Do the Right Thing

In Do the Right Thing (1989), writer-director-star Spike Lee uncorks enough rage for five movies. It's about racial tensions in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn boiling over on a hot summer day. The local deejay (Samuel L. Jackson) proclaims that it's the hottest day of the year, and the relentless, sticky heat seems to bring out the inner-rage of every member of the neighborhood, except for a status-quo-loving Uncle Tom type (Ossie Davis) who fancies himself the moral compass of the local black community, but whom the rest of the community laughs at, when they aren't ignoring him completely.

Spike Lee plays Mookie, a pizza delivery boy whose boss Sal (Danny Aiello) is stubbornly proud of his Italian heritage. Giancarlo Esposito plays Buggin' Out, a ranting patron of the pizzeria who harps on the fact that Sal only decorates his restaurant with pictures of famous Italians. He argues that since Sal's clientele is predominantly black, Sal should put a few prominent black people on the walls too. There's also a guy named Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), who wanders around the neighborhood with a boom box on his shoulder that plays Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" on a loop. Radio Raheem seems to be incapable of expressing his rage except in disturbing the peace with his loud music. Mookie, meanwhile, is always dawdling during his delivery runs, sometimes visiting his girlfriend for a little T&A. If these sound like stereotypes, well, that's because they are.

I found much of the movie grating: Lee seems to have one way of expressing anger, which is by having his characters shout at each other, often incoherently. And while there is one scene in which this technique is effective (where the men are shouting amidst Raheem's boom box, which he turns up louder and louder, escalating the tension), much of it feels too repetitive, too chaotic, and too unappealing. Perhaps it's a realistic depiction of life in the city. (I doubt it.) But realism isn't the only thing that matters in narrative, and the scenes of people screaming their heads off distance us from the characters and the film.

And yet Do the Right Thing is undeniably powerful. If ever a movie tapped into the pure emotion of racism, this is it. The film is all jagged angles, loud noises, jarring music, and intense people invading your space, forcing you to notice them. It has a kind of red-hot brashness to it, and this Spike Lee cultivates with masterful precision and intensity. He may not offer much in the way of solutions (even the ending, with conflicting quotes by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, fails to suggest a way around mindless in-fighting between races), but in terms of showing us just how ridiculous these conflicts can be, he succeeds. It's a shame that he had to do so by relying on so many stereotypes. Nobody in Do the Right Thing feels like a well-realized character. They're cartoonishly violent and excitable and stabby. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of the stereotypical loud black lady in the theater: it doesn't show us why thinking in stereotypes is flat-out wrong. It doesn't give us much of a reason to move beyond the limitations of such one-dimensional characters. (There is a kind of sweet exchange between Lee and Aiello at the end that feels a little more complex, but Lee doesn't do much with it. He uses it to sweeten what may already be too sour to begin with.)

Batman

Like Superman, Batman (1989) suffers a little because its villain is more dynamic than its hero. But director Tim Burton masterfully builds up the atmosphere in this imaginative and smashing piece of entertainment. Burton's Batman represents a sort of happy medium for me: it's not as campy as the 1966 Adam West film, and it's not as humorless as Christopher Nolan's Batman films. It's got both the camp and the seriousness in proportion.

Michael Keaton plays Bruce Wayne/Batman, and it's interesting to see such reserve from the actor who played Beetle Juice in Burton's previous film. Keaton seems to represent both ends of the spectrum with these two performances. As Beetle Juice, he was zany and utterly off-kilter (yet controlled). As Batman, he's perhaps a bit underwhelming. But he gives Bruce Wayne a certain amused quality when he interacts with journalists and police, as if he's having a good joke--not so much at their expense as without their knowing about it.

Jack Nicholson might be too easily praised for his work in Batman. We all know he's good at playing a psychopath, and in particular he plays characters who go insane but were never believably sane to begin with (e.g. The Shining). Still, it's hard not to be pleased with his performance as the gleefully maniacal Joker. He gets almost all of the funny lines in the script (by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren), and he gets the flashiest clothes. He's at his best when he's doing a clownish little dance as he shoots crime boss Jack Palance (for revenge), or when he makes some ridiculous joke and you can see his own face register the fun he's having.

Kim Basinger plays Vicki Vale. She's not a particularly strong actress, but viewing the film this time around, I was struck by the fact that her weakest moments occur when she has a crummy piece of dialogue to deliver, such as "I just have to know if we're gonna try to love each other." I don't think anyone shy of Bette Davis could make much out of that kind of writing, so it's not fair to blame Basinger entirely. With Michael Gough as Alfred, Tracey Walter, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, and Jerry Hall. The vibrant, memorable score was composed by Danny Elfman. 126 min. ★★★

Vampire's Kiss

Vampire's Kiss (1989) deserves its own wing in the bad horror movie hall of fame. Nicolas Cage, perhaps in a moment of panic after the success of Moonstruck (1987), delivers a chaotic performance that is a mixture of hammy amateurism and overwrought method-acting. The end result is still bad, enthusiastically wretched. He plays a yuppie who think he's becoming a vampire after he meets a mysterious woman at a night club and takes her home with him. He then proceeds to terrorize his poor, pathetic secretary, Maria Conchita Alonso. It occasionally reminds you of George Romero's eerie vampire film Martin (1978), although that movie was far more subtle and interesting. Nonetheless, this may be the most important work of Nicolas Cage's career.

Directed by Robert Bierman. Written by Joseph Minion. With Elizabeth Ashley as Cage's shrink, Jennifer Beals, Kasi Lemmons, Bob Lujan. John Michael Higgins and David Hyde Pierce can be seen briefly in crowd scenes.

Weekend at Bernie's

Sitcoms work because the contrived circumstances in which the shallow characters find themselves take only 25 minutes to be worked out. Most sitcoms are garbage, and don't resonate with the audience or linger in their consciousness (I'll single out a few exceptions: Seinfeld, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and 30 Rock, all come to mind as great sitcoms that developed characters you actually cared about or at least loved to hate/laugh at.) The problem with so many movies in the last thirty or so years is that they're just elongated sitcoms (the not good kind of sitcoms): the characters never move beyond the surface level, their motivations are unbelievable or uninteresting; the humor is predictable, and really isn't even funny.

As an audience, we feel nothing for these kinds of movies. They may satisfy some urge for banal entertainment that's been conditioned inside us by studios that want to make as much money as possible on as little quality entertainment as can be managed without alerting the public. There's no investment for the audience. That's the problem of a movie like Weekend at Bernie's (1989), the plot of which is like watching a balloon deflate for 90 minutes instead of 12 seconds. It's about two yuppies working at an insurance firm who are trying to ingratiate themselves with their sleazy boss, Bernie. They discover that someone is trying to defraud the company, but when they share this information with their boss, he decides to have them killed (he was the one perpetrating the fraud, it turns out). Bernie's plan backfires, because he winds up dead at the hands of the mob thugs he's in cahoots with, and the two yuppies are set up as the fall guys. A recipe for madcap hilarity, indeed.

Except, this movie has no charm, there's no moonlight in the soul of this movie. It lacks the opulent glittery magic of a sudsy 1950s comedy, or the fast wit of a 1930s screwball comedy, or the chaotic brilliance of some of the more recent comedies of note, like Bridesmaids. The leads are played by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman. McCarthy has the ability to be likable, but in this movie he's the opportunistic ladder-climbing type: overly obsessed with materialism and getting laid (an ideal yuppie). Silverman is more endearing: his pouty face works for him, and he seems exasperated by yuppie culture but unable to make a move away from it. There's something interesting in that. But then he ruins it by trying to impress a girl (the lovely Catherine Mary Stewart) by misrepresenting himself. That makes this some kind of 1980s film version of Two and a Half Men.

I think the real problem with Weekend at Bernie's is that yuppies aren't all that funny. They're actually kind of pathetic. They'd be tragic if they were more likable. Incidentally, there's a funny episode of Seinfeld where Elaine watches with great agony Weekend at Bernie's II, which apparently makes the first film look like a cinematic gem. With Terry Kiser and Don Calfa. Directed by Ted Kotcheff.

Heathers

In Heathers (1989), Winona Ryder plays Veronica, a member of the most popular, and powerful, clique in her suburban Ohio high school. The other three girls are all named Heather, and one of them in particular, Heather Chandler (played by Kim Walker), rules the social circles of the school with an iron fist. She's an elevated stereotype, a bitchy promzilla with really bad taste in clothes. (I'm not sure how the girls' wardrobes looked good even at the time this movie was made. Oh, the 80s.) Veronica feels torn--she wanted to be popular, but now she's paying the price as a social prisoner, bound by the rules of the Heathers and all their heathering ways. The she meets J.D. (Christian Slater), the new kid in town, who's a cocky rebel with a violent streak. The film is about Veronica's descent into a hellish world of violence and murder--murder made to look like suicide--as she tries to rearrange the social hierarchy of high school.

Heathers wasn't a box office hit, but it has acquired a cult following, probably because of its bizarre story. It explores death and violence and the cruelty of high school in a way I've never seen in the movies, except maybe in Brian De Palma's Carrie (which will be Part Two of this series). The thing that makes Heathers rather distasteful--its unapologetic look at teenagers and violence--is what makes it more truthful than the myriad of teen comedies that portray high school life with a safety line. In most movies in the genre, nothing's ever really as serious as life or death--everything stays on a sitcom level where you know things will be okay in the end. In Heathers, the problem is that you want things to stay the same, but they refuse to. The characters themselves are time bombs, ticking away at a feverish pace.

With the "suicide" of the first Heather, the school becomes a media circus, and the school administration unintentionally elevates the topic of teen suicide to a sort of cult status. It's suddenly "hip" to kill yourself, or something like that. If you think Heathers is trying to glorify all this, you're mistaken. It's showing the stupidity of people who try to gloss over it, who try to patronize the young by acting as though they don't have the power or the will to take their own lives.

Winona Ryder gives a solid lead performance. She plays Veronica as smart, affected, a girl who's aware of her merciless friends and her unhappy existence, but who lacks the nerve to stand up for herself. She finds relief in J.D., who's willing to go there--to express the violence she's been bottling up inside herself for so long. He's letting her do more than live vicariously through him. He's helping her to unearth feelings and desires in herself the existence of which she'd rather deny. And when she looks and sees what she's capable of, she panics.

Heathers is like Dante's Inferno Inferno mixed with Bonnie and Clyde and set in the 1980s. As a black comedy, it's never as funny as you'd like it to be. As a hyper-real portrait of high school life, it captures marvelously the social hierarchies and the shame and deception that occurs between people, and these hierarchies do not start, or end, with adolescence, as the movie is so apt to point out.

It was the first feature directing effort by Michael Lehmann, one which garnered him much acclaim. He's done very little work of note since. And even Heathers, which is not great but has moments of greatness, is itself too muddled and nasty to be fun. Maybe that's my fault for wanting the sitcom level offered by a Sixteen Candles or an Easy A. I think those movies capture the truth of high school to a degree. Heathers takes that truth and turns it inward--you are the vicious social tyrant you despise.

With Shannen Doherty and Lisanne Falk as the two other Heathers, and Penelope Milford, Glenn Shadix, Lance Fenton, and Patrick Layorteaux.