Category: 1980s

This is a harmless romantic comedy version of Cyrano de Bergerac. Steven Martin is his charming self and the story is earnest. I had a hard time believing in his interest in Daryl Hannah, nor her interest in Rick Rossovich. The best couple chemistry was between Martin and Shelley Duvall though there was no indication that either felt sexually towards the other. I did find the scenes with the fire department to be amusing. The British Columbia setting was beautiful. Kudos to the makeup department that devised a nose that looked ‘normal’ when looking at the front from afar, but was obviously extra long when in silhouette.  

This story of a Korean War vet experiencing severe PTSD starts off incredibly strong and then meanders after he is sent to the criminally negligent Florida State Hospital. Gary Oldman offers his best as the veteran, as does Dennis Hopper as a fellow patient, but the presentation is just not strong enough, glossing over so much of the travesties and injustices that the patients experience. Even supporting roles by the wonderful Pamela Reed and Frances McDormand don’t break through. I really wish this true story would have been picked up by a larger studio as quality mental health treatment is an ongoing struggle in the United States.

Following some of the themes from my most recent watch (FBI agents, terrorism, undercover agents), here we have Debra Winger as an FBI agent infiltrating a farming community filled with white supremacists. She meets and falls in love with Tom Berenger while on assignment and things then start to turn bad for her. I gained a new appreciation for Winger’s work as she really boosts the quality of the story. John Mahoney and Ted Levine are creepy as some of the members of the local cell. There are some seemingly over the top events undertaken by the supremacists, though I might be too naïve here and need reminding that I live in a nation where Black men are shot by gangs of white men just for jogging on their street and militia groups plot to kidnap sitting governors.

I have no idea how, but I started this thinking it was a documentary. Instead, it’s a fictional account of one sex worker’s double shift at a NYC brothel. It’s quite a low budget film and took me a bit to get into the film. The soundtrack is amongst the most jarring I’ve ever heard and the acting is often times stilted to the degree of cheap porn. Unlike porn, the sex scenes are possibly the most unerotic ones ever filmed. The male characters are almost uniformly caricatures, so that the film focuses instead on aspects of 1980s capitalism and how the shrill boss’s control, real and imagined, over her workers is all based on the almighty dollar. I had a hard time throughout ignoring the setting and how there was almost no security or private areas for the staff. I’m by no means an expert in the field, but it all seemed like really poor safety design. It did turn the brothel into a very mundane workplace, complete with petty jealousies and various aggravations.