The War of the Roses (1989)

(Another supplement to the Collection. Not a huge oversight, but it was Fox’s big release of the ’89 holiday season, so I figured, why not?)

One thing that doing this blog has afforded me is the ability to evaluate many of these movies in hindsight, in particular the ones that have become classics and which ones have not. Seeing Big again, for example, and Working Girl, I can now understand their endurance and popular appeal. Once in a great while I’ll see a mediocre or flat-out lame selection and wonder, What the hell did people see in that?

And then I’ll see a film, one that I liked at the time and then later couldn’t understand why it hasn’t become a classic, and then realize the reason. Such a film is The War of the Roses, Danny Devito’s second film as director, and third to co-star Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. It’s a black comedy about a marriage gone wrong, terribly wrong, and it sure has its moments of macabre humor and outlandish situations. But the curious thing about it is just how off-putting the whole thing is, as if it’s missing a key element to its wickedness. Sure it’s a black comedy, but it’s certainly not a fun black comedy, the way black comedies ought to be. And that, I think, is what keeps it from its would-be classic status.

Gavin D’Amato (Danny DeVito), a divorce lawyer, tells the story of the Rose couple, Oliver and Barbara, to a prospective client. Oh, things starts off just peachy: they meet-cute at a pastoral locale in Nantucket, have a delightful courtship, marry move into an apartment and have a couple of kids. Oliver is an up-and-coming attorney and a well-respected practice, but he’s a control freak, and doesn’t exactly appreciate his wife’s free-spirited nature, or entrepreneurial inclinations. But no matter; they both have their eyes on a beautiful mansion, and, despite their shaky financial situation, they buy it, moving in right away.

And that’s when the sh*t hits the fan. The kids are now grown up and move out, so the Rose are left alone, with no one to impress or model good behavior. Barbara feels the love has gone out of the marriage; Oliver can’t figure out why. Things get ugly real fast – he starts to destroy her possessions, she his, he accidentally runs over her cat, he destroys his vintage automobile in retaliation. Soon it gets so bad that cohabitation is out of the question, but since they both love the house, clearly more than each other, they find themselves at an impasse. Oliver has the solution; he realizes that according to law, they can legally stay in the same house (they have joint ownership), and so the abode becomes a war zone. When Barbara uses Oliver’s near-death love note, giving up “everything to her,” against him, it becomes the last straw. After verbal and physical fisticuffs, they both wind up dangling from a three-story-high chandelier, crashing down to their death after its cord gives way. Gavin’s client is convinced to go home and settle with his wife amicably.

The War of the Roses is, of course, part of that film subgenre about the unstoppable force and the immovable object – in other words, two bullheaded people, or more, who face off against each other, only to all lose in the end. Several films come to mind – Neighbors, A Simple Plan, Very Bad Things. A few of these films have the characters ultimately coming to their senses and resolving said conflict, but most of them do not, leaving us with the obvious moral that we need to settle our disputes amicably, lest face the inevitable consequences. It’s a risky move – the filmmaker is essentially asking us to spend two hours with essentially unlikeable people, promising that the message at the end will make it all worth it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t.

But The War of the Roses goes beyond this one step – it’s also a love story, and then a love-gone-wrong-story, and that complicates things. Because now we’re invested in a ostensibly happy relationship, only to have the rug pulled out from under us, or I should say, yanked out ruthlessly and thrown at us. That’s another element that makes Roses even riskier, and I don’t think it pays off. We like Douglas and Turner together, and we feel a bit betrayed, particularly when the shenanigans go too far for comfort.

Yes, I know there are successful examples of marital discord – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and its model, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, to name a couple. But in both of those we get character backstory, and a reason for the troubles. And therein lies the problem with Roses: we don’t really know why they split up – just a cursory scene in which Barbara is “dissatisfied.” For that matter, we don’t really know why they fall in love either. Of the two, perhaps Oliver’s begavior is more discernable; he, apparently, does have some feelings for her (in their last breaths, he attempts to touch her, and she brushes him off), so then why is he such a brute to her? Maybe these questions could be better explored in a drama, and indeed many parts of the film are pretty near a drama anyway. But the bottom line is this: by the time we get to the scene where Barbara feeds Oliver’s own dog to him as a pate (not really), we’re amused by the extent to which they despise each other but still have no emotional investment in the characters.

But Devito has a good eye for camera placement (he loves the diopter shot), and his score doesn’t overwhelm the action, as it so often does with dark comedies (e.g. Desperate Housewives). It s certainly a well-made film, and I did appreciate the ending, in which Gavin dissuades a potential client who evidently got the message (his walking out of the office as a window reflection is pitch perfect). But it’s just one of those movies that I wished I liked more, as I love all the talent involved, and love a black comedy as much as the next guy.

But it’s not one of those movies you see all the time on TBS or Channel Z late at night. And it probably shouldn’t be.

Still, watchable enough to get….

Rating:  ***

 

 

The Abyss (Special Edition) (1989)

Another digression from the Fox DVD set roster: this time, a film that surely has attained cult-classic, if not classic, status despite being a box-office bomb when it came out in August of 1989 (small wonder). Its reevaluation is partially due to its reissue in the 90s as a “Special Edition,” which restores about 25 minutes of footage originally cut from its original release; this is the version I am now reviewing.

James Cameron is a director who really knows how to make your pulse race.

And that’s not just an idle compliment. Cameron has directed film after film, for a good 15-year stretch, that pushes the viewer like no filmmaker in recent memory has ever done. He crafts every scene so that they work, in progressive tandem, to fuse action and suspense without ever letting up. Oh sure, there are a few breaks here and there to let you catch your breath, and to do a little perfunctory character developing. But before long, we’re back in the fray, and our sweat has just dried in time for another round of perspiration.

He does this through sheer talent – a innate sense of where precisely to put the camera, how exactly to photograph his kinetics and how to edit it al together for maximum effect. It’s something you take for granted until you see another director try to do it, and either fail at it or do an entirely mediocre job. This pretty much describes every action director who works in current Hollywood.

And another thing – he pumps up his screenplays with as much antagonism as possible. Sure, it’s easy to do that with the Terminator movies – you just have one unstoppable automaton from beginning to end. But with something like Titanic, you need more than just Mother Nature and man’s overzealous folly of engineering, and so Cameron wrote in Cal, Jack’s foe in his quest for Rose’s heart, and for his life once the big tub starts to sink. And now here in The Abyss, he knows that some oil-riggers who find aliens at the bottom of the ocean just isn’t enough; hence, Lt. Coffey, a deranged Navy Seal who provides the monkey wrench for our heroes’ best laid plans.

Cameron is so expert as his adrenalization that he gives us nary a chance to question some of his plot incredulities. For example, why would the military try to go after a live nuclear submarine in a hurricane? And what really are the chances they’d draft a ragtag bunch of oil rig workers to assist the with the operation? And that guy – Lt. Coffey – how likely is it they’d send a psycho like him on a mission that could precipitate a third world war if it were to fail? But you know, you just don’t think about stuff like that in a Cameron movie – somehow he doesn’t give you time to think. And if you do, he throws some dialogue at you that makes you say, “Oh, okay,” so you can prepare for the next crisis.

But in the long run, it’s not really the plot details that fuel your long-term investment in an action film; it’s the characters. And Cameron gives us two of his finest in The Abyss: Virgil Brigman (Ed Harris), the oil riggers’ foreman and Lindsay Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), his estranged wife and designer of the rig (“Deep Core”). Their performances, and chemistry with each other, play a large part in why The Abyss thoroughly deserves to be considered among not only Cameron’s finest works, but of all great sci-fi thrillers.

Now character development is not one of the director’s strong suits. His players, particularly his supporting players, tend suffer from contrivance – and that is indeed the case with The Abyss’s background crew, from the sassy black crewperson to the quirky rat-toting conspiracy theorist. They could easily have been replaced by his crew from Aliens and no one would’ve noticed. And Cameron’s tin-ear for dialogue induced more than groan from me, particularly in the first hour.

But Cameron casts well – he gets real actors to star, and they tend to be my favorites. (Perhaps he knows they can make some of his lame lines work.) And getting in Harris and Mastrontonio for his leads he has suffused his film with an emotional resonance that his waterbound saga desperately needs. Their heart-wrenching work is a perfect match for the spine-tingling momentum that Cameron provides as a director. By the end you’re a blubbering mess, just like you were at the end of Titanic.

There are two portions in the film that perfectly demonstrate this. In the first, Virgil and Lindsay have just disposed of Coffey in their mini-sub when his own vessel tumbles down an undersea trench and explodes. But their sub starts to flood, and, with only one suit, Lindsay agrees to “drown” since the water is so cold, hoping the hypothermia will allow her to be resuscitated. (Again, not sure if this is medically sound, but Cameron Tells Us To Go Along With It.) From the moment she hysterically gasps for air as the compartment floods, to the scene in which Virgil frantically defribulates her over and over and over (longer than we’re comfortable with, but effective as a result), we are on the edge of our seat with emotional trauma.

And the other scene – just as effective – is essentially the film’s climax. Virgin plummets lower and lower and lower, into the titular abyss, with every few hundred feet being an added cause for concern. It gets to a point where it looks hopeless, until finally – “touchdown!” Virgin defuses the missile, but hasn’t enough oxygen to return. He knows he can’t make it, and decides to stay, in an act of self-sacrifice. Need another tissue?

So let me briefly cover the plot, or at least that portion which I haven’t already covered. Virgil and Lindsay’s undersea oil rig, and all its crewmen, are asked to join a team of Navy Seals to recover a nuclear submarine that had sunk after it saw an unidentifiable object. One of the Seals, a renegade Lt. named Coffey, takes it upon himself to confiscate one of the sub’s missiles, and to make matters worse, a hurricane destroys the above-water ship and destroys its crane, sending it plummeting into an ocean trench, nearly taking the oil rig with it. That trench is popular these days; it’s where they see some strange, glowing life forms too – the sort of life form a now fully deranged Coffey wants to kill.

He takes his mini sub to launch his missile into the trench, but is stopped by Virgin and Lindsay in their own mini-sub. After a sub-battle, they win, but their damaged vessel quickly floods. She enters hypothermia and is resuscitated back at the rig; with the human threat removed they must now contend with mother nature – Virgil volunteers to go down and diffuse that missile. But he depth becomes too great; he makes it, barely, and cuts the cord, but sacrificially stays down, knowing he can’t make it back.

Enter: The Aliens. Those glowing beings from before show up and create a breathing environment for him. No, they can’t talk, but they show him, with a huge IMAX screen, that they want to destroy humanity, because they are destroying the planet. (Interesting logic.) So they send huge tidal waves to do the deed, but stop just short. The reason? They’re mightily impressed by Virgil’s selfless act. They’ll spare the planet… for now. And they give all the oil riggers, including Virgil, a free ride back to the surface, no decompression needed.

I know that a lot of people had some issues with the ending, and yes, it is heavy handed. And yes, despite some nice early CGI effects, it is pretty pale Spielberg. But, quite frankly, that’s what gives the whole film its point – these green boys are down there (and caused the nuke sub accident in the first place) because they’re pissed off. The edited version, which doesn’t include the post-apocalyptic warning and only shows that they help him because they’re impressed with his martyrdom, misses that crucial element of admonition. I mean, some of the greatest sci-fi classics of all time like The Day the Earth Stood Still, were laden with moralism. Sometimes ya just gotta lay it on for the greater good.

So, yes, it works as polemic and exhilaration. And Cameron, despite loving his CGI toybox, has never overused it, except possibly with Avatar. The Abyss, released in 1989, is all about a real mis en scen. Very few effects, no hovering camera, no food processor editing. Just solid, hard-camera, storyboarded filmmaking. Gotta love those days.

Warts and all, The Abyss is an experience not to be missed. This is what the movies are all about.

Rating:  ****

Say Anything (1989)

 Another oversight on the Fox collection, and this one, I think, is an egregious one.

Say Anything came out in the spring of 1989, just as I was limping in the final stretch of my freshman year at college. It was a rough year (more on some other time), and the warm weather after a frigid, often lonely, winter meat hat there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Seeing Say Anything was a much-needed bright spot during a time of stress, depression and uncertainty.

The film is essentially the classic “ordinary” boy hoping to go out with the most popular girl in school formula, you know, the premise that carried a good portion of all those teen-sex comedies of the 80s (I was always partial to Can’t Buy Me Love).But Anything is not only a cut above all of those movies, but it may very well go down in history as the first, great modern teenage love drama, if it hasn’t done so already.

Yeah, I’m making that call. It’s that good. Writer/director Cameron Crowe burst onto the scene with this one, after having penned several screenplays for others, and he knows the territory. Of course, he got a strong assist from John Hughes, who primed the pump with his own genre-defining works – films about highschoolers hat showed us how they really talked, and what they really felt, and what they really did when the grown ups weren’t around. And – surprise – it’s actually, for the most part, not that far removed from the way we adults talk. And it’s even entertaining to boot.

But Crowe forged his own path. While Hughes films were, for the most part, comedies (his most dramatic work, The Breakfast Club, was really just a comedy with a few sprinklings of sobriety), Cameron focused more on the dramatic aspects of adolescence, and adolescent relationships in particular. He is keenly observant of the details of, for example, breaking up – in Say Anything, we see the girl, Diane Court, breaking down in her parked car, sobbing with visible grief, while the boy, Lloyd Dobler, tears up subtlety, stoically, as he drives away.  And throughout the rest of he film, we get little moments like these, and it is precisely their emotional efficacy that makes the big moments work so well.

It all comes down to a phone call. It’s high school graduation (a refreshing timeframe), and class valedictorian Diane Court has her college plans all laid out nicely in front of her – a fellowship in England, among others – mostly courtesy her career/academic-minded dad, the guardian she chose amid a custody battle when Diane was 12. Enter Lloyd Dobler, a profound thinker and overall funny guy but majpr-league underachiever. With no immediate career plans, he opts instead to focus on his kickboxing, and hang around with his gal pals, one of whom can’t quite get over her ex. So what are the chances that untouchable Diane will go out with ne’er-do-well Lloyd when he calls. Pretty good. Why? “He makes me laugh.”

They go to a huge graduation bush, and the mutual attraction grows, with Diane particularly impressed by Lloyd’s charming blend of old-school chivalry and modern depth of thought. Diane, too, likes to dig beyond he surface, a quality, perhaps, that Lloyd wasn’t expecting in a girl so pretty and popular. But then, maybe that explains her disenfranchisement with the school elite, and her attraction toward Lloyd, which by now has entered a more carnal phase, much to the disapproval of Diane’s dad, Jim.

But Jim’s own relationship with his daughter is threatened by his past. The owner and operator of a nursing home, he appears to have a strong moral fiber. But the IRS has uncovered some duplicitous dealings, including his fleecing of deceased nursing home residents out of thousands of dollars. After Diane breaks up with Lloyd, in no small part due to her dad’s disapproval of him, she discovers the larceny. Realizing Dad should no longer have any real control over her life, she trusts her heart, and gets back together with Lloyd. They both pay one last visit to Jim, now incarcerated, before both heading off to England for that fellowship.

Any meaningful discussion of this film must necessarily include praise of Crowe’s screenplay, work that is as honestly observed as it is majestic in its theatrics. Crowe had been a protégée of James L. Brooks for several years (Anything is produced by Brooks’ Gracie Films), and you can tell the influence. Both writers understand that balance between over and underwriting – the urge to load the characters up with smart, witty dialogue while holding back just enough to allow then to be… human. And Crowe also loads his film up with other characters and subplots too. but he never overloads – something he would be guilty of I later pictures. But here, for his starter, it’s just enough so to buoy his central story without overshadowing it – and it shows us the social satellites that play an important part in his lead characters’ lives.

I mentioned before that this is a formula pic, and although it elevates it impressively it still holds true to it; indeed that is part of its appeal. We’ve all been there, and surely often wished, desperately, that the one girl or boy who would be so perfect to date could be just down to earth enough to get to know. Yes, of course, it’s an absolute fantasy, but Say Anything renders it credible by having two socially polar opposites possess enough intelligence in common to make it work, knocking that social strata down handily. It’s a fantasy all right, but just like credible science fiction it uses intelligence to make its conceit just squeak by.

And here’s another thing I liked. By having the father under criminal investigation, Crowe tells us that there are always reasons for interpersonal issues inn or lives, some which may not be so visible on the surface. When Lloyd and Diane break up, it’s not just the fact that they’re s different – she has her own familial demons to wrestle, beyond Lloyd’s purview, and it serves as a reminder to al of us that maybe it’s not always we who are at fault. Again, it’s this kind of attention to the cause/effect realties of life that afford the film its knowing verisimilitude.

And I also want to focus on one other element: Ione Skye, who plays Diane. She is a wonder to behold, and gives the film its heart and soul, but especially heart. Not only is she ravishingly beautiful, but she possesses both a admirable maturity and empathic vulnerability. She’s the girlfriend we all had, or at least wish we had, at some point in our lives. You wait, so desperately, for her to reconcile with Lloyd, who represents us (or at least the guys). Who among us couldn’t identify with him when he shakes as they’re in the car making out? Or want her back so bad he holds a boom box outside her window in that classic scene? I’m convinced the film would have had nearly the same impact with another actress in the lead – Ione pretty much makes the film, and that says a lot given all the other superb elements at play here.

I could go on and on and on here, but I’ll stop. You get the point. If there is a better film about teenage love, teenage heartbreak… teenage life… then I haven’t seen it.

I’ll say it again, my star-rating system caps at 4, so I regret that I can only give Say Anything…

Rating:  ****

Working Girl (1988)

If you were to look up the word “throwback” in the Funk & Wagnall’s, you probably find Working Girl, a throwback to the classic era of Hollywood filmmaking, where clever, well-crafted scripts were buoyed by a healthy dose of star power. No grandiose messages or in-you-face polemics, either; just a fine old time at the movies – bring the whole family!

It must’ve taken some moxie, too, for Fox to release it for the 1988 holiday season, putting it up against films that dealt with, among other things, autism, 1960s racism in the South, a shock-jock’s murder, and an estranged marriage after the death of a son. But Fox had the last laugh when the ostensibly lightweight Girl scored several Oscar noms, including Best Picture and Actress, and went on the gross 80 million dollars.

But when you think about it, perhaps it ain’t so lightweight. Sure it’s essentially How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, except now our upwardly mobile protagonist is class-challenged but ambitious secretary from Staten Island, Tess (Melanie Griffith). But in transplanting a familiar archetype from the 50s to the 80s, it also addresses some of the changes that characterize the 80s. Tess is not just right time/right place go-getter, she’s also a metaphor for contemporary women the workplace. By impersonating her boss, Katherine (Sigourney Weaver), and handling a corporate acquisition under a false identity, she essentially states that just because a few women now old power positions, things are still just as hard for women who start at the bottom.

And there are a few twists along the way. Tess’s boss is also a woman, allowing the former to learn a few tricks of the trade, like how to balance femininity with power, and even how to use feminine wiles to achieve that power. Laid up from a skiing accident, Katherine sets the whole thing in motion, by stealing Tess’s idea for orchestrating a corporation’s purchase of a radio network, when it really wants to get into television. She partners with a executive named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), and together they pitch their idea to Trask Enterprises. All the while, Tess’s business acumen impresses Jack to the point that not only is he thoroughly convinced that she’s a seasoned businesswoman, but he falls in love with her. All this as Tess is in the process of leaving her loser boyfriend. Their only obstacle: Katherine, who turns out to be Jack’s flame (or ex-flame, according to him), and now threatens to blow the lid on Tess’s true identity. But all’s well that ends well – true love conquers all as Jack stands by his woman, even if she is a recepionist. Or, ex-receptionist; Trask likes her so much they hire her in an executive position. Kiss those Staten Island Ferry-riding days goodbye, Tess!

This was the first screenplay by Kevin Wade, and it’s a marvelous first outing by any writer. The jokes aren’t too broad, the business dialogue not too dry, and it keeps things moving lively along by cutting back and forth through all aspects of Tess’s life: her business dealings, her romance, her blue-collar life on SI. And director Mike Nichol’s maintains a sensible direction that’s all about character. He stays on his actors’ faces during those emotional moments just long enough. He’s got a nice touch that balances both the grit and the gloss. Of course, we’re talking about one of the great lensers of the 6s and 70s, so the man knows what he’s doing.

And most importantly, he knows what to do with Melanie Griffith, something so many others have been clueless about. Griffith is pitch perfect here – the role she was born to play. She achieves great balance too – channeling the vulnerable, childlike qualities of Marilyn Monroe while also somehow conveying the sense that she’s a very smart woman. I mean, some of those business lines, thick with info and numbers, are a pretty hard sell for anyone, let alone a bubbly blonde. But Griffith makes it work, and even if she doesn’t, the movie’s tone – a “wink-wink” fairy tale – pushes it smoothly along. Like I said, it’s all about tone.

Since Girl came out, nearly 30 years ago, it’s become the 80s film about women in the corporate business world, complete with Big Hair and IBM computers. It was a wake-up cal to America about the realities of the glass ceiling and, sadly, I fear little has changed. They could probably remake this with smart phones and twitter and it would still seem fresh and relevant. But it would also seem fresh because it’s a damn fine story, with a credible romance even if its core storyline fees a bit less than credible. Some things never go out of style.

Oh, and extra props for Carly Simon’s marvelous theme song, “Let the River Run,” which also provides the film’s score. Just jazzes the whole thing up nicely.

Go see it.

Rating:  ****

Die Hard (1988)

The 80s, of course, was the decade for the action/adventure film, but by 1987 it was in need of a major overhaul. The genre’s two top stars, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were having mixed success by then: Stallone had just hit rock bottom with his arm-wrestling saga, Over the Top, and Arnold’s films, while still profitable, didn’t exactly requite a degree in quantum physics to follow.

Enter producer Joel Silver. Following the lead of pals Don Simpson and Jerry Brickheimer (Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop I and II), he gave audiences Lethal Weapon. A reinvention of the buddy-cop drama, it was slickly produced, sure, and loaded with extreme action and violence, but yet it was expertly directed (Richard Donner) intelligently written, and featured villains that you wanted dead. It was just the shot in the arm the genre needed.

The following year, Silver gave us Die Hard, and his time we have one cop, a NY cop to be precise, visiting his estranged wife in LA. When her building is taken over by international terrorists, it turns out he’s the only guy that can stop them, and thusly, a subgenre is born. That premise of the unlikely hero – the guy in the wrong place at the wrong time – would spawn countless imitators, some good, some bad, and refuel the thrill-a-minute action flick for a god ten years or so.

Die Hard was a surprise hit. Dumped in late July of 1988, no one expected fireworks. But I think it was such a wild success not simply because it was well-made but also because it filled a void in our appetite for action and suspense. Throughout the 70s, producer Irwin Allen made a cinematic name for himself with the Disaster Film, a new genre that touched the collective nerve of a populace skittish about a world changing too fast – supersonic jets, ocean liners, skyscrapers. Those fears never really went away; in fact they intensified in the 80s with the advent of faster planes, taller towers, and now a new threat: global terrorism. Die Hard exploited all these fears, and then some. And it gave us a new everyman hero for the changing times – Brice Willis – sort of the Steve McQueen for the MTV generation.

And he has a backstory. McClain’s in LA to see his wife, Holly, but he resents her leaving the marriage to take a corporate job on the East Coast. As he visits her office building, a towering skyscraper and home of the Nakatomi corporation, her company, it’s not long before trouble arrives – in the form of Hans Gruber and his 12 cohorts, a group of heavy automatic weapon toting-terrorists. They seize all attendants of the Christmas party as hostages, but McClane manages to elude them, and for the duration of the film he becomes the fly in the ointment of their plot: to steal the 640 million dollars in the company vault, using the brainpower of a tech wizard and the detonators and explosives they bought along. Only problem: McClain now has them, and all their efforts to get them back come to no avail. Oh, sure, the outside world steps in – LAPD, FBI, SWAT – but they’re no help; in fact they make things worse. Only a police sergeant on his radio seems to be of any assistance, right down to the end, when McClain pops off the baddies one by ne until he reaches, Gruben, whom he sends to his falling death after the half the skyscraper is a mess of rubble and ashes.

I think my salient reaction after seeing this now us the same as it was when  first caught its original theatrical release nearly 30 years ago: how in the world did they make this? It’s a reaction I usually after seeing the more accomplished action flicks of someone like James Cameron, and, to a lesser extent, Jan DeBont, Renny Harlin and Andrew Davis. It’s two hours of pure adrenalin, gripping from beginning to end, with hardly a moment for the viewer to question any of the inconsistencies or implausabilities (and there are several). At he end, you’re breathing a sigh of relief, wonder what the hell just happened, and giddy that you can be so manipulated by he magic of the movies.

But directors like the one I mentioned, and the one who lensed Die Hard, John McTiernan, make it look easy. There’s clearly a lot of craftsmanship going on here, and a few key elements that are part of the equation. The first lies in he villains. Hans Gruber, along with associates, are some bad motherf**kers, but they're equally as brilliant. The film spends the first 20 minutes or so showing us how insanely unstoppable they are. They’re a well-oiled machine, and Gruber never misses a beat in showing us how charming he is. So charming in fact, that we don’t much question his motives. He’s a West German (despite his British accent), so he’s not a communist, essentially after money but also seeking the release of political detainees from around the world, and opposed to Nakatomi’s imperialist profiteering. All this is for naught anyway, it seems, for Gruber just admits to his terrorist front as a smokescreen for the robbery (he plans to fake his own death in a rooftop explosion, which would kill all the hostages). Huh?

But we’re not going in to Die Hard for its politics, muddy as they may be. We want to see the protagonist kick some Euro ass, and that brings me to the next element: the audience’s identification with the hero. McClain isn’t some haighfallutin secret agent, nor is he a monolithic muscleman. He’s a regular Joe, with snappy one-liners and an abundance of street profanity to underscore the point. And the screenplay affords him some heart and soul, too – a few scenes, including his tearful “I’m sorry” letter to his wife lest he perish in the fray. Producer Silver knows this is key to a likeable hero; he did the same thing with his leads in Lethal Weapon.

The script has some clever surprises along the way, too. McClain doesn’t just use brawn to get ‘er done – he pulls a few McGuyver-esque students when he’s off own his own, like scaling down an elevator shaft using his gun as a rope support. Or rigging up a fire hose so he can swing down from the rooftop on the outside of the building. There’s also a clever scene where Hans finally meets his nemesis face to face, and pretends being a hostage as McClain isn’t yet aware of his true identity. The script only commits one major misstep: in the final, epilogual scene, when everyone’s on terra firma catching their breath, one of the assumed-dead thugs, Karl, blows out the front door with his gun a blazing, only to be brought down by that cop McClain had been talking to on the radio. This is one of those “not-so-fast” post-climax clichés, so common in horror movies, but completely unnecessary here. (It’s only thrown in to show that the ground cop is able to fire his weapon once again.)

But Die Hard was a real game changer, and for good reason. It raised the ante on the action film, for better (Under Siege, The Fugitive) or worse (anything by Jean Claude Van Damme). I prefer to remember the better.







                                        
                                           Rating:  ****

Big (1988)

 

In late 1987/early 1988, within a nine-month period, Hollywood gave us four – count ‘em four – movies with the same exact premise. Colloquially called the “body switching” movies, they took their conceit from a not bad Disney comedy from 1976: a child or teen and an adult somehow switch places, physically, while retaining the psyche of their previous selves. Like Father, Like Son and Vice Versa followed the formula exactly, while 18 Again just focused on the adult (George Burns) with a teenager’s mentality. And Big, starring Tom Hanks just focused on the child. A smart move, it turned out – it eliminated all the back and forth between the two characters. Another smart move – it forewent a heavy-handed explanation for its conceit, opting instead to just have Hanks as child because the child wished it in front of a preternatural fortune-telling machine. All these moves easily paid off in the end: released in June of ’88, Big was the last of this short-lived subgenre, and easily the best.

But the main reason it stood so far out from the others is the fact that it got the most metaphorical value from its premise. Sure, it was fun to see Hanks eat a mini corncob like a real one but aren’t we really talking about our own innocence, our own insecurities, in trying to navigate the adult world that seems to be getting more adult every day? How many times have we tackled a problem by stepping back and looking at it from a simpler perspective, much like Josh climbs the ladder of success at a toy company just by determining what’s fun to play with? (Just like Chauncey Gardner’s similar rise in Being There.) And how often do we struggle in relationships because we feel so emotionally immature, not unlike Josh’s total bewilderment when his “girlfriend,” Susan (Elizabeth Banks) asks him, “Where are are?” Nearly every scene in Big is underlaid with the resonance of real life situations, and the beauty of it is we still consciously appreciate it for the surface-level comedy that it sells itself as.

The story by now is familiar to anyone not living under a rock since the 80s: young Josh gets his wish, turns Big, gets to design a line of toys at a company in New York and falls in love with his beautiful co-worker, Susan, or at least falls in love as much as a 13-year-old boy has the capacity to do. The main plot thrust is essentially Josh, and his still-child best friend Billy, attempting to track down that fortune-telling machine. The script smartly sets up a convenient waiting time – 6 weeks – to accomplish this, so the adult Josh can carry on in the adult world before finally getting down to brass tacks and returning home (despite some initial hesitation, and a near-best buddy breakup).

Of course we knew that had to be the ending, right? And for that matter, there are few structural surprises in the film – we can pretty much call this one before the opening credits even start. But yet, there are surprises – the punchlines, for example, mostly dealing with the double entendres of child/adult world, are fresh and witty. [Favorites: Interviewer: “Did you pledge?” (college); Josh: “Every morning,” and Josh (getting first payckeck): “175 dollars?”; Jon Lovitz: “Yeah, they really screw you, don’t they?”] And the tone is just pitch-perfect. I’ve always said that it’s all about tone, and it couldn’t be truer here. It’s just playful and fanciful enough to carry a premise we might be doubting otherwise, but never too heavy so as to come off pretentious and self-important.

Perfect example: After a few dates with Susan, 13-year-old Josh loses his virginity to her. Although only hinted at, it’s pretty obvious it happens, and if one were to think long and hard about it, it’s pretty sick. In the real world, it would have enormous psychological ramifications, but in Big, it happens, a mild joke is made of it (he comes in to work the next day on Cloud 9) and it’s never heard about again. The movie deals with it perfectly, and it matches the playful tone it sets up from the beginning. The main drama here deals with love, as a movie of this nature ought to do.

Credit for this tone must be accorded where due, and that would be Big’s screenwriters, Gary Ross (Pleasantville) and Anne Spielberg (Steven’s sister), and of course director Penny Marshall. Marshall no doubt recommended Hanks for the lead role as both were good friends through their work on television, and her sitcom work, both in front of and behind the camera, affords her the soft touch necessary to manage the material.

And then there’s the lynchpin of the whole thing: Tom Hanks’ performance. I honestly can’t think of any other movie star of the time that could’ve made this work. Sure, Robin Williams comes immediately to mind, since we always think of him as a child in an adult body anyway. But he would’ve had trouble with the film’s crucial third act, where Josh grows a little in his attempts to assimilate into he grownup world. Hanks deftly maintains the balance of natural impish abandon and mature sensibility – the same sort of balance he would later use in his Oscar-winning role in Forrest Gump.

But it really all started with Big, the film that put Hanks on the map as a talent to be reckoned with. His Bachelor Party days officially behind him, he was ready to go on and set the cinematic world on fire - with The ‘Burbs, Turner and Hooch, The Bonfire of the Vanities…

Well eventually, anyway. But Big was the game-changer, and deservedly so. See it, if you haven’t already.

Rating:  ****