Reviews

Just saw this tonight and I'm still puzzled as to how I feel about the film. Having skimmed through some of the comments it appears people are either embracing it as a masterpiece or reviling it as a boring piece of garbage. I won't go so far as to suggest this film is a masterpiece, but it certainly skews closer to that end of the spectrum than the other.

Things I Liked:

1) Bruce Willis. Lots of people said he was really really boring, which is their way of saying, "He wasn't being John McClane, he wasn't the Bruce Willis I am used to. I don't get it." Understated acting does not necessarily mean boring. He was playing a sad, confused Everyman (at least emotionally), it would be ludicrous for him to spout lame one-liners and start crawling into ventilation ducts. I thought he did a great job.

2) Samuel L. Jackson. The Willis-Jackson chemistry is great here, better than their DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE team-up, and Jackson by himself is fantastic as he almost always is. He had the more flamboyant and unusual of the two lead roles, so perhaps he had the advantage over Willis, but he manages to keep his character from flying up into the camposphere by delivering fantastical dialogue seriously.

3) The comic book as modern mythology idea was interesting although underdeveloped, like the movie itself really. I wish they had trimmed a good fifteen or so minutes of longing stares and slow motion shots of people standing around so they could have afforded more screen time to developing the movie's central premise, that is, that the power and truth of Mythic Reality can and does exist in the modern world, filtered and diluted though it might be.

Things I Didn't Like:

1) Okay, I hate to sound like a Bruckheimer-loving yokel, but this movie really did drag. I'm not asking for even one gratuituous car chase, but please, Night, zip it up a little. I felt every one of this movie's one hundred and fifteen minutes.

2) Like THE SIXTH SENSE, this is a film more or less without plot. The plot, such as it is, is the growth and self-realization of a character. That's fine and dandy, but I kept waiting for Clark Kent to finally move to Metropolis, so to speak. Willis spends the whole movie stuck in Smallville here, and when it finally does look as if he's about to maybe tear open his shirt to reveal the big red S (metaphorically speaking of course), they hit us with the ending...

3)....which, to put it the least, I did not like. It was an interesting twist, I'll grant the filmmakers that. I loved Jackson's final rambling speech, it was great, sad and horrifying all at once. But then they go and ruin it by stapling a very clumsy, very awkward text card "Epilogue" onto the final frames. Ugh. First of all, it's not like this is true story (I expected another title to read "(so-and-so) is still at large. If you have any information as to the whereabouts of this person, please notify the theater manager.") so that makes no sense. Secondly, the movie was so drawn-out and elongated (which at times worked and at other times did not) that to truncate the ending like that, to resolve the story in a rush and not even visually but with text, felt like a huge cheat.

Overall I give this movie a 7. Worth seeing at least once.

I dunno. This one...sure, they spent a lot of money on it, okay. Yes, Sigourney Weaver is amazing in that not only does she look phenomenal for a 48-year-old woman, but she actually bothers to act in what could easily have been a where's-my-paycheck performance. Fine, we've got a great supporting cast, like J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif, Dan Hedaya, Ron Perlman. So where did they go wrong? Why is this a waste of a movie?

I'll give it a shot:

1) Let's start with the small stuff first. H.R. Giger might be a whiz at designing xenomorphic monsters, but must we let him influence spaceship architecture too? Come on! Why on Earth do spaceships always have dark corridors, strange and severe angles and contours...it's a military vessel, sure, so it won't be pretty, but this ship looks like a lot of effort went into making it creepy and scary. It's not as ludicrous as EVENT HORIZON's Notre-Dame cathedral in space, but it's pretty close.

2) They spend all of the film's creative energy justifying a means of bringing Ripley back into the story, and they do a decent job: cloning her centuries later, so that The Man get his grubby hands on the Alien DNA kicking around inside her when she died. Fine, semi-plausible within a sci-fi context, although the odds of one blood sample lasting for 200 years until cloning is perfected is slim, but whatever. However...once the pawns are in place, the film, like the spaceship it's set on, goes on autopilot: kill the lights, let the monsters loose, run for your lives. We've seen this exact same thing three times already. It was old in the third movie.

3) They squander one of the more intriguing premises of the film: having a little bit of Ripley's human DNA, the Aliens are a lot smarter now. But beyond one or two scenes, and a silly "ambush" they set for the humans, this is kind of forgotten about.

4) Winona Ryder is horribly miscast as Call, the gal with a secret (and unlike the morons at Fox, I won't give it away for those who haven't yet seen the movie). She's just too soft and porcelain to play a hardened pirate-type character.

5) Not to give anything away, but the final monster, a human/Alien hybrid, looks like crap. Kind of like Pumpkinhead. So the ending was a bit lacking.

All in all, this movie just didn't do anything for me. It lacked the terror of the first one, the ferocity of the second, and the misguided-but-bold philosophical stance of the third. Instead of trying a new thematic approach, it tries to cover all the bases at once, stretches way too thin, and snaps, leaving you with a movie that doesn't really say or do or instill anything. Sigh. Oh well.

HTD is a classic of lousy movies, for many reasons: 1) It manages to fail even with great source material, the surreal, almost existential comic of the same name from the 1970s; 2) the real-world fallout of the film, which was such a humongous bellyflop when Universal laid it in theaters back in 1986 that many careers were ended, including the directing career of Huyck, who also put his name on an even worse film 2 years earlier, the unholy piece of dreck "Best Defense;" and 3) the obvious-in-retrospect fact that with such a huge budget, they didn't spend enough on the most important effect, making the duck look real. If done today with CGI, a major problem with HTD could have been sidestepped. HTD's flaws are legion: the aforementioned bad duckatronics, the voice actor hired to speak for Howard (he sounds not so much cranky and cantankerous, but just nebbishy and whiny), the uber-80s fashion (I know we all dressed badly back then, but good God!), the stupid dialogue, the inclusion of a rather silly save-the-world plot. Still, there are some nice moments poking through the flotsam, a few brief scenes which gleam with the potential of being a movie that might not have sucked quite so bad as the end result did.

Still...whenever they show it on TNT, I watch the whole damn thing. Honest to God. It has to be seen at least once.

RED DAWN was largely dismissed when it came out as yet another product of the Reagan America, where the blood of communists mixed freely with that of the unbelievers upon the altar of Christian, capitalist democracy. This just isn't the case. RED DAWN, unlike a piece of garbage like RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, doesn't have cardboard heroes and villains, and it isn't a paean to the American dream or the sanctity of our way of life. It's about little, unimportant people swept up in extremely unpleasant events, trying not to chewed up and spat out by them. Sure, the premise - a Soviet-Cuban sneak attack on the USA divides the nation in half - might be dismissed as jingoistic and warmongering by liberals, but the fact remains that the USSR was an aggressive, expansionistic nation and our government spent 50 years preparing to meet the kind of attack mounted in this film. Pointing out that the Soviets were not led by nice people isn't right-wing dogma, it's just a fact, plain and simple, and too many critics use that flawed argument to write off this intriguing and disturbing portrait of the guerilla psychology and mindset. Kevin Reynolds, the original scenarist, has said that he envisioned this story as a modern-day "Lord of the Flies," with kids retreating into the wilderness and becoming slowly dehumanized by the rigors of guerilla warfare, and you can still see that original theme in this film.

RED DAWN has some great acting, notably Patrick Swayze's terrific performance as Jed, the older kid who takes the role of leader of the Wolverines upon himself and at times finds it more than he can bear, and the always great Powers Boothe as a downed fighter pilot who finds refuge behind enemy lines with the Wolverines. Another highlight worth mentioning is the great performance of Ron O'Neal as Col. Bella, the sympathetic and war-weary Cuban officer who does his job competently and professionally, who doesn't like seeing his soldiers ("the enemy," from the viewpoint of the American audience anyway) get killed and who wants more than anything else to return home. All in all, not a perfect film, but a pretty good one.

TAOBBATED, as I will acronymize this film, is neither the stupid low-budget piece of excrement nor the sublimely original cult masterpiece you've been told it is, but it's a lot closer to the latter than to the former. Peter Weller plays Buckaroo, the titular neurosurgeon/inventor/modern-day samurai/Billy Joelesque rocker, and he plays him frightfully well, low-key and distant but with occasional glimmers of genius and intensity. The stellar supporting cast includes Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd, and Ellen Barkin, and they're all pretty darn good.

I'm not even going to pretend to be rational or unbiased about this movie. It's too utterly offbeat and original and just damned _odd_ to not love. Some favorite scenes: the opening sequence of the Jet Car test run; Buckaroo's phone call with the Black Lectroids, and his subsequent detection of the sinister Red Lectroid agents in his midst; the eerie recorded message from the Black Lectroid leader, the "good guys" who threaten to blow up Earth unless Buckaroo stops their enemy, Dr. Lizardo (Lithgow, in a truly twisted scene-chewing performance). Yes, it looks cheesy and dated, but damn it, you have to take a stand somewhere in life, you have to roll up your sleeves and step up to the plate and put yourself on the line, and have the courage to say, "I don't care what anyone thinks of me, I love this movie." That's the way I feel about old Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers, and I still consider myself a loyal Blue Blaze Irregular fifteen years after seeing this film.

As a post-script, I'd like to mention that the novelization of this movie, written by Earl Mac Rauch, is great, and actually contains about 3 times the information and plot that is in the movie. If you can find it on Amazon or at a garage sale somewhere, snap it up, it's worth the search. Also, there's a script for BUCKAROO BANZAI VERSUS THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE floating around too, which should be made no matter the cost if only to film one priceless scene - the cameo appearance of Jack Burton, Kurt Russell's swaggering truck driver hero from John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, who appears as a Blue Blaze Irregular and gives Team Banzai a lift!