1989 - DO THE RIGHT THING, one of Spike Lee's best films

One of Spike Lee's best films.  Do The Right Thing examines the mistrust, resentment and confusion in the interactions between white and black Americans.  Spike Lee's film was amazingly prescient in 1989 and sadly still very relevant for 2023.

Lee was really the triple threat with this film, he wrote, directed and played a featured role as the flawed protagonist Mookie, a delivery man working at a local pizzeria in Brooklyn.  Danny Aiello is the owner of the pizzeria who has been in the neighborhood a number of years and doesn't have a clue about the lives of the people living around him.

 

Spike Lee put together an excellent cast, Samuel Jackson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, John Turturro, Bill Nunn and Rosie Perez to name just a few.

 No film is perfect and probably the worst scene in the film is the love scene between Lee and Rosie Perez which involves ice cubes of all things, it's very silly stuff and not very erotic.

Credit on this film should also be given to Ernest Dickerson who did the photography and Lee's longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown.  Do The Right Thing is an excellent film from a dramatic and technical stand point.

The running time is 120 minutes.

1989 - PETER GUNN, at first you don't suceed try again.

This is the pilot for a revival of the old Peter Gunn TV series from the late 1950's.  The writer/director Blake Edwards had gone to this well once before with a movie version of his old series called Gunn, with very mixed results.  Here Edwards plan was to revive the series for a 1980's audience

Peter Strauss takes up the role of Peter Gunn, Barbara Williams is his girlfriend/mistress Edie Hart.  Peter Jurasik is Peter Gunn's friend Lt. Jacoby who is basically in the story to provide Gunn with information that will move the plot along.  Edwards also cast his daughter Jennifer Edwards as Peter Gunn's ditsy secretary in a lot of pointless and rather tiresome attempts at humor.

If Edwards had cribbed a lot of his plot for the Gunn movie from his TV series, in this version he actually uses scenes from the Gunn movie in this TV pilot, this is getting a little confusing.

 

Peter Strauss is actually pretty good as Peter Gunn, Barbara Williams does the smoldering girlfriend part about as well as can be expected.  The plot is the old corrupt cops story line with Peter Gunn sorting out who is killing who. 

I'll give Edwards credit in this version of Peter Gunn he went back to the original series's 1950's setting.  He also loaded up enough action to keep the viewer watching.  However ABC decided not to pick up the pilot for a TV series.  There have been no more versions of Peter Gunn since.

The running time for this film is 90 minutes.

1989 - FLETCH LIVES, the sequel to Fletch

Let's take a look at the sequel to the 1985 Chevy Chase mystery Fletch, in my opinion one of the better roles that suited his wise ass persona.  The film was again directed by Michael Ritchie one of Hollywood's best satirists  and written by a decent comedy writer Leon Capetanos.  

The first Fletch film was a rather pleasant funny surprise with Chase donning various disguises and accents as he attempts to solve the mystery of a millionaire who wants Fletch to kill him as he is dying of a terminal disease. Chase smart asses him self through that mystery and the film made fairly decent money eventually a sequel was called for.

In this film Fletch travels to Louisiana to claim an inheritance from a deceased relative, he gets himself mixed up with a bike gang, a televangelist, the Klu Klux Klan and a black handy man right out of a Steppin Fetchit film. 

Fletch Lives doesn't measure up to the first film but it has it moments and probably some of the most outrageous Southern stereotypes ever put on screen since Gone With The Wind. Outrageous but at times pretty funny.

Michael Ritchie and Chase manage a few mild satirical shots at Southerners and I suppose the film is as good as a sequel can be while rehashing the best bits of the first film.  Still, I enjoyed Fletch Lives, the running time is a painless 95 minutes.

1989 - THE BURBS, an underated Joe Dante film.

Dante's funny black comedy about life in the suburbs has seen it's reputation grow since it was originally released.  Tom Hanks is the everyman character Ray Peterson who along with his neighbors Art Weingartner and Lt. Mark Rumsfield are spying on their very creepy new neighbors, the Klopeks.

Dante put together a great cast staring with Tom Hanks who has never been a slouch in the comedy department.  Bruce Dern is his right wing nut neighbor and Richard Ducommun is his just plain nuts neighbor.  Throw in Dante's usual stock company which consists of Corey Feldman, Dick Miller and Robert Picardo.  I also have to mention Gale Gordon, Henry Gibson, Wendy Schaal, Rance Howard and Carrie Fischer.  It's just a fun cast.

 

This film is one of Dante's most underrated films.  For once he isn't dealing with Gremlins or Warner Brother's cartoon characters. Dante allows his sense of humor to shine through dealing with real people for a change.  It's still somewhat of a cartoon like atmosphere but at least it's a little more real world identifiable before the craziness sets in.

 

The film was written by Dana Olson and runs 101 minutes.

1989 - BATMAN, first revamping of the comic book character

This film looks a lot more conventional 14 years after its initial release.  Warner Bros. studios hired at the time weirdo director Tim Burton who had made a couple of interesting films like Beetlejuice and Pee Wee's Big Adventure.  Watching the film now it's clear that the studio was calling most of the creative shots not the director.  The film is tailor made for a summer popcorn audience.  It has songs by Prince, lots of larger than life actors like Jack Nicholson and a semi campy tone that almost teeters over into comic book stupidity.

The film tries for the gothic look but the photography is fairly conventional.  This version of Batman actually has a "stop the presses" newsroom which could have come straight out of an old movie. 

The casting is kind of interesting.  Michael Keaton was an unconventional choice for the Caper Crusader but the rubber Batman suit helped bulk him up.  Besides Nicholson there is scenery chewer Jack Palance played a crime boss who tries to give Nicholson a run for his money hamming it up.  Some comedian named Robert Wuhl plays a reporter right out of The Front Page.  Billy Dee Williams and Pat Hingle had nothing parts as Harvey Dent and Commissioner Gordon.

However most amusing is Kim Basinger cast as Vicki Vale a supposedly world famous photographer.  Basinger is fun to watch, she changes her hair style and clothes in almost scene she appears in and it seems like she is constantly screaming, her performance is a real piece of work.

This version of Batman looks positively quaint these days and is probably of interest as an example of a movie studio going to the proverbial well repeatedly with the same character and usually hauling in a lot of money every time.

126 minutes, written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren.

1989 - LA TAKEDOWN is the exact same goddamn movie as "Heat"

I knew Michael Mann based his film Heat, on a TV movie he directed and wrote called LA Takedown. But I was hardly prepared for how closely he lifted scenes in Heat from that movie. Whole scenes appear to be duplicated right down to the camera movements.

 

At three hours, Heat is a very long and padded out crime film with interesting scenes stuck in between lots of boring stuff about the personal lives of the criminals and the cops chasing them. The TV movie LA Takedown simply eliminates all of those personal scenes and mostly concentrates on the crime story.

LA Takedown is so similar to Heat that Michael Mann even modulated the actors to give the same performance. You could swap Al Pacino and Scott Plank between films (playing the same character Lt. Vincent Hanna) and not even know the difference. Pacino was criticized for his over the top performance when Heat came out but Plank has the exact same eye rolling, shouting mannerisms as Pacino in LA Takedown.

 

Obviously Michael Mann REALLY liked this story.

 92 criminal minutes.