25 Years Ago This Month: July 1989

Lethal Weapon 2 was the big release of the month, a sequel to the successful buddy cop film starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. The sequel added Joe Pesci for some truly annoying extra comic relief, but continued to tackle important topical issues. This time it was South African apartheid. Basically Riggs and Murtagh get to take down the racist institution all on their own. Or at least the criminal diplomat in Los Angeles running a major drug ring.

25 Years Ago This Month: June 1989

So in 1988, I believe I saw only two films in the cinema. I quadrupled that number in 1989, two of them arriving to theaters in June of that year. I can't say for sure I saw them right away, but most likely pretty quickly after my school year ended. Remember when superhero movie franchises began once a decade? Superman in 1978, followed by Batman eleven years later, and then Spider Man thirteen years after that? Then after that it just didn't stop. Now there's a new one about every month.

The biggest release of the year, and box office king of 1989, was the Tim Burton-directed Batman starring the unlikely Michael Keaton as the caped crusader and Jack Nicholson as The Joker. Kim Basinger, being a big star at the time, was cast as reporter Vicki Vale, the journalist with the alliterative name who is not Lois Lane. Nicholson was perfectly cast as the maniacal villain and no one could have imagined a better performance of the part until Heath Ledger. Everyone was suspicious, and rightly so, of Keaton as the hero. He was known for his comic roles and he had recently been great in the title role in Burton's Beetlejuice, but I always liked him in the part. I like his aloofness, his ability to deliver the comic lines without coming down on them too hard, and then be serious behind the mask.

25 Years Ago This Month: May 1989

Even though they were made during my lifetime, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom felt to me like they were from another time. Of course that's primarily because I was not cognizant of them when they were released and promoted and swept up huge sums of box office dollars. So when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was released, it felt like it was made for me. I had no inkling that it was made for me AND an older generation (not even all that far removed from my own really) who were looking to recapture the spirit of the first two films. For me, it was an amazing opportunity to see Dr. Jones on the big screen. The fact that he was up against Nazis again made it seem all the more like the repeat of Raiders that eleven-year old me was looking for. To watch it again now would probably diminish the film in my mind, though not as badly as the second film, I guess. Last Crusade went on to be the highest-grossing film of the year worldwide.

25 Years Ago This Month: Field of Dreams Movie Review

It’s amazing how, not even being a fan of baseball, I can still be moved by the nostalgia that drips off Field of Dreams. I hadn’t watched it since I was a kid, and I remembered it as being sort of overly sentimental and hackneyed, but as an adult, as a grown man who has learned to appreciate America and history and our collective cultural consciousness, Phil Alden Robinson’s adaptation of W.P. Kinsella’s fantasy novel stands out as a modern cinema classic.

25 Years Ago This Month: April 1989

We begin with what I've seen...

The biggest release of the month was Field of Dreams, still considered a sports movie classic starring Kevin Costner as a man compelled by voices to build a baseball diamond in his mid-west cornfield. He believes he was being guided in order to bring back the disgraced Chicago Black Sox - the eight players banned for life after taking money to throw the World Series in 1919. But the end has quite a different surprise in store. Ray Liotta plays "Shoeless" Joe Jackson and James Earl Jones has some wonderfully well-spoken lines and one classic speech about the timelessness of baseball.

25 Years Ago This Month: March 1989

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

Three of the great filmmakers of the 70s and 80s (Woody Allen; Francis Ford Coppola; Martin Scorsese) collaborated on the omnibus film New York Stories which encompasses three short vignettes. The first and best is "Life Lessons" (Scorsese) starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette about an artist living with his former lover, whose sexual escapades with other men fuel jealousy and a spark of creativity. Coppola's segment is "Life Without Zoe," a sort of fantasy about a girl living in a luxury hotel. "Oedipus Wrecks" is Allen's contribution, about a New York lawyer (played by Allen) haunted by his overbearing mother, who appears in the New York skyline to tell the whole city about her son's personal problems.

I reviewed it last year after taking a second look many years removed, but the cult classic Heathers was released a quarter century ago.

25 Years Ago This Month: February 1989

I always start with what I've seen...

Director Stephen Herek's second feature, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was released in February 1989. Herek started with Critters and went on to a career of directing second tier Hollywood movies. He has never made a major film. Even when I was in fifth grade, even at the tender, inexperienced age of ten or eleven, when most people have absolutely no discerning critical taste, I knew that Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure looked stupid. I had no interest then, no interest through the following years of middle school when friends talked about it and quoted it, no interest when the sequel arrived in 1991. And I certainly have no interest now in watching Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter play a couple of illiterate and retarded teenagers who time travel through history to help themselves write a school essay.

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.

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.