Stripes

Bill Murray is one of the funniest actors in history, and his comedy seems effortless when he is at his best.  For my money, his best is in Stripes.  Why is that?  Maybe it's because he liked working with Ivan Reitman, his director in Meatballs, again.  Maybe he enjoyed the company and writing style of fellow Chicagoan and Second City alum Harold Ramis; this was their third film working together.  Maybe Murray was tired of playing supporting roles and was finally ready to be a leading man.  I don't really care why.  I'm just glad this movie was made.

Career slacker John Winger (Bill Murray) has lost his crappy job, his crappy car, and his too-attractive-for-him girlfriend in the matter of only a few hours.  With no real career options, his situation seems hopeless.  By chance, though, John and his buddy, Russell (Harold Ramis), see a commercial for the US Army on television.  Reasoning that the Army would get them into shape, give them a career path, and provide uniforms that seduce women on their own, the two sign up and are quickly sent off to basic training.  Why would Russell go with this whim?  Because his career teaching English to immigrants wasn't as exciting as he had hoped, I guess.

Harold Ramis: secret member of The Crystals

The reasons for their joining aren't terribly important (although, they do turn out to be poorly thought out).  What is important is that the two join a cast of misfits in basic training, and Winger goes out of his way to regularly irritate their drill sergeant, Sgt. Hulka (Warren Oates).  It turns out that Army training is hard and not terribly sympathetic to smart asses.  Who knew?

As I mentioned earlier, Bill Murray is on the top of his game here.  The chemistry between him and the rest of the cast is fantastic, particularly the banter between him and Harold Ramis.  Murray can sometimes seem a little bored in film roles when he is not allowed to be weird, but he clearly had a lot of freedom in this film.  I'm sure a lot of his lines were improvised, but his joke delivery here is great and the rest of the cast reacts perfectly.

Murray, about to give P.J. Soles the "Aunt Jemima" treatment

This was Harold Ramis' first substantial film role, but he did a good job playing the square to Murray's slacker.  Warren Oates was even better as their ornery drill sergeant.  He was basically playing the straight man to Murray, buy he also had a few little moments of his own.  My favorites include his reaction after being blown up and his involuntary chuckle after Winger refers to him as a "big toe."

This movie had a lot of up-and-comers in it, too.  Unfortunately, this was the last major film role for P.J. Soles; she wasn't a great actress here, but she played her part well enough (and didn't have to say "totally" for a change).  Sean Young had a small and fairly charisma-free performance as Russell's love interest, but how many interesting characters would have fallen for Harold Ramis?  This had to have been John Candy's big break; even though he had a small part in The Blues Brothers, he was really given a chance to shine in Stripes.  If nothing else, he deserves recognition for his Three Stooges homage during his mud wrestling scene.

So...the Stooges hurt women?

John Larroquette and Judge Reinhold also had early career appearances in this film (it was Reinhold's debut), and both were funnier here than in any other movie I can recall.  This is also one of career character actor John Diehl's biggest roles.  He did a good job as the hopelessly stupid recruit.  Bill Paxton and SCTV members Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty have cameos in the movie; if you can't spot Paxton --- and it's pretty hard --- re-watch the mud wrestling scene. 

This is perhaps the pinnacle of director Ivan Reitman's decade-plus run of entertaining movies.  He has made movies with better stories and special effects, but there's a certain magic in Stripes that I can't imagine duplicating.  Reitman's talent as a comedy director is knowing how to work with comedians and then cut their performances into a cohesive plot.  He does that quite well here.  Perhaps his greatest achievement in Stripes was getting the use of Fort Knox to film the exterior army base scenes.  Would this movie have worked if there weren't real soldiers and tanks in the background?  Probably, but that authenticity made the antics of Winger seem all the more ridiculous.  Reitman also opted to include a couple of somewhat depressing dramatic scenes to balance the film out --- and they worked; the Hulka vs. Winger bathroom scene (the non-pornographic one) really makes a case for being a soldier.

Sure, the film loses some steam after basic training is completed.  What do you expect?  The drill routine during their graduation ceremony is all sorts of awesome; how can an Army movie follow that scene up?

HHHH-arrrmy training, SIR!

I'm not saying that the rest of the movie is bad, it's just nowhere near as amusing as the first hour.  The magazine cover cut-aways during the final scene are funny, but a little too similar to the end scenes of Animal House (which Ramis also co-wrote) for my tastes.  Essentially, my complains for Stripes can be boiled down to kind of imitating a successful comedy classic and a pacing problem...in a comedy.  Shocking allegations, I know, but I take controversial stances.

Stripes is a comedy classic showcasing a lot of young talent that would heavily influence the rest of the 1980s and it showcased Bill Murray having fun.  It doesn't get much better than this.

For fans of the movie that are curious about the Extended Cut, it doesn't provide much.  Aside from an awkward scene with a topless P.J. Soles, every cut scene deserved its place on the editing floor.  On a final note, I would like to point out just how far superior the primary movie poster (pictured at the top of this post) was to another poster that was made for the movie.  What, they thought that the main draw of the film was going to be the heavily armed RV?  Who approved this?

Dune

Have you ever heard of Alan Smithee?  For a little over thirty years, it was the credit given to directors that wanted to disavow their work in a particular film due to the final version of the film not meeting their creative vision.  In other words, if the star or studio re-cut the movie, the director could protest by crediting the work to Smithee.  It's happened many times over the years, and Eric Idle made a terrible movie that joked about the process, so you may have heard of Smithee by now.  What I didn't know until I researched it for two or three minutes (I love the internet!) was that directors sometimes requested a Smithee credit for re-edited versions of their movies, like those shown in airplanes or on television.  Why do I bring this up?  I knew that one of the many versions of Dune that was aired on television had David Lynch's name removed from both the directing and writing credits.  While I haven't seen the Smithee version of the film (also known as the "Extended Version" on DVD), it can't be much worse than this approved version.

Dune is a high-concept science fiction yarn based on the excellent book of the same name by Frank Herbert.  Dune tackles a lot of serious themes and has an intricate plot that was thought, for many years, to be unworkable as a movie, and they may have been right.  This is a movie that delves into politics on a grand scale, ecology, Zen Buddhism, and revolution, all in two-and-a-half hours.  If that seems like a long movie, you're right.  It's still not enough time to develop all of those concepts simultaneously.  On the bright side, the movie soundtrack was done by Toto! They rawk!

Okay, now a quick quiz... What's the best part of this video?
A) The sweatbands on the keyboardist's wrists.
B) The singer finding Africa: The Book! and giving himself a satisfied nod.
C) The band singing a song allegedly about Africa and the video taking place on a large book.
D) That it manages to devalue an entire continent (54 countries!) in under five minutes.

The film begins with Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) explaining the state of the universe to the camera.  In the distant future, the universe is ruled by Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV (Jose Ferrer) and the most valuable resource in the universe is the spice melange.  Melange is kind of like a cosmic LSD, only useful; it expands the mind, prolongs the user's life, and is essential to space travel.  The Spacing Guild's Navigators use the drug to see the future and fold space, which makes space travel faster and safer.  The problem with melange is that is only grows on one stinking planet, Arrakis AKA Dune.  With this explanation, the Princess is not seen again until the last ten minutes of the film, where she might not have had any dialogue.

Are you with me so far?  Well, in an effort to smash a political rival, Emperor Shaddam is giving control of Arrakis to, um, his rival, Duke Leto Atreides (Jurgen Prochnow).  That doesn't make much sense, does it?  Well, the Emperor is arranging to have the Atreides' longtime rival, the Harkonnens, ambush Atriedes on Arrakis.  When the Spacing Guild's Navigators foresee these events, they demand that the Emperor kill not only Duke Leo, but also his son, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan).  These future-seers think that Paul is a danger to their melange supply.  So, the Emperor agrees to off the kid.  And with that, we are about five minutes into the movie!

From here on out, things pretty much fall into place.  The Atreides go to Arrakis and they get ambushed.  Paul and his mother escape into the desert and encounter the native Fremen, who manage to live in the desert and have learned how to live with the incredibly destructive sand worms that are a danger to everybody else.  But why should the Fremen help these strangers?  And, even if Paul and his mother get help, what is next for them?  Revenge?  That seems a little petty.  How about a step toward universal domination via guns that are powered by special words?  That seems a little ridiculous.  It's a little of both.

Legend has it that David Lynch's final script called for this film to be a little over three hours long, but the movie studio forced it to be whittled down to a trim two-and-a-quarter hours.  I cannot find a way to suitably express my condolences to anyone who had to watch a three-hour version of this movie.  Two hours was all I could take, and that is only because I stopped questioning the plot.  This movie positively drags.  Well over half of the movie is pure exposition, with the ambush of the Atreides serving as a mid-movie huge action scene.  The odd thing about that battle is that very little of it is shown.  Then there is more exposition, and a whole boatload of weird stuff shoved into the last half hour.

The biggest problem I have with this film is its use of voice-overs.  Sometimes, they are used to explain plot.  Sometimes, they seem to indicate telepathy.  Whatever.  They are all just awful.  I don't need to hear Kyle MacLachlan's voice explaining more than his dialogue does --- I need the scenes to explain the plot, instead.  Voice-overs that explain plot are a lazy, cut-corner trick to salvage a movie that has become too expensive to re-shoot scenes, and the fact that this movie is full of them should indicate the quality of the movie.

Speaking of Kyle, I have to admit that I am not a big fan of his work.  He's actually not too bad here, but the things that the script forces his to say often sound really, really stupid.  Do you remember the Fatboy Slim song, "Weapon of Choice?"  It borrows one of Kyle's lines: "If we walk without rhythm, we won't attract the worm;" of course, Kyle then proceeds to walk normally.  Actually, I don't particularly dislike any of the actors in this film, with the possible exception of Kenneth McMillan who, as the evil Harkonnen leader, couldn't have been more comically evil if he had a six-pound handlebar mustache to twirl.  Brad Douriff, Sean Young, Linda Hunt, Freddie Jones, Richard Jordan, Dean Stockwell, Max von Sydow, and the already mentioned Jurgen Prochnow all played their small roles capably.  They looked and sounded silly doing so, but they took their jobs seriously and did the best they could in difficult circumstances.  Patrick Stewart has a small role in the film, too, but the aspect of his performance that struck me the most was the fact that he apparently grew a skullet as the movie progressed.  I can't say that I was particularly pleased by the young Alicia Witt (in her film debut) and her bizarre voice, but her character was pretty weird and the voice may have been changed in post-production.  Now, Sting gets a lot of attention on the various DVD covers for this film, and I'm not sure why.  Maybe because of this:

Umm...is that a bird...servicing him?

Whatever the case, Sting gets to overact and has an anticlimactic fight scene with Kyle.  I would critique his work, but I can't look at those weird fiberglass undies and keep a serious thought in my head.

So, at least the acting's not bad.  There's no great work, but it all fits the film.  For this movie to even come close to succeeding, though, it needs to look awesome.  As George Lucas has shown, if your movie is visually spectacular, nobody cares about the plot.  Sadly, Dune couldn't get that right, even with a large budget.  Problem #1: the stillsuit.

It's like they have Hitler 'staches, with a left sideburn connection

Everyone on Arrakis has to wear these things to survive; they recycle your body's moisture and fluids to prevent dehydration on the desert planet.  Unfortunately, that means that everybody spends substantial time wearing nose plugs.
Problem #2: the special effects looked bad, even by 1984 standards.

An actual frame from the movie.  No joke.

In the beginning of the movie, young Paul turns on his "bodyshield" for a sparring match; it is blocky, sometimes opaque, and it made Star Wars-inspired noises.  Awful.  Thankfully, this suit is never seen again after the half-hour mark.  The sets in general looked cheap, the costumes were lame, and the special effects were often not done to scale; when you see a human and a worm in the same frame, it's hard to tell how close they are supposed to be to each other.  For being a science fiction epic tale, there is surprisingly little imagination or innovation in the visual effects.
Problem #3: the story is damn near incomprehensible.

An actual page of script from Dune

I read several Dune books as a young whipper-snapper, and I was clueless when watching the movie.  I can only pity someone who approaches this movie out of pure curiosity or, worse, a devotion to David Lynch.  I choose my words carefully here, because I want there to be no misunderstanding: this movie is confusing, even by David Lynch standards.  That's right; it is easier to decode his movies where actors switch characters in the middle of the film than to follow this plot.

I'm not even going to go into Lynch's direction, except to say that this film looks awful, and that's usually his strong point.  Did you know that Lynch was considered as a director for Return of the Jedi?  He opted to make this mess instead.  I suppose that's a good thing, because his fondness for strange dwarf characters would only have lead to some bizarre scenes with the Ewoks.

The one good thing I can say about this movie is that it approaches the source material with respect.  The final product may resemble the diarrhea of someone who digested the book, but the intent to honor it was there.  I don't even want to blame anyone in particular for this monstrosity.  I just want to forget about it.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

It has been pointed out by my friends at No Bulljive that I have not reviewed a whole lot of science fiction movies yet, so I figured that I should begin to amend that with one of the greats.  Sure, I could ridicule Battlefield Earth (which is in my bottom 3 movies of all time) or Alien: Resurrection (which might join that elite company if I can ever sit through it again), but I want to start the New Year off right, or at least happily.

Blade Runner is based on a Philip K. Dick novel, the first of many of Dick works to be adapted for the big screen.  In 2019 Los Angeles, the world (or LA, at least) is a very different place.  For starters, American culture in Los Angeles appears on the verge of being consumed by Japanese culture.  There are other little things, too, like flying cars and space colonies, but the big difference between here and now and 2019 is the existence of replicants.  Replicants are genetically engineered beings that look like fully grown humans, but can have superior intelligence, strength, or appearances; since they are potentially so powerful and nearly indistinguishable from humans, replicants are outlawed on Earth, and can only live in the space colonies.  When some replicants steal a spaceship (killing every human aboard) and head to Los Angeles, what are the local police to do?

Yeeeah!

That's where Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) steps in.  Deckard is a retired police officer that is cajoled/politely blackmailed into service by his former boss, Bryant (M. Emmett Walsh).  Deckard is the best around and the only man to rival his skill as a Blade Runner (replicant identifier/hunter) was murdered by one of the replicants.  Deckard decides to go to the source of the replicants, the Tyrell Corporation, and speak to Tyrell himself (Joe Turkel).  To give Deckard an idea of what he is dealing with, Tyrell has him perform the standard "are you a replicant?" test on his assistant, Rachael (Sean Young); the test is supposed to determine how empathetic, and therefore human, the subject is.  It usually takes only a couple dozen questions to identify a replicant, but it took almost a hundred before Deckard was sure that Rachael was a replicant...and that she thought she was human.  Tricky!  The rest of the film follows Deckard on the trail of the replicants as they track down whatever it is they are in town for. 

Blade Runner is, in a very literal way, a detective story, but there's a lot more depth to it than you might expect from a typical crime and capture tale.  First off, Blade Runner is an excellent example of modern noir; the story is plot-driven, the characters are unemotional, and the film is full of shadows.  There is also a healthy dose of paranoia in the movie, as the other characters all seem to know something Deckard does not.  I think that the film's strength lies in its storytelling; the plot is pretty clear and the story has a satisfactory ending, but there are subtleties to the script that add ambiguity to certain issues and raise questions about others.  The obvious question (that I don't want to spoil for you), "Is Deckard a replicant?" can be argued convincingly from both sides, and I think that's pretty cool.  It's nice to see a science fiction movie that is not about a dystopian future, but is instead a story merely set in the future.  After all, the future can't always suck.

The performances in this film are generally pretty good.  Harrison Ford is a likable tough guy and I enjoy watching him play intelligent characters.  Rutger Hauer definitely had the meatiest supporting role; he was genuinely unsettling, playing such a calm and collected character with such rage inside him.  Most of the other actors served their purpose, but some of them had just a little touch of something special.  Sean Young had a bizarre hairstyle and made the most of her character's subtle, but complicated emotions; Edward James Olmos could have been a stereotypical cop, but they gave him a bizarre 2019 language to speak, a blend of English, Japanese, and (I think) a Slavic language; William Sanderson was surrounded by a creepy assortment of "living" toys; even Daryl "I'm a better actress when I don't speak" Hannah had some very interesting makeup.  The rest of the cast is noteworthy, but James Hong, Brion James, and Joe Turkel didn't add anything special to their roles.

Ridley Scott did a fantastic job coming up with this futuristic world.  Sure, he handled the actors well enough (particularly Hauer and Young), but the details that went into this movie are most impressive.  It's hard to put a finger on exactly what details stand out, though.  The weird Olmos language is certainly one, as is the Japanification of LA (if they really have street-side Asian noodle stands in 2019, I'm moving West!), but even the building designs are noticeably out-of-time, but still plausible.  I also liked the use of space to convey tone; busy streets sometimes helped develop a feeling of confusion or panic, but empty streets or rooms could imply danger, loneliness, or power.  Scott has an excellent eye for cinematography, so it shouldn't be surprising that the film looks great.

I should point out that this version of Blade Runner is the most recent version to be released; all in all, there are four cuts of the film available on DVD (all in the same package, too), with three or four other cuttings floating around somewhere.  The Final Cut makes some pretty significant changes to the original theatrical film, and many of the changes are noticeable from the Director's Cut, too.  I will tell you right now, though, not to waste your first viewing of Blade Runner on anything but The Final Cut.  The picture is far clearer than the previous versions, many technical problems are cleaned up, and several previously ambiguous moments are given clearer direction.  Each version of the movie is interesting, but The Final Cut is clearly the best of the bunch. 

It's difficult for me to explain exactly why Blade Runner impresses me so much.  It's well-shot, well-acted, and well-produced, it has depth and subtlety and a few "what the hell?" moments that make sense only if you choose to put some thought into the movie.  Plus, it inspired some of the lyrics to White Zombie's "More Human Than Human."  Yeah, that must be why this is a classic.  Yeeeeah!