Category: 1980s

Alone in his New Jersey study, Philip Baker Hall’s Richard Nixon monologues to a tape recorder, detailing all the personal slights he has experienced through his life that led to the Watergate scandal. It’s an exhausting hour and a half where the President’s full paranoia, anger, and self-denial are laid bare. The dialogue goes off the rails so often that it’s sometimes impossible what tangent he will connect to next. Hall’s performance is astounding and exceptionally tiring to watch. He looks physically drained and ill by the film’s end.

I don’t know why I enjoyed this movie so much when I was young, but even during further rewatches, I find it nostalgically charming despite its questionable treatment of the women involved. Dudley Moore is a married television reporter who meets cellist Amy Irving during one of his stories. They begin an affair and when she tells him she’s pregnant, he’s prepared to divorce his current wife Ann Reinking who chooses that moment to announce that after years of trying she’s also pregnant, expecting twins in what is certain to be a difficult pregnancy. He’s stuck between a rock and a hard place and chooses perhaps the worst path, to stay married to both women. With another actor this might not have worked, but the hijinks surrounding Moore grow as he tries to balance both relationships and it is often hilarious. Both women are extremely successful and despite societal entrainment could find much benefit in the arrangement if they let themselves. I like how the ending feels open to interpretation though I’m unsure how one of those interpretations is likely to work.   

I often have a hard time appreciating Albert Brooks’s self-deprecating humor, yet for some reason I keep watching his films. Perhaps I should relate more to this film as here he repeatedly breaks up with his girlfriend Kathryn Harrold before almost immediately changing his mind and wanting to get back with her. His character is a neurotic, controlling mess and its hard to see what Harrold sees in him though there’s very little development into who her character is to make such judgment. There are a few rather funny scenes from his bad decision under the influence of Quaaludes to his misguided attempt to better himself by getting in shape. These outshine the rest of the questionable plot.

A team of five American martial artists, coached by James Earl Jones and including Eric Roberts, Chris Penn, and Phillip Rhee, is brought together to compete against Team Korea. The movie keeps referring to the martial art as karate, but it both doesn’t look like karate as I know it nor explain why they are competing against South Korea. The Koreans are portrayed as being ruthless with year-round, state-paid, no-holds barred training against the thrown-together, slacker Americans who haven’t yet discovered there’s no I in team. The stakes are about as low as they possibly can be while still portraying a competition. Luckily it doesn’t forget the important parts of a 1980s sports film and totally brings the blood-pumping soundtrack and training montages. Somehow this film managed to spawn three sequels.  

Bryan Brown is a special effects expert who agrees to help a government agency in staging the fake assassin of a well-known gangster. When he’s double-crossed, he must use his skills to evade and trap gangsters and corrupt government agents alike. I remember when F/X 2 came out wondering about the original which I had never heard of and it has stayed on my radar since. Unfortunately there’s not a whole lot of special effects seen in the film other than a pretty twisty climax, it remains a decent action film with Brian Dennehy playing a good cop working the other side of Brown to also get to the bottom of the conspiracy.