"Risky Business" Still Feels Daring, and Relevant.

Nearly 35 years later, Risky Business seems hardly to have aged at all. It was the 80s’ answer to The Graduate, a youth comedy having an existential crisis, and featuring an emerging star, Tom Cruise, who even resembles Dustin Hoffman, especially when he sports a pair of dark sunglasses atop his hawkish nose. But there’s a difference between the actors, too: Hoffman has a subdued quality that he occasionally overcomes; Cruise is manic, perpetually revved up, which makes his character, the careful, obedient Joel Goodson, all the more inviting: When his parents go away for a week, Joel turns on the stereo and struts around the living room in his skivvies to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”; it’s one of the sexiest moments in the movie, not to mention an iconic scene for the 80s.

Surely this was the moment when audiences knew a star had arrived. And say what you want about Tom Cruise (he’s taken a good bit of unfair shellacking from fans and critics for a long time): the man has star power. And he's totally believable. You have to stretch your imagination ever so slightly to believe that Dustin Hoffman’s in heat for Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, but we can practically feel Tom Cruise’s racing pulse when he encounters Lana, the upscale call girl who turns his life upside down.

When Lana, played by the startling, icy-tender Rebecca de Mornay, enters the Goodson residence (a stately WASP-nest in suburban Chicago), it’s like a fever dream, practically lifted from a horror movie, with an eerie wind blowing the French Doors open, and leaves rustling and spilling into the house, and Joel, vulnerable yet expectant, lying on the couch, waiting for his unknown lover to come and ravish him. (Not before he’s visited by a male escort in women’s clothes, in a surprisingly hip and amusing scene.)

Like Cruise, Rebecca de Mornay was unknown at the time Risky Business premiered, but her performance shapes the role into something meaningful and magnetic. She’s not a floozy. De Mornay gives Lana a cool, powerful moxie that is both a turn-on and a foil for Joel Goodson, the boy with too many desires and not enough outlets for them. He’s goaded by his buddy Miles (80s teen comedy favorite Curtis Armstrong, of Revenge of the Nerds), who gives Joel a big speech about letting go, saying, “what the fuck” every once-in-a-while. When Joel finally heeds these words, disaster after disaster unfolds: Lana purloins his mother’s priceless glass egg (a ridiculous accoutrement that sits on the living room mantel); Joel sinks his dad’s porsche into Lake Michigan; and, seeing an ideal market in Joel’s steamed-up high school buddies, Lana turns the Goodson house into a makeshift bordello. Risky Business has a deliciously complex view of American values, which are inherently hypocritical when it comes to sex: Joel imagines the police encircling his house because he’s got a girl in his bed; it’s sexual policing, and he’s been caught red-handed. (The neon sign burning over his window casts an X-rated hue over the night scenes in Joel’s bedroom.)

Risky Business has been advertised as a comedy for far too long, with that famous Tom Cruise underwear-dance suggesting a lightweight tone akin to Sixteen Candles. Not that I have anything against comedy, but Risky Business defies genre-labeling, and so to expect this movie to be Porky's, for instance, is to invite disappointment. Of course, the movie is funny at times (and its sensibility is often comical), but director Paul Brickman’s vision is darker and more complex. Unlike Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a movie that reinforces the underside of capitalism (because Ferris is a spoiled upper-middle-class kid with no conscience who gets everything he wants), Risky Business has a deep discomfort with the capitalistic age of the 80s, and Joel becomes a vehicle for that discomfort.

Joel’s teenage angst is transmuted into a deeper, richer kind of angst, one that will probably stay with him past his youth. He's afraid of the future, afraid of making a mistake, and it's pretty clear that in Joel's world, one slip-up could destroy everything else. If many of those lighter 80s comedies are beloved classics in their own right, Risky Business stands apart from them in that it’s more complicated and adult in its sensibility, and as such it asks more troubling questions, without pandering to its audience like The Breakfast Club, which concludes that teenagers are right about everything. Risky Business exposes the hypocrisy of adults without congratulating the adolescents for their purity: Most of them are just as corrupt, as we see in the scene when Joel’s friends announce their plans to “make a lot of money,” and he’s struck by their brazen materialism.

But that tug-of-war between making money and being happy–and making a contribution to the world–rumbles in Joel’s mind too. He’s terrified of ruining his life, of not getting into Princeton and making a good living, but he’s also terrified of becoming his parents. And Paul Brickman does not provide easy answers. If one of the marks of a great movie is its lingering effect on us, Risky Business may in fact be a great movie. This movie transfixes us, and we wonder about the characters. What became of them? What did they accomplish? Did they end up together or apart?

The absurd (and funny) ending (another iconic moment) when Joel must buy back all the furniture from his house, which has been stolen by a vengeful pimp named Guido (Joe Pantoliano), adds to the film's otherworldly, out-of-body-experience vibe. And Brickman uses Tom Cruise’s narration, conveying a cynical hopefulness, and Tangerine Dream’s great neon waterfall of a score, to great effect. It's hard not to fall under the spell of this movie, and so we too are walking around in a dreamlike state, just like Joel. It's like a John Hughes teen comedy mixed with a Michael Mann thriller with a little Buñuel surrealism thrown in for good measure. Risky Business has the makings of great pop cinema: it is distinctly American, it is cool and sexy and bold, and it pushes us, making us feel things we don’t expect, bending genres, taking unfamiliar turns down dark alleys, and all the while, we're confident that this movie knows exactly what it's up to.

The Right Stuff

As three-hour-long epics go, The Right Stuff (1983) is a pretty good one, bolstered by the humanized performances of a slew of talented actors portraying the men and women involved in America's race against the Russians to get outer space. The film--which was written and directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling book--finds a surprising balance in a story so charged with cultish nationalism. I've never been particularly interested in planes or pilots, and when I lived in Orlando, was always blasé about the goings-on at NASA just forty-five minutes away at Cape Canaveral. When people would talk excitedly about the latest rocket launch, I felt bored. This film shows exactly how exciting and meaningful it was to be a part of the space race.

As a director, Kaufman is one of the best to come out of the 70s, and The Right Stuff should probably have been his piéce de résistance, except that it wasn't successful at the box office, barely breaking even (or not) depending on which budget calculation you go with. (It was made for around 20 million, and grossed around 20 million.) Kaufman had already established himself as a fine director with the impressive 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Right Stuff isn't as canny as that film, but it's certainly as well-made and well-acted, and tries very hard to show us the many perspectives at play during this little chunk of big history. And it has a sense of humor. The grandiosity that Kaufman puts on the screen is always accompanied by a wink.

The film begins in 1947 at a military air base in the California desert, where Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) determines to break the "sound barrier," a phrase that essentially meant doom for an aircraft once it reached a certain altitude. Yeager's accomplishment (spoiler alert: he breaks it) sets in motion the events of the film which take place into the 1960s when the seven "chosen" astronauts make their various orbits into space. One of Kaufman's most adept accomplishments as director is his seamless merging of actual documentary footage of news coverage with fictionalized footage of the actors. In that sense, The Right Stuff often feels like a plucky documentary about the space age. It would have been propaganda in the hands of a less literate filmmaker. 

One of Kaufman's best instincts as director is to consider the point-of-view of the pilot's wives. On one hand, this story is every bit a tale of male achievement in a very traditional power structure, but Kaufman has a sense of realism--not to mention compassion--for the "women behind the men." Is the film accurate in its portrayal of the men and their wives? That isn't for me to say. But as a piece of narrative, The Right Stuff succeeds in multitudinous ways at being both honest and insightful about marital relations in the military and the American obsession with a kind of mythologized machismo. What's so genius is that the film mixes its criticism with its reverence in a way that feels genuine. And yet it's always sure-footed. Kaufman wants to give us a ra-ra American epic, but he wants us to think about it too, and layers his criticisms in subtle ways that allow us to come across them on our own. Otherwise it would be preachy or condescending.

As John Glenn, Ed Harris--plucked from cameo roles and TV by George Romero in the 1981 knights-on-motorcycles indie film Knightriders--shows what he's made of as an actor here. Harris is the kind of all-American actor who's very easy to root for, and his performance as Glenn paints him as a thoughtful man who took very seriously his unexpected new role as a public figure. The equally fine supporting cast includes: Dennis Quaid, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Charles Frank (as Scott Carpenter), David Clennon, and Donald Moffat (as Lyndon Johnson).

The Dead Zone

Rarely do horror movies allow for such an affecting character to come to life as in The Dead Zone (1983), which was directed by David Cronenberg and scripted by Jeffrey Boam, who adapted Stephen King's novel. The movie itself is an episodic tale of an English teacher named Johnny Smith whose near fatal car crash leaves him in a coma for five years. When Johnny finally awakens, he's a changed man, blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see people's fates by the slightest physical contact.

Johnny is played by Christopher Walken, and he's already sort of grim looking before the accident: he reads Poe to his students and you can tell he's far more interested than they are, and then he sends them off with a reading assignment: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Johnny is a sort of modern-day Ichabod Crane. Walken is a tall, memorably distant looking actor. He's always sort of brooding but with a mixture of hopefulness in his vision. He turns this film, which might otherwise have been a somewhat calculated and commercial thriller (particularly for Cronenberg: this is his most mainstream movie that I've seen), into a powerful vehicle for his acting out the teacher's haunted existence. He saves lives but becomes something of a parlor trick, and he wrestles with God, especially when his fiance (Brooke Adams) abandons him and marries someone else during the five-year-coma.

The most interesting story thread--and the one that closes out the movie--involves Charlie Sheen as a smug politician who we understand will one day become a nuke-happy dictator unless Johnny acts quickly. Thus the movie gets to ponder the implications of interfering with human history: Johnny asks his doctor, Would you go back in time and kill Hitler if you could?

The movie is hampered by its humorlessness. It's grim throughout, and the surroundings--New England in Winter (although the film was shot in Cronenberg's native Ontario)--don't help. But it's an effective thriller, punctuated by a series of well-made sequences featuring Johnny's skills (including one where he assists the chief of police in the investigation of a serial killer).

With Tom Skerrit, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Nicholas Campbell, Sean Sullivan, and Jackie Burroughs. 103 min. ★★★

Valley Girl

Valley Girl (1983) is sort of a critique of 80's teenage materialism and the rigid social hierarchy that exists in high schools. It's also a romantic comedy about two people from different social spheres. But more than anything, Valley Girl is a leisurely stroll through a particular time and place, the Valley circa 1982, where well-to-do teenage girls spend their afternoons and weekends racking up debt on their parents' credit cards at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, speaking in a kind of other-worldly dialect that's equal parts ridiculous and amusing. 

The main "Valley Girl" is played by Deborah Foreman, who's a charming actress but whose character, Julie, is only slightly less vapid than the rest of her superficial girlfriends. Julie is dating the typical jock-douche bag, Tommy (Michael Bowen, who seems made for parts like this), but is tired of the way he treats her. So when she sees Randy (Nicolas Cage), who's more punk than preppie, crashing one of her friends' parties, she decides to pursue a romantic relationship with him, even though he's "different." Randy takes Julie outside the Valley and exposes her to different sub-cultures and this all serves as an eye-opening experience for her, but she's pressured by her friends to dump him because dating an outsider will not do.

It's hard to feel very invested in Julie's plight, and while Nicolas Cage, whose puppy dog face is the primary reason for his charm, is believable as the alluring outcast-lover, he's also a bit obsessive. (On the other hand, he's genuinely devoted to Julie where Tommy is interested in having a girlfriend for his own selfish reasons.) Randy's plan to win Julie back fails until the end when he crashes the prom and punches out Tommy. Immediately, Julie goes back to him. There was never much of a strong case for staying with Tommy, anyway. However, Valley Girl doesn't have enough good ideas in its script to make its plot come together. It all just sort of lies there and lumbers along. There are funny bits thrown in--typical of director Martha Coolidge's films--and viewers will appreciate Valley Girl more for its bubblegum flavor than its staying power. It's a fun movie but it never manages to rise about the valley girl shallowness it half-heartedly seeks to make fun of. 

There's an amusing sub-plot involving one of Julie's friends, Suzi (Michelle Meyrink), who's vying for the attention of a boy named Skip (David Ensor), but must compete with her beautiful young stepmom. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Daily, Cameron Dye, Heidi Holicker, Lee Purcell, Joyce Hyser, and Colleen Camp and Frederic Forrest as Julie's ex-hippy parents. Written by Wayne Crawford and Andrew Lane. 99 min. ★★½

Videodrome

In Videodrome (1983), the president of a Toronto-based TV station (James Woods), known for his risque programming tastes, becomes the target/victim/subject of a new and ominous "program" known as "Videodrome." He's lured into a series of disturbing depictions of torture (all recorded onto lovely, now nostalgia-inducing video cassettes, which are so much more interesting in appearance than discs anyway), but he soon finds that the project known as "Videodrome" has far more political aspirations than supplying voyeuristic viewing pleasure.

Writer-director David Cronenberg explores the philosophical underpinnings of television, as well as the evolution of mankind and technology, or rather, the merging of those two once distinct forms as one thing. Videodrome is astonishingly relevant thirty years later in a culture where our mobile devices seem like technological extensions of our bodies, allowing us to live in a state of perpetual virtual "connectivity". James Woods becomes addicted to "Videodrome," and experiences hallucinations that blur the real and the unreal, and the movie makes it clear that the line between them was blurry to begin with, and was perhaps even imaginary all along; certainly that line has become irrelevant to the world of "Videodrome," and it's increasing less distinct to us today.

While some of the ideas in Videodrome don't pan out, and the film runs out of steam in the final third, it's nevertheless a fascinating, prescient movie, full of the freaky weirdness you would expect from Cronenberg. It was more enjoyable than I thought it would be, probably because of the ideas it poses. Of all the horror masters, Cronenberg has always been the most intellectual, and even when his films are strange or ludicrous or oblique (and many of them are all three, including this one at times), they're equally mesmerizing and curious and, I think, relevant.

With Debbie Harry as Nicky, a sex-obsessed radio psychologist, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Lynne Gorman, and Julie Khaner. ★★½