Victor Victoria

"A woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?" Julie Andrews asks Robert Preston in Victor Victoria (1982), a gender-bending musical comedy--set in Paris in 1934--from director Blake Edwards that desperately wants to be "with it." The trouble is, Julie Andrews is far too wholesome to ever convince as a woman posing as a man-turned-female impersonator. When she auditions for a gig at the beginning of the movie--as a woman, doing opera--she's turned away after being told she's not naughty enough. If ever a movie contained a self-fulfilling prophesy, this is it.

Of course, it has some things going for it: there are laughs, some of them slapstick numbers that may be yet another sign of the director's desperation: in case you're not held by the film's plot and its faux gaudiness, you might be amused by people bashing each other over the head with blunt objects. There is one marvelous number, "Le Jazz Hot," which features Julie's voice well. And there's Robert Preston, her gay assistant who hatches the female impersonator idea in the first place. He's energetic where everyone else seems exhausted.

James Garner plays the love interest, a very masculine night club owner from Chicago who's scoping out the Paris nightclub acts with the hope of finding one that will sell. He falls for Julie during the act, before realizing she's a man (allegedly), and then spends the rest of the film feeling uptight about his masculinity. He's not particularly believable as either a night club owner who attends risque shows or a love interest for Julie Andrews.

There are some preachy values at work in Victor Victoria that make the film rather complacent. After Julie seduces James, she gives him lectures on women's lib and gender roles that feel too self-proud. Are we supposed to reward the movie for being a champion of civil liberties? (Then again, there were quite a few "message" comedies from the late 70s and early 80s that decided at some point to look straight into the camera and preach, and most of them were nominated for Academy Awards.)

Garner's girlfriend, a ditzy blonde with a shrill voice (she reminds you of Jean Hagen from Singin' in the Rain), is played by Lesley Ann Warren. With Alex Karras, John Rhys-Davies, and Malcolm Jamieson. 133 min. ★★

Eating Raoul

In Eating Raoul (1982), a couple of squares named Paul and Mary Bland (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) are desperately trying to improve their circumstances in life. He's a wine merchant and she's a nutritionist, but they've got their eyes on a house where they can open up their very own restaurant, Paul and Mary's Country Kitchen. They're so square they sleep in separate beds, and the 1950's style decor in their Los Angeles apartment suggests that they're displaced persons, stuck in the wrong decade.

Paul and Mary hit on an idea (no pun intended) one evening after a sex maniac storms into their apartment and Paul accidentally kills him with a frying pan. What if they lured swingers into their home with salacious personal adds? They could collect the money and dispose of a pervert all in one night. Pretty soon they're "bopping perverts" left and right, and keeping the cash their victims have on them, disposing of the bodies in the apartment trash compactor. But a suave young thing named Raoul (Robert Beltran) soon enters their lives (he's a professional thief with all kinds of criminal connections). Raoul is everything Paul is not, and Mary finds herself unexpectedly turned on by him. They agree to let him go into business with them (he sells the bodies and also makes off with the victims' cars, selling them for cash), but there's tension between Raoul and Paul, who's threatened by Raoul's swarthy manliness.

Eating Raoul is a thinly conceived black comedy, but it's got a certain charming weirdness to it that might come off as entertaining, depending on the viewer's tastes. It's not a particularly well-made movie. Bartel, who also directed and co-wrote the film (sharing a screenwriting credit with Robert Blackburn), doesn't have a knack for setting up scenes, and the film's low budget surely proved a limitation. But what it lacks in panache and slick filmmaking, it tends to make up for in weirdness. This is people-watching turned into a film. Bartel does have a knack for letting weird characters develop funny little vignettes. (There's one particularly funny scenario in which Mary plays the blonde prisoner of a Nazi general.)

This movie is, like a John Waters film, in love with bad taste. Moreover, it reveals the hypocrisy of conventional middle class values in a way that doesn't divorce its main characters from their likability. Paul and Mary are so out of sync with the rest of the world, and so matter-of-fact about what they're doing, that it's hard not to like them. Mary Woronov has a few weak moments: her voice is perfect for normal talking, but when she's trying to act threatened, it gets shrill and loses all conviction. She's much better when she's in control than when she's playing a victim. She's a commanding presence at times, and she knows how to play lines deadpan. Bartel taps into this cult movie icon's sexy comic abilities, and she and he--in addition to Raoul--make an endearingly oddball team.

With Edie McClurg, Ed Begley, Jr., Susan Saiger, and Buck Henry. 82 min. ★★★

Tootsie

Dustin Hoffman in drag looks like Jane Fonda in Nine to Five crossed with the homicidal tranny in Dressed to Kill. Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, a dedicated actor who gives good advice to his students (he teaches acting class to supplement his income) but fails to implement it in his own life. Michael's a has-been actor, perpetually ignored at auditions because he's too old or to young or too short or just generally "not the right fit." He waits tables while awaiting the next big part, and scolds his students for not trying to make work for themselves. (That's the one bit of advice Michael tries to follow: he's raising money to self-produce his buddy's play.) But nothing works, and even Michael's agent seems oppositional toward his career. So, in a moment of audacious desperation, he makes himself over as a woman (named Dorothy Michaels) and wins a big part on a daytime soap opera, as a gutsy hospital manager named Emily Kimberly.

The first half of the movie is just about the most inspired comedy material to come out of the 80s. That's probably because there's so much interplay between Hoffman and Bill Murray, his roommate, and Teri Garr, Michael's long-time friend and more recently, his lover. The moment you see Bill Murray you start laughing, because he has a goofy charm to him that doesn't require him to say any words. He's just naturally funny with his half-blitzed stare, as though he were possibly stoned, or possibly figuring out solutions to every problem in modern society, or both. But in some kind of alternate universe where he's content to keep it all to himself. And Teri Garr projects a marvelous frenetic energy to her role as a neurotic actress who's too self-conscious to make it past the first audition. She really comes alive, and she and Murray and Hoffman have a loose, fun chemistry together.

But the second half of the movie feels too commercial, too self-satisfied. It's a recurring problem for the director, Sydney Pollack, who also appears as Michael's agent. The year before, Pollack directed Absence of Malice, which was a proficient newspaper drama, but like Tootsie, it wasn't forceful or exciting enough to rise about its banal cleverness. Pollack seems to be the most laid-back director in recent memory (he certainly projects a likable calm as an actor, even when he's exasperated by Michael's flights of temper and petty complaints about show-business). I suppose one could take for granted that Dustin Hoffman in drag is enough force to sustain a comedy all by itself, but when it's given the 80's commercial treatment, it starts to lag. In particular, the part where Michael, as Dorothy, accompanies his co-star, Julie (Jessica Lange), to her father's house in upstate New York for the weekend. Michael lets slip his attraction for Julie, who naturally thinks that he is (as Dorothy) a lesbian. Meanwhile, Dorothy's father (Charles Durning) develops the hots for Dorothy and eventually asks her to marry him. It sounds wacky and screwball-comedyish, but in the hands of Pollack, it all seems just a notch about the melodramatic soap opera that the characters appear in. Perhaps he's trying to reign in the insanity. It's safer, more controlled, but the avoidance of risk-taking takes the edge off the comedy, and it starts to resemble a banal sitcom.

The actors really do to pull this thing off. They are, in the end, enough to make Tootsie a fun and often laugh-out-loud funny movie. It's got a lot of clever lines and a to-die-for supporting cast, which also includes Dabney Coleman as the soap's director, George Gaynes, Geena Davis, Doris Belack, and Lynne Thigpen. And above all, Tootsie is a movie about actors and acting, and more than most movies, it gives the profession its due, not only speaking to the soul-crushing rejection that so many actors face, but the endless dedication many of them put in. It also makes fun of actors, and turns the profession on its head, which keeps Tootsie from seeming like a proprietor of a bunch of self-congratulatory martyrs. And let's not forget how much fun gender confusion really is. It's an eternal source of great farce, from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Mrs. Doubtfire. (Even when films like Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire don't sustain themselves to the end, there are still pleasures to be had, like the wonderful comic performances we get from them.) 1982.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

One of the few remaining mysteries in filmdom is that rare miracle when a good or a great movie doesn't get trashed by a franchise of sequels and reboots and remakes and TV show spin-offs. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is in the company of a very few movies that were important pop culture phenomenons, box office hits, and stand-alone films. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of being Steven Spielberg, presumably one of the three or four directors in Hollywood who can do just about anything he wants. He's got enough of a financial track record to be trusted by the studio execs. Ironically, of course, this is the kind of freedom that tends to ruin a director's career. Indeed, Spielberg's best work was largely behind him with the release of E.T. Go back and watch Jaws (1975) and even before that, The Sugarland Express (1974) (his feature film debut, if you don't count the made-for-television Duel), and you'll see a fresher, more interesting body of work than the stuff in War Horse and his remake of The War of the Worlds.

I often hear people malign E.T., as though it's their least favorite Spielberg movie. I think they're missing something really marvelous. It's not got all the bells and whistles of a Jurassic Park or a Raiders of the Lost Ark or a whatever-else you want to compare it to. This movie is primarily a brief return to childhood fantasies, to the time when things like alien men visiting earth seemed real and wonderful. I think too that E.T. has a remarkable ability to conjure up the memories of one's own specific childhood, whether it had anything to do with aliens or not. There's a looming sense of tragedy, because it's all so ephemeral, but also a bursting feeling of gratitude that you get to relive something that's already difficult to put into words. Our childhoods are best understood through images in our heads, and certain smells and sounds--often experienced in movies--that provide little jolts of memory, triggered unexpectedly by seemingly random occurrences, and never predictably so. They're always so delightfully unmanipulated by us. We struggle to force memories, but when a movie like E.T. comes along, they seem to bubble up to the surface of our consciousness, overflowing for a moment.

This is the experience I had while watching E.T. for probably the third time in my life. I remember watching it in high school one afternoon when I was home from school, and I remember being emotionally affected by it then, too. (I don't remember the very first time I saw E.T., but it was long enough ago that the second viewing was pretty fresh. I couldn't even remember whether or not E.T. survived the movie.)

The young cast is remarkable considering what's demanded of them. And yet they exude an easy, natural likability that feels unforced. Henry Thomas plays the boy Elliott, who discovers E.T. in his suburban California backyard. Robert MacNaughton plays his older brother Michael (he and Jesse Eisenberg bear a striking resemblance to each other), and young Drew Barrymore is the five-year-old sister Gertie. Their mom is played by Dee Wallace, who was born to play somebody's mother in just about every noteworthy film she's starred in. She's on the periphery of this movie's story, because the world of the adults is portrayed as from the outside looking in. But she's not painted as a grump trying to rain on the kids' parade. She's just too busy trying to keep the household in shape. (Their dad has run off to Mexico with another woman. It's worth noting that Spielberg tried to go for a more honest look at the American family, and to have overlooked the rising divorce rate would have been a pointed mark of ignorance, or perhaps just wishful thinking.)

With Peter Coyote as one of the scientists who intrude upon the children's world. (He's reliving some childhood dreams through Elliott, though, and so he's not there to turn E.T. into a lab experiment.) The adults aren't portrayed as pure evil or corrupt, necessarily. They're trying to help E.T., who can't survive in our atmosphere. And yet, there's a striking visual difference between the adults and the children. The children aren't afraid to approach E.T. as they are, but the grown-ups are adorned in all kinds of outer-spacey looking garb, and they cocoon the house with a plastic makeshift tent, presumably to avoid tainting their would-be science experiment, E.T. You get a sense of the emotional difference between adults and children, too, as it's played out in their surroundings: the homey, imaginative environment of the house, which is full of toys and constant reminders that children exist within it, is transformed into something cold, sterile, and utterly scientific.

C. Thomas Howell also appears, billed as Tom Howell, playing one of Michael's buddies. E.T. was voiced partly by actress Debra Winger. The script is by Melissa Mathison. John Williams composed the score. (You can hear a lot of similarities between it and his Star Wars score, but there are also moments that remind you of the music he composed for Brian De Palma's weird thriller The Fury.)

Friday the 13th Part 3

The good thing about watching any of the Friday the 13th films is that you can clean your house while the movie's on, come back to the movie intermittently, and not feel like you've missed anything crucial.

In Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), which was originally released in 3-D, the name of the game is delayed gratification. The writers (Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson), apparently feeling no obligation to use their imaginations, decided instead to protract every murder sequence to the point of insufferable tedium. Like Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), this one begins with footage from its predecessor, just in case we had absolutely no idea what was going on. Afterwards, the movie opens with the butchering of a cartoonish slob and his nagging wife. Not only are these unappealing, uninteresting characters, but we are forced to spend an unbearable ten minutes (which seem much longer) watching them wander around their dilapidated house and its attached grocery store as Jason waits for the right moment (and means) for a gruesome double-slaying.

Finally, the real story starts, but by then you feel impatient and annoyed, and the bad acting and bad dialogue of the group of adolescents en route to Crystal Lake for a nice long weekend fails to alleviate either of these sentiments.

What is always so disappointing about this series is its lack of imagination and moreover its refusal to be fun. Horror movies must have both of these ingredients to be successful, and for some reason no one ever felt them necessary to the success of the Friday films. Everything about this movie cinematically is a tease. The cinematographer (Gerald Feil, who worked on several other slasher films), relies on his knowledge of previous horror movies: lots of shots from the killer's point-of-view, lots of long pans toward the intended victims, lots of false alarms. But there's no suspense. No one has bothered to pull us into this story because no one cares about there being a story. And I suppose the only reason people see these movies is because they know what they're getting.

It would have been financially imprudent to offer up something new when it had worked, financially, twice before. This also explains why the acting is so bad. Amy Steel, the heroine of Friday the 13th Part 2, was at least a passable lead, and far more convincing than Dana Kimmell, our current heroine, or Adrienne King, the survivor of the first Friday. The supporting cast is mostly equally embarrassing, although the playful banter between one of the couples is occasionally funny (mostly it's forced and idiotic). Steve Miner, who directed the previous entry, must have run out of ideas somewhere before finishing Part 2, because Part 3 makes the others look better by comparison.

The ideas Miner and the writers do try fall flat because they haven't been thought through enough. They're clumsily constructed imitations of scenes from better movies. It's as though the filmmakers have seen the best films about young people from this era (Breaking Away, The Warriors, Rock 'n Roll High School, etc) and tried to conjure up a fraction of their charm or passion. One example is the scene where a motorcycle "gang" accosts two of the adolescents at a grocery store. The female biker initiates the conflict by snatching their money, and the two male bikers physically threaten the boy, whose spine is made of jelly, making him an easy target. When he and his friend get back to their car, he accidentally backs over the motorcycles, inciting an unintentionally comical outburst of rage from one of the gang members. The scene has no credibility. The bikers are thugs for no other reason than to stir up a little manufactured conflict. (This scene is also a poorly contrived way to further the body count, because you know the bikers are going to get it when they pursue the teens back to the lake.) The kids feel heroic for backing over the bikes, and this little scene is supposed to win us over. Even if it had worked, it would have been a brief hiatus from this movie's 90-minute-long career of boring its audience to death.

The bad performances would be funny if this movie were going for a campy feel, but because the movie takes itself so seriously, the acting registers as simply uninteresting. I think dullness is the real offense of these movies, much more than their objectification of people as bodies to be slaughtered. How can boredom be so successful at the box office?

Betsy Palmer and Amy Steel appear in footage from the previous film. With Paul Kratka, Tracie Savage, Jeffrey Rogers and Richard Brooker as Jason.