Category: 1980s

I thought Sally Field and Jeff Bridges couldn’t make for a bad film together. I was wrong. This is a stinker. Sally is a widow preparing to marry Jeff and move back in to the home she shared with her previous husband. Unfortunately, that husband, James Caan, is haunting the house. Caan is an annoying, unbelievably cast showman named Jolly who takes to tap dancing randomly around Field and Bridges’s courting. Bridges is all stuffy as an museum Egyptologist and given little to do. Field is the most reasonably cast, but has no chemistry with Caan and not given enough chance to gel with Bridges. The film picks up when Jeff pretends to see his own former lover and has a colleague perform an exorcism, but I was already too annoyed by the first half of the film to care. 

During a Florida heat wave, unscrupulous lawyer William Hurt meets and begins an affair with the married Kathleen Turner. They have sultry chemistry and before long, she is convincing him to murder her husband for the inheritance. The setting is ripe for sweat and slow moving fans. Together with a sax-y John Barry score, the scene is perfect for a 1980s noir. In a pair of great supporting roles, J.A. Preston and Ted Danson offer unheeded, level-headed advice and support as Hurt’s friends. The twists and turns are fairly predictable, but that doesn’t stop the gasps from coming when they happen. 

I watched this through twice and I’m still not sure what to think of this. Emilio Estevez is a punk who is recruited into becoming a repo man by Harry Dean Stanton. There’s a girl, televangelists, aliens, and most importantly a ’64 Chevy Malibu that you shouldn’t open the trunk of. Estevez looks prettier than he ever did with his blonde crewcut and smooth tanned skin. The quality Stanton brings is above everything about this film, but manages to keep it cool. It definitely has a vision at its core and there’s a bit of commentary on life, particularly in Los Angeles, during the Reagan era.  

Mark Harmon is a San Francisco detective. Sean Connery is a Lieutenant Colonel who used to be his commanding officer. After a shooting at the Presidio that also results in the death of two city cops, the two are forced to work together to find the killers despite their troubled history. It’s an entertaining but entirely forgettable crime drama. By the time the mystery behind the reason for the killings is revealed, I’d forgotten there was even a mystery to be solved. While I generally like Mark Harmon, he’s out of his depths in this film next to Connery and Jack Warden. A love story between Harmon and Meg Ryan is completely unnecessary and her entire role in the film feels rammed in.

Another theatrical themed film featuring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, this could make a good double feature with Noises Off. Though not as laugh out loud funny as that film, there is still a lot of humorous twistiness in this story. Caine is a famous playwright who has lost some of his magic. Reeve is one of his protégés who has written a promising new script. With the encouragement of his wife’s (played by Dyan Cannon), Mike invites Chris to their Long Island home to steal the script and possibly murder the young writer. I didn’t love the ending, but the twists are a lot of fun and the home setting has so many beautiful details that just add to the story.

1980s Bill Murray being in this film is just odd. It’s as if Peter Venkman or Frank Cross was inserted into an Ivory and Merchant piece. At the time, he just didn’t have the acting chops, and perhaps the director didn’t know how to guide him, for the performance. He’s not the only off part of the production though. I didn’t realize I’d miss W. Somerset Maugham being a character in the story until he was missing and there wasn’t a good thread holding the various stories together. I’m not a huge fan of the original, but definitely appreciate it more than this version. That film got right into Larry Darnell’s transition, while this one spends a lot of its early parts on the war and explaining why he felt the need.

Al Pacino is a Cuban refugee, arriving in Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift. He arrives as a criminal and remains a criminal through the entire film, quickly moving up in the South American drug trade until he has nowhere to go but down. That last bit is the most interesting part of the film and where there’s some actual character depth from anyone in the entire film. I do enjoy all the 1980s Miami imagery in all its bright colored, white afroed, cocaine-fueled glory. I’ll soon watch the original Scarface and see if that changes my feelings on this one any.