25 Years Ago This Month: January 1989

The deep doldrums of January brought only a handful of major releases. That's been typical for a long time as the theaters continue to be tied up with movies vying for big awards. So the studios tend to dump their garbage in the first month of the year so no one will notice.

January of 1989 brought some real stinkers.

First up is The Experts, starring Arye Gross and John Travolta (with mullets!!) in a late Cold War era comedy about two nightclub entrepreneurs who are drugged and kidnapped to the Soviet Union. They're placed in a town made to look and feel like a middle American town. It's populated by Soviet agents schooled in speaking with American accents and behaving "American." Travolta and Gross believe they are actually in Nebraska. America wins when the two begin indoctrinating these phony "Americans" with rock music and dancing which turns the would-be spies into America lovers.

Short Cut Movie Review: Heathers

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.

I once saw the near-deification of a teenager who had died in an accident involving tremendous stupidity. It was undeoubtedly tragic for his family and no one should have to go through that, but it was also disconcerting to see the outpouring of grief, memorials, and bad poetry for someone whom most people thought was a real jerk and a bully. I bring this up because I was reminded of it watching Heathers, the 1989 cult classic black comedy about teenage suicide and murder.

25 Years Ago This Month: September 1986

I have been remiss in keeping regular posts going and I completely forgot to get this entry together for the start of the month. Nevertheless, it is still September, so I haven't really missed my deadline.

Sort of oddly, the source I use for finding movie release dates has only a small handful of movies that opened in September 1986.

The most significant release of the month must have been David Lynch's weird and wild Blue Velvet, a story which begins by showing us a nice normal suburban American neighborhood with white picket fences, and then has our hero discover a severed ear in a grassy field. That ear only hints at the thematic darkness beneath the surface that would become a hallmark of Lynch's work. It contains one of the late Dennis Hopper's greatest performances, as well as excellent work from Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan.

Very Bad Things Movie Review: Very Bad Indeed

First published in The Connecticut College Voice on 25 November 1998.

I have made some minor editorial adjustments but nothing that affects the content of the review.

If there’s one thing I can promise after seeing Peter Berg’s Very Bad Things it’s that you will be disgusted, your head will be spinning, or both. In his directorial debut, Berg (who throws in a very subtle hint at his Copland character) has given us a new entry in what has been coined the New Geek Cinema, a new style of filmmaking largely attributed to the likes of Tarantino. The basic gist is that each film tries to outdo the other with outrageous situations, and perhaps also making light humor of it.

Jon Favreau is Kyle, a man who just wants to marry the girl of his dreams played by Cameron Diaz. But before the wedding, his four buddies decide to give him the bachelor party of a lifetime in Las Vegas. Drugs and alcohol abound, and then the stripper-prostitute arrives. As misfortune would have it, she gets killed accidentally during rough sex in the bathroom. Boyd (Christian Slater), the psychotic in the bunch, lays down two options. They can call the police and probably get in some serious trouble, or take the “105 pound problem” to the desert and bury her. Of course there’s more -- a security guard shows up at the hotel room, and Boyd murders him, leaving them two bodies to take care of.