1988 - MARRIED TO THE MOB, a gangster comedy

Michelle Pfeiffer has to play "straight man " to a bunch of eccentric performers in this gangster comedy.  She's married to a young Alec Baldwin who is working as a hit man for gangster Dean Stockwell.  But Baldwin is also having an affair with Stockwell's mistress which is a bad idea.  Stockwell kills Baldwin, but Stockwell's bigger problem is his very scary wife played by Mercedes Ruehl.  Throw in an eccentric FBI agent played by Matthew Modine who gets romantically involved with Pfeiffer.  Well it's funny stuff.

 The director is Jonathan Demme who learned his trade working for Roger Corman.  From Corman Demme learned how to mix comedy, violence and action.  He brought a light touch to this nutty version of The Godfather.  Married to the Mob was a turning point for Demme.  After this film he moved into more serious film making with The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia and the probably ill advised Beloved.  For the most part he really didn't make entertaining films like this later in his career.

 

For a woman who started her career as a beauty pageant winner Michelle Pfeiffer turned out to be a very good actor.  She manages to hold her own with this incredible cast.  Former child actor Dean Stockwell is the scary but goofy mob boss.  One minute he's hitting on Pfeiffer after her husband's funeral and the next minute he's putting down an attempted assassination.  Not to be outdone is Mercedes Ruehl who plays it very broad as Stockwell's extremely jealous wife and is definitely not a person to be trifled with.  Matthew Modine is the FBI agent keeping an eye on Pfeiffer and at times he's growling like a tiger in his pursuit of Stockwell for no particular reason.

 

This kind of story is extremely hard to pull off but everyone in this film was on top of their game.  A very funny film. 

The film was written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, the running time is 104 minutes. 

1988 - I LOVE MARIA, aka Roboforce

Filmmaker Tsui Hark is the producer and stars in this pretty wild film which mixes about every conceivable genre possible for one film.  The obvious inspiration for this film was Robocop but instead of just doing a rehash of that film I Love Maria is jammed with lots of crazy action and comedy scenes.

In brief, a criminal gang known as The Hero Gang has built an impregnable robot called Pioneer 1 who can tear through the police like a piece of paper.  The stated goal of The Hero Gang is to eliminate the police and create chaos.  In addition they have developed another more humanoid looking robot called Maria played by Sally Yeh.  Yeh was the actor who was the blind women in John Woo's The Killer but I digress.  Anyway a scientist from the police force, a former member of The Hero Gang and a goofy reporter manage to get control of Maria and take on The Hero Gang along with help from the robot girl.  

 

As with a lot of these Hong Kong action films from the 1980's the fighting and shootouts are very well done. However you have to sit through a lot and I mean a lot of some really dumb comedy.  But that's the price you pay when you watch some of these Hong Kong action films.

 

I Love Maria is an entertaining film and a very fun ride of a film for the most part. 

The film was written (if that's the word) by Yuen Kai Chi, the running time is a frantic and never dull 96 minutes.

1988 - MR NORTH, sort of comedy of manners way to refined for it's own good.

Mr. North is the last film that John Huston has a credit on.  Huston worked on the screenplay and was supposed to play one of the characters in the film but his poor health finally caught up with him and Robert Mitchum stepped in as a substitute.  

Mr. North is based on a book by Thornton Wilder who is mostly remembered for his play Our Town.  The film tells the story of a young man named Theophilus North and his interactions with the elite of Newport, Rhode Island in 1926.  Robert Mitchum is a dying millionaire with a bladder problem, Mary Stuart Masterson is a young woman with severe migraine head aches who North cures. Virginia Madsen is an Irish maid in love with an upper class man etc.  North moves from one subplot to another as a little mister fixer upper.

For a film with three talented writers, the dialog is very stiff and unnatural.  The actors aren't able to breathe much life into their characters. Faced with streams of prose the characters all sound like something out of a poor man's version of Masterpiece Theater. 

 

Frankly I don't think anyone with a straight face could say this is one of Thornton Wilder's better story efforts.  The plot what there is of it seems more like the uncollected fantasies of an old man than an actual novel with a beginning, middle and end.

This was kind of a Huston family reunion film. Danny Huston, Angelica Huston and Allegra Huston were all John Huston's children.  Virginia Madsen was Danny Huston's wife.  Lauren Bacall and Robert Mitchum were close friends of John Huston.  But all this buddy buddy actor stuff unfortunately didn't really make Mr. North much of a film.

Written by John Huston, Janet Roach and James Costigan.  The running time is 93 minutes.

1988 - FULL MOON IN BLUE WATER, not so hot comedy drama

 Gene Hackman is the owner of an ocean side bar off the coast of Texas.  It seems that his wife disappeared while going for a swim a year ago. Hackman's been in a funk ever since.  Burgess Meredith in yet another old coot role, is Hackman's father-in-law who is confined to a wheel chair and suffering from dementia.  Elias Koteas is the caretaker for Meredith.  Koteas is apparently mentally handicapped.  Teri Garr is a school bus driver in love with Hackman who is trying to get him out of his funk by sleeping with him.  That's about it for a story in this film.

 

 Full Moon In Blue Water mostly reminds me of Saroyan's Time of Your Life which is also set in a rundown bar with a bunch of eccentric characters which frankly was a much better film.  The trouble is that Full Moon in Blue Water doesn't have interesting characters and the interactions in the bar with the patrons aren't particularly touching or humorous.  It would also seem to me that if Hackman gets to sleep with Teri Garr that sure would go a long way to getting him out of his depression.

The actors do what they can do with this story, the cinematography is very pretty but you have to be a very talented fimmaker to make a piece of whimsy like this work as a film.

 

The film was written by Bill Bozzone, the running time is 95 minutes.

1988 - BILOXI BLUES, a not very funny service comedy

Considering the talent involved this is a god awful comedy and not a good film.  The director Mike Nichols clearly looking for a commercial hit re-teamed with playwright Neil Simon for Simon's sort of autobiographical story about his time in basic training.  Nichols and Simon had been pretty hot stuff on Broadway during the 1960's and 70's.  They brought Simon's The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park and Plaza Suite to Broadway for successful runs.

Over time they both had their successes and failures.  Nichols was no longer the wonder boy director who had made such films as The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, and Catch 22.  He had a string of failures and was looking to rebuild his career.  Simon had a little better luck than Nichols although he tended to rewrite the same play The Odd Couple, over and over in different variations.  Simon also clearly longed to be taken seriously as a dramatist instead of just a comedy writer so a  "strained seriousness" as Andrew Sarris like to say, had begun to creep into his plays.

Biloxi Blues had been a hit for Simon on Broadway so Nichols looking for a sure fire winner turned it into a film.  The problem was that the film wasn't very funny and the turn towards drama towards the end of the film was abrupt and seemed to be added as an afterthought.  Nichols was a fine craftsman when it came to directing in film or on the stage but he didn't seem to put much effort into this film, it could have been shot by about any mediocre film or TV director.

 

You can't really fault the cast, Matthew Broderick was always a good actor especially when it comes to comedy and he does what he can to make Simon's lame comedy situations and one-liners funny. Probably the only inspiration in the film was the out of left field casting of Christopher Walken as the army drill sergeant.  Walken brings all of his weirdness to a role that was usually standard stuff in this type of film. 

Biloxi Blues did what it was supposed to do, reestablish Mike Nichols as a viable commercial director since it was a minor commercial hit, but the film is for the most part is not amusing and plot wise not very interesting

The screenplay was by Neil Simon was from his play, the running time is 107 minutes.

1988 - DIE HARD. revisiting this 80's action thriller

Is it an action movie? Is it a Christmas movie? Does anyone still care about this silly argument that could only show up on social media?  It's been over 30 years since I saw this film in the theater. I was curious to see how it held up.  After viewing Die Hard again I would say it mostly still works but it's a little slow and creaky at times.  Present day audiences are pretty much conditioned to having their action movies kick into gear almost immediately after the credits.  Die Hard actually takes about 30 minutes before the big action scenes start.

 

 

The film is famous for the beginning of Bruce Willis's action hero character.  Willis was primarily a television actor but the producers had such a problem finding someone to portray John McClane, Willis  who was practically at the bottom of the list was hired.  He turned out to be a good choice to play the tough New York City cop taking on a bunch of European terrorists.  He was the every man who could shoot up a bunch of haughty bad guys out to mess with the American way of life.  It took a few movies before Willis descended into his snarky movie actor persona.  

 

Viewing Die Hard now I would have to say that I would give the real performing honors to British actor Alan Rickman. His very clever take on the lead terrorist Hans Gruber, the main bad guy taking on Willis is a real treat.  Rickman gives a very smooth and witty performance, the film really comes alive when he shows up.  Bonnie Bedelia was cast as Willis's wife and she wasn't a conventional Hollywood beauty.  She actually looks like she could be a wife and mother.  

 

As a movie Die Hard is rather overlong coming in at 132 minutes.  Towards the middle of the film the action and the story kind of slow down with lots of unnecessary personal issues among the main characters.  The story also gets very silly with the appearance of two FBI agents with the same last name, Johnson. 

For the most part Die Hard is still entertaining. The director John McTiernan  was at the top of his game staging the various action sequences and the whole film has that kind of superior professionalism that  Hollywood could bring to a big studio production.

The was written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza.

1988 - SHAKEDOWN, a good urban action film

The old corrupt cops on the take plot is dusted off for this very entertaining film with some excellent action scenes and stunt work.  Peter Weller is a public defender who stumbles on to a plot by some NYC cops to extort money from drug dealers.  Sam Elliott is his buddy (a what else), rogue cop who helps him get to the bottom of things.

The film looks like a lot of it was shot on actual locations in NYC and it certainly has the grimy 1980's urban atmosphere with scenes photographed near porn theaters and in some very crappy neighborhoods.  The writer/director James Glickenhaus and his production team have staged some impressive large scale action scenes, one that involves a jet that is actually kind of unnerving to watch.

 

This is the kind of action film that knows what it wants to do and generally hits it's targets unlike a lot of the overblown action stuff that is released today.

 

The film runs a brisk 97 minutes.

1988 - ROUGE, a showcase for actor Anita Mui

Anita Mui a Hong Kong singer and actress is the whole show in this love/ghost story directed by Stanley Kwan.  Mui was a major personality in the world of Asian entertainment.   She died of a brain tumor at 40 years old.  She was frequently associated with Jackie Chan and shows up in many of his films in odd roles like the step-mother or sort of a second choice girlfriend frequently playing down her glamorous looks.

In Rogue Mui plays a prostitute in 1930's Hong Kong who falls in love with a rich merchant played by Leslie Cheung another actor who died prematurely at age 46.  When this couple wants to get married Cheung's family refuses to acknowledge their relationship.  They make a pact to commit suicide together at which point the film jumps forward 50 years.  Mui now a ghost is searching for her lover who did not show up in the afterlife with her.

 

Mui actually doesn't act much in this film in the traditional sense. But she is a powerful physical presence throughout the film.  She does manage to portray a look of desperation and sadness throughout the later part of the film that is very effective

 

This is a rather unusual film to come out of Hong Kong in the 1980's.  Most of the films at that time were action films or action fantasy films for the most part.

The film was written by Yau Tai Ping On and Lilian Lee Pik Wah, the running time is 96 minutes. 

1988 - RED HEAT, strictly by the books action flick

 I don't know what went wrong with this film but it sure isn't anything special.  Writer/director Walter Hill teamed up with Arnold Schwarzenegger with another one of those "fish out of water" action movies that they should have been able to shoot in their sleep.  

Maybe that was the problem, the characters, the Chicago settings and even the action stuff are all kind of boring.  Maybe they did shoot it in their sleep.

Since Hill was the driving force behind the film I guess he ultimately should have the responsibility for the lack of imagination that runs throughout the film.

Running time 103 minutes.

1988 - THE BOURNE IDENTITY, the first version

No this is not the Matt Damon version but a TV mini series which actually follows the plot of the Robert Ludum novel, something the Damon version never bothered with.

The film stars Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith.  Chamberlain had an OK film career but he was really big stuff on TV staring in such mini series as Shogun, The Thorn Birds and Centennial.
These were all big budget TV shows from the early 1980's.  The Bourne Identity is Chamberlain a little past his time, but an acting professional is an acting professional and he does pretty good playing the amnesiac spy.

Chamberlain's co-star is Jaclyn Smith who is chiefly remembered as one of the original Charlie's Angels from the campy old TV show.  She was never much of an actor but she looked great and was able to say her lines without bumping into the furniture when she was on set.  

The Bourne Identity is a film for people who prefer the Jason Bourne character with a plot and without all the spastic camera movement that the film series with Damon brought to the cinema.  The mini-series isn't bad but it definitely has that TV vibe to it.

185 minutes

1988 - APPOINTMENT WITH DEATH, lazy Agatha Christie mystery make that very lazy

 Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a mean matriarch who is vacationing with her family in the middle east in this strictly by the numbers murder mystery.  This is a Cannon film production the studio responsible for such classics as Lifeforce and Ninja III:  The Domination.

Hack director Michael Winner put together an interesting cast, Lauren Bacall, Peter Ustinov, Haley Mills, Carrie Fisher and an interesting actor named Jenny Seagrove who wasn't able to really get a career going in films. 

However even a decent cast has to deal with the artistic ambitions of Michael Winner and there isn't a whole lot any of them can do about that.  Winner stages ever scene with his usual direct (coarse) approach to filming a movie. 

The chief liability in this film is the Agatha Christie murder plot.  Once again Christie withholds information from the viewer and spends an unending amount of time focusing on the time of the murder.  Was it a 4:00 pm or 4:30 pm or 4:45 pm etc.  Christie wrote a lot of murder mysteries and they weren't all winners but come to think of it mysteries kind of annoy me anyway.

102 minutes

1988 - THE PRESIDIO, because some one has to watch this stuff

A mystery set on the now dismantled army base Presidio in San Francisco.  The only reason to watch this thing is because Sean Connery is the lead in the film and that's not much of a reason.  Otherwise, the film is an uninteresting action mystery.

Besides casting Connery it's clear that the other leads Mark Harmon and Meg Ryan were hired to draw in a younger audience with the promise of watching a couple of supposedly sexy young actors generate some heat.  Harmon's career in film never really took off, he was just a little more bland then usual for a white guy in the movies.  Mark Harmon ended up back on TV a few years later.  What can you say about Meg Ryan?  She was the perfect bland Hollywood leading lady until she committed the sin of growing old.

The mystery in this film isn't very interesting, the car chase isn't very interesting, the action scenes aren't very interesting the whole film just ticks along to the big resolution which wraps up with a boring machine gun fight.  When you can't make a machine gun fight interesting you have a big problem. 

Just another cookie cutter action film.

97 minutes. 

1988 - ANOTHER WOMAN, Woody Allen reworks Wild Strawberries badly

Let's go to the dialog:

"I accept your condemnation."

“Maybe you’ve had too much champagne.”
“Maybe this conversation scares you.”

“I laid my head down and closed my eyes, and I guess I dozed off. I don’t know how long I was asleep, but one of the pillows must have slipped off the vent, and I gradually became aware of a voice. A woman’s voice. And it was such an anguished, heart-wrenching sound that I was totally arrested by its sadness.”

Ingmar Woody directs Liv Rowlands and Max Von Hackman

“Something tells me you know everything, and you’re scared.”
 
"I closed the book, and felt this strange mixture of wistfulness and hope, and I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you've lost. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace."

Finally this little gem, seems to be Woody's own review of his film:

"This is overblown, it's too emotional, it's maudlin. Your dreams may be meaningful to you, but to the objective observer, it's just so embarrassing."

1988 - WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, still looks pretty good.

An almost 25 year old film, technically this film still looks very impressive.  Who Framed Roger Rabbit has very good period detail and is a very well made film.

The integration of the cartoon characters with the live actors reached a new level of technical achievement with the camera actually moving around instead of the usual locked down single angle setup which had been the standard practice.  The actors were carefully cast, this was not a star vehicle the cartoon characters were the stars. 

If the story isn't exactly falling down funny it is clever and stays very true to 40's cartoon conventions and cliches, (pianos being dropped on people, characters running into walls etc).  

Although this was a Walt Disney production, animator Richard Williams was hired by the producer Steven Spielberg.  Williams despised the Disney corporation and refused to work at the studio so the animation was done in England. 

Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, the running time is 104 minutes.

1988 - FRANTIC, and yet another would be Hitchcock thriller

A San Francisco doctor and his wife on vacation in Paris find themselves caught up in international intrigue after the wife is captured by spies for some unknown reason, etc etc.  This is a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much for the most part.

Yet another Hitchcock wanna be. Frantic is directed  and co written by Roman Polanski in what is a pretty obvious attempt to make a more "normal" film for a more mainstream audience.  It's hard to know what is worse to watch this craven shot at mediocre mainstream film making from this director or the ultra weirdo Polanski who makes nutty and almost unwatchable films like Cul-Du-Sac and What? .

In spite of the film making skill and the presence of Polanski's wife in very short mini's you have to sit and watch the film's very obvious plot unfold as Harrison Ford goes through the motions of finding his wife.  There are a couple of attempts at some mild criticism about the bureaucracies of the government's of France and the United States being unable to help Ford but this subplot is half baked at best.

Frankly the film doesn't hold up plot wise,  when Ford begins to figure out what happened to his wife and why, he doesn't go back to the police even as the situation gets increasingly dangerous. If he did that, the film would be over in about 45 minutes, so the contrived situations continue to pile up.

Another underdeveloped film from a good filmmaker.

120 minutes

1988 - KNOCK OFF, Tsui Hark deconstructs/sends up/spoofs, the Hong Kong action film.

The incredible plot to Knock Off, has something to do with planting mini bombs in pairs of blue jeans which in turn can be used to terrorize the United States by threatening to detonate their pants or something like that.

The film stars the you asked for it action team of Jean Claude Van Damme and Rob Schneider.  Van Damme is supposedly playing a fashion designer and Schneider is supposedly an undercover CIA agent, no credibility stretching here.

The real star of the film is Tsui Hark.  Once again Hark uses his super charged film technique to take a series of action scenes and stage and film them in the most kinetic way possible.  Hark's technique completely overwhelms the film as it escalates into a series of elaborate action pieces ending with a see it to believe it scene on a ship involving cargo containers rolling around the deck attempting to crush Van Damme.

Tsui Hark traffic manages another action scene.

Clearly the concept was to make an action/comedy film.  However someone should have spoken with Hark before the filming because he is definitely marching to his own drummer on this film.

A fascinating mess.

91 minutes.

1988 - SUNSET, supposed Hollywood comedy is not really a comedy, actually not really anything.

Sunset was a film sold as a comedy from writer/director Blake Edwards which starred Bruce Wlllis and James Garner.  The film is not funny, it's actually kind of an episode of Edward's old Peter Gunn detective series padded out. 

The film is about the supposed friendship between silent screen cowboy star Tom Mix (whose life would probably make a more interesting film) and Wyatt Earp.  Mix and Earp become involved in a murder mystery in old Hollywood.  Garner's OK as Wyatt Earp, Bruce Willis smirks his way through another film.

For some reason Blake Edwards got himself the reputation as a comedic auteur mostly because he wrote and directed his own films.  Edwards was a pretty mediocre filmmaker who fancied himself some sort of keeper of the traditional comedy heritage of Hollywood.  What this mostly translated into was a lot of bad films with a lot of bad slapstick in them,  his Pink Panther films can be a major ordeal to sit through.

For some other reason,  Blake Edwards the supposed admirer of old Hollywood comedians, has a Charlie Chaplin like figure as his bad guy.  He's played by Malcolm McDowell who usually specializes in sadists and killers, nothing to subtle there.  I'm not sure what Charlie Chaplin did to deserve this kind of treatment.  Edwards based his career around cribbing old routines from silent comedians like Chaplin.   

A real oddball of a film.

103 minutes.

1988 - THE DEAD POOL, a Dirty Harry movie in name only.

Clint Eastwood gives a John Wayne like performance (goes though the motions) in this entertaining but really routine and actually pretty poor Dirty Harry film. 

Why was this film even made?  Probably because Warner Brothers wanted another film with the character Dirty Harry and no Dirty Harry with out Clint Eastwood.  Eastwood in turn didn't seem to care about the cop film genre anymore  but wanted to make films that interested him.  His follow up to The Dead Pool was Bird  probably his reward for making this film.

Also, it's probably safe to make the assumption that Republican Clint wanted to take a few pot shots at the liberal media, the liberal Hollywood establishment and liberal film critics since they seem to be the main targets on The Dead Pool list.

This is really lame film making of the highest order.  The gun battles are lame, the acting is lame and the psycho nut killer is lame.

 However, there are a few compensations.  You get to see Jim Carrey murdered and there is a funny car chase with a police car and a little model car loaded with explosives racing around the streets of San Francisco.  Eastwood also gets to use a big honking gun phallic symbol thing at the end of the film.

91 minutes.

1988 - THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, could have used a few more jokes.

A long haul of a film about Jesus from Martin Scorsese.  This was a personal project for him and it got him into a lot of trouble,  as he focused on the more secular aspects of the life of Christ.  This was pretty unfair criticism of The Last Temptation of Christ.  Scorsese certainly didn't turn the film into some sick sex and drugs fest.

A more fair criticism would have been was that the film was really boring.

The film does sort of follow the life of Christ.  But there are a lot of scenes of people aimlessly wandering around the desert for what seems like very little purpose.  A lot of the theological arguments in the film could have been just as easily played in a Caribou or Starbucks with a bunch of seminary students having coffee rather than having people standing around in the middle of nowhere.

There are a few laughs to be had with the casting of the film.  William DaFoe and Harvey Keitel with their New York accents are Jesus and and his good buddy Judas.  Judas spends a lot of time yelling at Jesus to do the right thing and get on with this Messiah business instead of sitting around drowning in all his angst ridden doubt about himself.  Their scenes together are like listening to a couple of Yankees fans argue about the baseball season.

The fact that Scorsese got funding at all for such a hot button film is a tribute to his ability to get it made at any cost. Unfortunately the film probably wasn't worth his time or the amount or crap he took over it.

If you want to read about the life of Christ, I would recommend the Gospel According to John, it's the shortest book in the New Testament.


164 minutes.

1988 - John Carpenter's THEY LIVE, Republican party taken over by space aliens

Made during the end of the Reagan Presidency and probably containing about as much criticism of the Republican brand of leadership that a Hollywood film was going to have.  They Live is a B-movie dressed up with some mild social criticism.

 

Carpenter wrote the screenplay under an alias.  The story is about space aliens in disguise exploiting the Earth to enrich themselves financially.  They have devices that allow them to go undetected and only a special pair of sunglasses reveals what they actually look like.   

They Live was also an experiment by John Carpenter to make a science fiction film on a really low budget.  Carpenter cast a professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper who actually wasn't too bad as the lead.  Wrestlers after all are performers.  "Rowdy" Roddy gets to run around and shoot aliens and he has a very long fight with another guy that must go on about 10 minutes.

 

They Live is in the great tradition of B films. It runs about 90 minutes has a lot of shooting and fighting,  a couple of good lines and an amusing ending.  Carpenter didn't appear to be taking the film very seriously and the film is sort of a minor science fiction classic.

93 minutes.