Die Hard Movie Review

I guess Die Hard has achieved something close to classic status by now. It’s a beloved action movie from the 80s (the heyday of big dumb action) with an up-and-coming movie star that spawned four sequels and a catch phrase. Taking another look at it I’ve found that it holds up well, but it’s certainly not great. It does just about everything right and hardly missteps until the very last scene, I’d say.

25 Years Ago This Month: December 1988

Typical of December, the final month of 1988 was full of releases vying desperately for awards consideration, especially Oscars. Eight films released in this month received Academy Award nominations, including all five of the Best Picture nominees.

As always, we start with what I've seen...

Barry Levinson's Rain Man was the box office behemoth of the year and winner of the Best Picture Oscar the following year. It embodies everything a typical "best picture" is, but mostly it's a rather simplistic portrait of autism produced at a time when virtually no one knew anything about the disorder. A quarter century later, many people can probably tell you something about it, most mistakenly that it's caused by childhood vaccinations. Dustin Hoffman's autistic savant is the very rare exception among people on the spectrum, but in 1988 it led most people to believe that being autistic meant being able to count cards and take the house in a Las Vegas casino.

25 Years Ago This Month: November 1988

What I've seen

Oliver & Company, inspired by Dickens' Oliver Twist, was Disney's predecessor to their animated musicals renaissance a year later. With songs by Billy Joel, it paved the way for The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. 

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown brought great international success, and a first Oscar nomination, to Pedro Almodóvar.

I always had a soft spot for the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged, a contemporary update of Dickens' A Christmas Carol with Murray as a cold-hearted TV executive who learns the meaning of Christmas through lessons delivered by a ghost played by Carol Kane, Bob Goldthwaite in the Bob Cratchit role. Also with Robert Mitchum, Karen Allen, and Alfre Woodard.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1988

The biggest movie of October 1988 was The Accused with Jodie Foster as a woman who is gang raped in a bar and Kelly McGillis as prosecuting attorney. This was the first big movie to deal directly with the issue of rape and really helped create a conversation about the role of the victim in rape. Foster won her first Oscar for the film.

Michael Myers returned to Haddonfield in Halloween 4, which I've already covered before.

Mary Gross, who got her start through 4 seasons of "Saturday Night Live", starred alongside Rebecca De Mornay in Feds, a not-so-funny comedy about two women struggling through the rigors of FBI training. Gross is the brainy one and De Mornay is physically capable, and they help each other through a male-dominated program.

25 Years Ago This Month: September 1988

Of course you can see in the September releases that the big summer blockbusters have finished and the studios are trotting out the stuff they think will contend for awards (at least the first of them anyway). So that's how you end up with...

Michael Apted's adaptation of Dian Fossey's story, Gorillas in the Mist, starring Sigourney Weaver as the doomed zoologist murdered in her cabin in the mountains of Rwanda.

Richard Dreyfuss starred alongside Raul Julia and Sonia Braga in Moon Over Parador, a comedy about an actor hired to play the part of a dictator of fictional Latin American country Parador after the death of the actual dictator. Obviously made to resemble Augusto Pinochet, he ended up looking like a cross between the Chilean dictator and Gaddafi.

25 Years Ago This Month: Eight Men Out Movie Review

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, the story of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal, is, on the one hand, an odd outlier compared to the rest of his work, and on the other, somewhat right in line with his plight of the working man sensibility. I’ve always been a great admirer of Sayles’ films. I especially enjoy the fact that he can make films illustrating the challenges of capitalism for laborers without being preachy or overtly socialist. He’s the more toned down American version of Ken Loach. In that respect, Eight Men Out fits right in because his version of the story, which is based on the book by Eliot Asinof, focuses more on the accused players as put-upon contracted laborers in thrall to a greedy owner who exploits their talents for financial gain. But amid his full body of work as writer and director it stands out as one of only two films he adapted from source material. So while he’s chosen to focus on the aspects that do appeal to him as a storyteller, the crux of the film is that it’s a historical sports movie, standing very much apart from his other work.

25 Years Ago This Month: August 1988

Cheers, Jesus.

The films I've seen

The most significant movie release of the month was The Last Temptation of Christ. Martin Scorsese had been trying for a decade to adapt Kazantzakis' controversial novel and finally got it made with Willem Dafoe in the starring role and Harvey Keitel as a Brooklyn-accented Judas. Of course it was idiotically boycotted by Christian groups, most of whom had probably not even bothered to watch the film to find out exactly what they were objecting to. It has since become one of the more important films in Scorsese's body of work and has been canonized by Criterion into their collection.

The biggest money maker was A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which I reviewed last year. It made nearly $50M at the box office and finished 19th for the year.

Now I loved Young Guns when I was a kid. I only ever saw it on cable, but it remains to this day a serious guilty pleasure of mine. Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid and then there's Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Casey Siemaszko, and a young Dermot Mulroney as his friends. Terence Stamp and Jack Palance add a veneer of respectability, but just a little.

25 Years Ago This Month: July 1988

The two biggest movies of the month were total counter-programming to one another.

First there was John McTiernan's Die Hard, a fine action thriller that spawned a string of increasingly ludicrous sequels. It solidified Bruce Willis as an action hero, helping him break out of his "Moonlighting" and romantic comedy typecasting, and it introduced Alan Rickman to American audiences as the suave and cunning villain Hans Gruber.

For the ladies there was Tom Cruise in Cocktail later in the month. Believe it or not, I've never actually seen it. I had no interest in it during its cable run in 1989/1990.

25 Years Ago This Month: June 1988

Three of the films that opened in June '88 went on to make the top 5 box office for the year.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was the big tent pole release of the month. Robert Zemeckis expertly fused live action scenes with animated characters in a way that wasn't gimicky. The story is well-crafted and provides the cartoons something to do other than be an annoying distraction.

25 Years Ago This Month: May 1988

We start with what I've seen:

Wow! The Wrong Guys featured five stand-up comedians (Louie Anderson; Richard Lewis; Richard Belzer; Franklyn Ajaye; Tim Thomerson) who are now much less remembered for their stand-up than for other things (if they're remembered at all) who get together in a little Scouts reunion to try climb the mountain they never managed to conquer as kids in a variation the midlife crisis plot.

Of course I already reviewed Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood in last October's "31 Days of Horror Reviews".

To my recollection Willow was one of only two movies from the year I saw in the theater, and also one of only about a half dozen I'd seen in my lifetime to that point. Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer star alongside one another in a fantasy adventure story produced by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard so it's the very definition of childish kitsch.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1988

We start with the movies I've seen

Stand and Deliver is one of those inspirational Hollywood movies about a teacher stepping into a bad classroom situation and turning the students around. This is based on a true story and the movie is well-regarded and was even selected for preservation as culturally significant by the Library of Congress. Edward James Olmos plays math teacher Jaime Escalante, who helped Mexican-American students in a high schoo lin East L.A. succeed at the AP Calculus exam.

25 Years Ago This Month: Biloxi Blues Short Cut Movie Review

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues picks up several years after his Brighton Beach Memoirs left off. Eugene Jerome (Matthew Broderick) is now finished with high school and headed for Army basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi, ahead of deployment to the War in the Pacific. His comrades in training include a muscle head and obnoxious jerk named Wykowski (Matt Mulhern); a New York intellectual, Arnold Epstein (Corey Parker); a dim-witted loud mouth, Selridge (Markus Flanagan); and a sort of nervous young soldier lacking in confidence (Casey Siemaszko).

Eugene goes through another coming-of-age tale, this time learning about the rigors of dealing with different personalities and backgrounds in a high stress environment, losing his virginity, and falling love (with the sweet and lovely Daisy, played by the equally sweet Penelope Ann Miller). Eugene, with his never-ending wisecracks, and Epstein, with his stubborn adherence to fairness, justice, and logic and refusal to go along with the army’s code of following orders, are foils for their drill instructor, Sgt. Toomey. In Christopher Walken, director Mike Nichols found the perfect actor to portray the soft-spoken, but menacing Toomey. He doesn’t get results by braying orders and insults a la Sgt Hartman in Full Metal Jacket, but by constantly undermining the appearance that humor and laughter will save these boys. His methods seem unorthodox from an outsider’s perspective, but barring a final act of madness he seems entirely reasonable as a man charged with training boys for war. I believe this was my first exposure to Walken and in a way it’s the quintessential Walken role and undertaken long before he became an object of parody and imitation.

Biloxi Blues works better as a movie than its predecessor thanks to Nichols’ direction. His vast experience in both film and stage means he’s able to make Simon’s screenplay more open while also working well with the actors to breathe fresh life into the dialogue. It never really feels like it was written with a live audience in mind.

25 Years Ago This Month: March 1988

We'll start with the movies I've seen:

At the time Switching Channels was on repeat on cable TV, I was still too young to care about these kind of adult comedies, though I did see most of it, albeit in bits and pieces. It is at least the fourth iteration of Ben Hecht's play The Front Page, which was also the source material for the far superior and classic His Girl Friday. This 80s version is an updating which takes the story awy from print media and into the TV broadcast news station. Unfortunately, Broadcast News came out the previous year and was a much better movie on similar subject matter. How long before we get another updating focusing on Internet news?

I guess I liked Vice Versa for some reason back when I was a kid. It was one of several switcheroo films, in which two minds change places, around that time. With Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage playing father and son whose minds change bodies through some kind of voodoo magic, it's not much different from Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron in Like Father, Like Son the previous year.

25 Years Ago This Month: February 1988

This was not a particularly interesting month of movie releases. There are new films from John Hughes, Wes Craven, and Roman Polanski, and Spike Lee's sophomore effort, but nothing that really awed critics or audiences. And not a single thing that has really survived a quarter century later beyond the odd pick-up off a rental shelf (or queue in today's parlance).

*movies I've seen

Apprentice to Murder starring Donald Sutherland and Chad Lowe doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. I can't track down any reviews other than Kevin Thomas's in the L.A. Times (he gives it a mixed to positive review), it has only 221 votes on the IMDb, and it's not in the Netflix database. Talk about movies that time forgot!

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a zombie chiller from director Wes Craven and starring Bill Pullman. It's got a rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but only just. The blurbs are mixed with some critics calling it Craven's best film to date and others calling it pedestrian or too trumped up with effects.

*She's Having a Baby is one of John Hughes' lesser efforts with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern as a young married couple and the trials and tribulations of trying to conceive.

25 Years Ago This Month: January 1988

Acclaimed director John Avildsen, of Rocky fame in the 70s, went on to direct all three Karate Kid films in the 80s and then followed that up by returning for Rocky V. But in between he made a little known and nearly forgotten film called For Keeps? which starred Molly Ringwald in a role that was supposed to help her break out of her typecast goody two shoes teenagers into more mature fare. She's a high school senior who gets pregnant and then gets married in a shotgun wedding to her boyfriend, who clearly is not ready for fatherhood at 18. Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars, saying:

And yet there is a certain bottom line of honesty in this movie, and if it is about the joy of young love, it is also about the pressures of young responsibility.

Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times mostly praised Molly Ringwald's performance. Jonathan Rosenbaum was not very kind at all in the Chicago Reader. I have not seen it since I was a kid. I felt grown up watching it, but I don't really remember how well it deals with important teen issues.

The Couch Trip - Dan Aykroyd plays an insane man posing as a psychiatrist on a radio talk show. Michael Ritchie, director of other middling 80s comedies such as Fletch and The Golden Child, directs. Walter Matthau and Charles Grodin also starred. From the mostly postive New York Times review:

The lines and situations in "The Couch Trip" aren't consistently first-rate, but the point of view is so engaging, and the performers so enthusiatically committed, that the movie makes willing co-conspirators of the members of the audience. Like Mr. Matthau, "The Couch Trip" can be good fun even when it's slouching around with nothing much to say.

 Then there was this mixed review from Roger Ebert:

The humor comes from the behavior, not the details of the plot - out of the moment, out of the carefully observed quirks of human nature. The best moments in "The Couch Trip" do exactly that, but there are not enough of them, and the ending is a mindless and meaningless action sequence, with Aykroyd dangling from a helicopter to talk Matthau out of jumping off the top of the Hollywood sign.

Other films released this month included Kiefer Sutherland in Promised Land; Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli in Rent-a-Cop; Return of the Living Dead Part II; Chuck Norris in Braddock: Missing in Action 3 which closed out the epic trilogy; early roles for Tim Robbins and John Turturro in Five Corners also starring Jodie Foster.

Film Debut: Pauly Shore in For Keeps?

Important Anniversaries Marked in 2013

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Movie Review

I was always much less familiar with the Halloween sequels growing up probably for a combination of two reasons: they weren't as popular and so didn't play on TV as often and they scared me a lot more so I avoided them.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

A writer’s strike was responsible for the production of the horror movie spoof Student Bodies in 1981 as well as Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1988. The differences are astounding. Whereas the earlier film was already written and given production backing by a major studio looking for non-union projects, the latter was written slapdash by Alan B. McElroy and a team of story writers in a matter of days to get it finished before the impending strike was to begin. Believe me, it feels rushed.

Bad Dreams Movie Review

I think my older sister had this on video and that's how I came to see it. My strong memories of it suggest that I saw it more than once, though. I found it scary enough as a kid.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

The entire premise of Bad Dreams falls apart by listening to the philosophy of the Jim Jones-like cult figure at the beginning who leads a 1970s hippie youth cult known as Unity Field in mass suicide. The deepest thing he espouses is that “life and death are two different states of being.” Whoa! If charismatic cult figures only peddled such cheap nonsense, they’d have few followers. One young girl escapes the flaming death trap at the last moment and wakes from her coma thirteen years later in a psychiatric institution.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood Movie Review

This particular chapter didn't figure quite as strongly in my childhood as the two on either side of it. I'm not sure why that is. I know I saw it, or most of it, piecemeal on TV. But my memories of this were scattered.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

It becomes fairly obvious by the seventh film in the series that the Friday the 13^th franchise was desperately seeking new ideas. So in Friday the 13^th Part VII: The New Blood, instead of simply unleashing Jason onto an unwitting group of youths in the woods, screenwriters Daryl Haney and Manuel Fidello decided to provide him with an adversary he’d never seen before. That’s how we wind up with Tina Shepherd, a teenager blessed (or cursed depending on your perspective) with the power of telekinesis. Her abilities are introduced in a brief prologue in which she accidentally kills her father by causing the collapse of a dock at Crystal Lake.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II Movie Review

My memory suggested that I had seen this film and watching it again confirmed that to some extent. Much of the movie was unfamiliar to me, but some parts were very familiar which seems to mean that I only ever saw bits and pieces while flipping channels. The truth is, the Hellraiser films just don't figure that heavily in my youth. But because they were something that most people my age knew about, talked about, and had seen, I decided to include the first two films in this October series.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

Yes, and that's about how you might feel while watching this film.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II comes across as if screenwriter Peter Atkins placed elements of Hellraiser on a board on the wall, threw darts at it while wearing a blindfold, and whatever he hit earned its place in the sequel. This film is a total mess. It is not only incoherent on its own terms, but barely meshes with its predecessor in any meaningful way. It retains the premise and the majority of the main characters, but loses any sense of plotting, cause and effect, and basic storytelling.