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Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively tells his brother that an emperor can do anything he wants. The bitter irony is that this is only true so long as the emperor does not want to do anything that matters to the people of China. He spends his childhood as a prisoner of his court’s need to have an emperor, in order to justify their own position.
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Oliver Stone’s reputation as a wide-eyed provocateur of the left is mostly founded around one movie, the unfortunate JFK, and those who only see him through the prism of that one movie might expect Wall Street to be nothing less than a lacerating indictment of the entire capitalist system. The director’s target is more specific than that, however. His father was a stockbroker, so Stone isn’t about to trash the entire profession, but he does take aim at some of the more egregious excesses of the mid-eighties.
Keep in mind that this was before day trading and the days of CNBC and cable news channels with a full time stock ticker running across the bottom of the screen, so elements that seem familiar to us in 2007 were actually somewhat revelatory in 1987. Thus, Stone’s insider’s look at the world of corporate raiders and leveraged buyouts was pretty eye-opening at the time.
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I’ll buy that for a dollar!
Although clearly intended as insightful social commentary on the Reagan era, Paul Verhoeven’s first American film works better as straight action with a dose of comedy and a surprising helping of existential turmoil for its titular character. The attempts at social satire were sophomoric even in 1987 but fortunately the director didn’t seem to take that element too seriously, focusing instead on Robocop (Peter Weller) and his struggle to reclaim his submerged humanity.
The film takes place in one of those fantasy futures where capitalism is just as evil as liberals imagine it to be. Continue reading
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Full Metal Jacket is an outstanding film about Marine recruits in training followed by two less successful films about the Vietnam War. It begins so strong with the natural conflict between the slow-witted and unhinged Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) and the profane force of nature known as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey, a former Marine drill instructor himself) that the two following segments border on anti-climax.
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You might not remember it, but this film was Mel Gibson’s “comeback” after his first career meltdown during the mid-eighties. At least that one didn’t wind up offending any ethnic groups. Through the production of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Gibson had acquired a reputation for surliness, hard drinking and brawling, until he finally walked away from the movies for two years. This 1987 prototype of the buddy cop movie marked not only his return to the film business but the birth of a new Mel Gibson, the funny action star with the Three Stooges fetish.
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There was indeed a disc jockey named Adrian Cronauer who worked for Armed Forces Radio in Saigon during the early years of the Vietnam War. Aside from that fact, this film pretty much deviates from reality from that point forward. If it happens in Good Morning, Vietnam, you be be pretty sure that it didn’t happen to the real Cronauer. This is really the story of what would have happened if you had somehow plunked Robin Williams back in 1965 Vietnam and set him to work for the military radio network.
That’s not to say it’s a bad movie. In fact, it’s the best movie on the pure comic side of William’s filmography, specifically because the role of this DJ perfectly matches the comedian’s unbridled improvisational humor.
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There are very few movies that, after 18 years, I react to the same way I did when I first saw it. The Princess Bride is definitely one of those movies. I get exactly the same feeling of giddy delight from watching this that I did back in 1987. As a fantasy, it takes its fairy-tale elements just serious enough that it doesn’t feel condescending while still managing a knowing wink at a normally cynical modern audience.
Rob Reiner‘s fourth movie is as different from the three that came before it as they are from each other and nothing much like the many he has directed since. He obviously brings a great deal of love and respect to William Goldman‘s original novel and successfully communicated his enthusiasm to a talented cast.
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Spaceballs marked the beginning of a second stage to Mel Brooks‘ career. After a busy decade in the 1970s, he had been quiet since 1981’s History of the World, Part I. Unlike his early films, where he satirized broad genres or at least the entire life’s work of a single director, this second wind would find him targeting a single film for parody and, in this case, a full decade after the film in question, Star Wars, was current and considered ripe for the spoofing.
The real weakness of this and later Brooks films is the laziness of the humor. Brooks seems to be weakly emulating the style of Abraham/Zucker films that his early work helped to inspire, such as Airplane!. Continue reading