For some reason I never saw Temple of Doom in the theater, which seems impossible..but I didn't. I had to wait to rent it on video, and I just remember hating it with a passion. Think I tried it again in highschool to the same results. And none of this makes sense either, because all the darkness and ugliness in that movie should have been right up my alley. Maybe it's because I got a promotional book for it when it was in theaters and it kind of spoiled all the good stuff.

Last edited by crumbsroom (6/05/2024 5:56 pm)

Sixteen Candles - I think AMH and Ringwald go a long way, and whatever his faults, Hughes gets teenagers like few others.

Breakin’ - I think most people prefer the campier sequel, but I found this pretty charming. The actors have good chemistry and the dance numbers feel spontaneous. Lucinda Dickey goes a long way.

Temple of Doom - Don’t care what anyone says. I love this movie. Spielberg is still at his technical peak. All the whiners calling this racist should realize literally no brown person actually finds this offensive.

Search for Spock - Haven’t seen this since my teenage years when one of the channels played all the TOS movies over a few weeks. I thought it was alright. Either 4 or 6 would have been my favourite.

Another example of the kind of warped 50s nostalgia filtered in a markedly dated 80s lens, this had Michael Pare hot off of the similarly nostalgic Eddie and the Cruisers and Diane Lane off of the similarly hypereal Rumble Fish and including a bunch of young definitively 80s faces - Willem DaFoe, Bill Paxton, Rick Moranis - just prior to each of them becoming definitive 80s faces.  Weird and cheesy and a riot.  I've been hearing things lately about this film getting rediscovered by young Zs, and god help them.




I'm not always sure whether my memory of these films are overlapping at times, but this film was more rap-centric, I believe, rather than focused on break-dancing, making this of more interest to hip hop fans generally.  I do remember there were arguments over which film was best, and there would still be a couple months before I could play my Purple Rain ace to shut them all down.


(I also watched Once Upon a Time in America on video, the two cassette version, but it really didn't hold my attention or interest, and it wouldn't be until a rewatch in the early 90s before I really felt that I could say I really actually watched it.)
 

Oh the dilemma!  The cruel summer of 1984 opened with the cruelest proposition of them all.  Which of these future classics should we go see?  The obvious answer was both, but which one would be easier to sneak into after the first?  Not that it mattered all that much, as we would inevitably watch both films multiple times in the theater before the summer was finished with us.  It does seem especially rare for the studios to force such a clash, as it seems that most opening weekends are better coordinated to avoid stepping on each others toes like this.

Ghostbusters was hilarious and only scary for, like, that one scene.  Hits the sweet spot in so many ways for an 80s kid.  Gremlins was also very funny and only pretend scary, and of course I went out and bought all the dolls.  Both films represent an apex of what would become the Amblin brand of fantasy entertainment, leading to a long string of films throughout the rest of the decade - Goonies, Cocoon, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, et al.
 

Rock wrote:

Beat Street has more breakdancing than Wild Style (the best of these movies, IMO) but less than the Breakin’ movies.

Throw in Krush Groove and I smell a long-overdue box set.

Another theater watch (actually a couple), another one of those films that seems more entertaining for a 10 year old than a proper older teenager, because by high school - the age of the protagonist - I would imagine that a certain amount of fresh cynicism would have prevented them from appreciating the earnest and whole-hearted gumption.  Luckily, I wasn't quite experienced enough yet to recognize the maudlin manipulations and paint-by-numbers after-school-special moralizing.  I just wanted the little guy (me!) to finally get to best the bullies and get the girl to boot.  Days of simple pleasures.  Also, "The Crane" became the greatest dancefloor move since Travolta's exclamatory side-point.





Had to wait for video to catch this one, and the typical take was always the same - "Nowhere nearly as funny as Airplane!".  Well, no shit.  But it's still plenty funny.  I was inconsolable when Val Kilmer one-ups James Brown by sticking his head in an oven onstage.  You just don't get films that willing very often.






Caught it on cable.  It's exactly as terrible as anyone has ever told you it was.  And then it gets worse.

That reminds me, I still need to watch Rhinestone.

Always chuckle remembering the “gasoline!” bit from Top Secret.

Fun fact: Conan the Barbarian was my first 'R'-rated viewing in a theater.  So watching its sequel in the theater was a no-brainer, which is unfortunate considering how the film was...well, a no-brainer affair.  Watered down to a PG-13, the film largely dispenses the original's mythic straight-faced tone in favor of wayy-too-much comic relief and general silliness.  If Barbarian is a graphic novel in the best sense, Destroyer is a comic book in the worst.




Like so many sex comedies of the 80s, the guys here are more like surrogate teenagers than adult men, and the 'R' seems more like a subterfuge technicality for a film aimed primarily at a male teen audience.  But, unlike dreck like Hardbodies, this film is actually funny and Tom Hanks has plenty of relatable charm and there are a few females who are actual characters rather than objects.  As outrageous as it is, it's never really very offensive.  Maybe except to PETA.





Another educational experience.  I liked the first Cannonball Run as goofy fun, so I went to a matinee for this, where I sat alone in the air-conditioned theater, undistracted so as to hone in introspectively on the slow dull but distinct realization that sometimes, somewhere in the bowels of Hollywood, people will make films without scripts and other people will agree to do them without reading the blank pages where they'd see a script was not, not at all out of any consideration for loyal viewers like myself with our hard-begged money, but rather all in the service of so many complex things that I could not yet understand like drugs, money laundering and tax write-offs.  I was like Ralphie discovering the decoded secret of sucker capitalism.
 

Did I say something about "tailor-made to my interests"?  Here's a film that seems like it was ripped straight from my private fantasies and channeled through my doppleganger, Barrett Oliver (all he needed was the glasses).  I was absolutely obsessed for a good minute trying to figure out what name he yells at the end.  Anyway, of course I watched this in a theater, and maybe a couple of dozen times on tape and cable or whenever I had the chance.  I even designed a line of toys and action figures that I could have sold with all that money and those factories I did not have access to.  And, btw, no, the horse did not actually drown during the shoot.  Just more slander spread by those PETA haters.





The inevitable antidote for all of the frat-boy sex comedies out there, but maybe it isn't the best message to say that the underdogs are capable of being every bit as sleezy and creepy as their entitled nemeses.  Still has the yuk-yuks though.





Watched on video.  At this age, I was willing to see anything involving computers, even though, as I mentioned in the OP, I was personally inept at them.  Here is a romantic comedy variation of 2001's HAL, voiced by Bud Cort, where a self-aware computer decides to cuck its owner by wooing his girlfriend (Virginia Madsen) away from him.  I didn't really know what to expect here, but I was disappointed about most of it.  It wasn't funny enough as a comedy, it wasn't sexy enough as a romance (I mean, compare to Madsen in Creator, for example), it wasn't thrilling enough as the horror it flirts with being in the back half.  Like most of these computer-oriented films, it's more about a projection of what computers can be than anything like what they actually were (which in 1984 was, um, mere computing machines).





This was a legendary disaster, so much so that even Eddie Murphy was shit-talking it instead of promoting it.  It was so legendary, in fact, that you kinda had to see it to believe what a true disaster looked like.  (For the record, it wasn't as bad as Cannonball Run II.)  The story goes that a film about Dudley Moore as a defense contractor had been shelved before completion, and that some executive had the bright idea of reshooting a few extra scenes with Eddie Murphy as a tank driver to insert into the incomplete picture, creating, I dunno, a film poster with two bankable stars that could make money before anyone figured it out.  The film is indeed not funny, even a bit boring, but (note the not-quite-10-year-old) does happen to have Helen Shaver in lingerie.  So...glass half full, is what I'm saying.
 

I was so goddamn mad.  Even my dad wouldn't let me see this in the theater.  I had already gotten hold of the soundtrack cassette, and apparently he was worried that there might be an explicit "Darling Nikki" scene or something.  Oh No!  Wouldn't that have been awful?  Guess I'll just have to sit here at home and look up "masturbate" in the dictionary instead.  Anyway, at least he went to see the movie, like a dog.  "Oh, was it good?  "  So I had to settle to watch it on video, because I was so much older five months later.  And Appolonia did not let me down.  The soundtrack is one of the very best albums of the decade, as we all know, and the film is...not really.  It's OK as an extended music video.  Prince is unintentionally hilarious, like a self-serious Zoolander.  Morris and the Time get to shine.  And it would take me about a decade before I learned that Prince's father isn't actually that bad but they felt they had to juice up the domestic drama so he got thrown under the bus of alcohol and abuse.  (It was actually Prince's mother who was alcoholic, and his father never laid a finger on her.)





Here's a film I haven't seen in forever, but I watched it 3 or 4 times on cable at the time.  It's a good little film, I remember, small town working class drama with enough comedy on the side, and a great cast from the Outsiders reuinion of Swayze and Howell with Jamie Lee and Jennifer Leigh.  It deserves a rewatch.





To flip the script a bit, this is not the typical frat-boy sex comedy that it is so clearly intentionally marketed as being.  In fact, in addition to instead having a central female protagonist (Melanie Meyrink), it was written and directed by women, and the director, Martha Coolidge (of above-par contemporary comedies Valley Girl and Real Genius) was actually fired from the film for not including enough gratuitous nudity on-screen.  Given all of this, the film is neither quite what its producers or its women creatives wanted, but it's a step above the expected soft-core spankfest.  (Did I know or understand any of these background dynamics when I saw and enjoyed the film?  Your honor, I invoke Melanie Meyrink in my defense.)





Here's a good sci-fi that I would normally enjoy.  Unfortunately, despite an excellent set-up, I did find much of it to drag and become uninvolving, especially those huge portions in the middle between the scenes of the actual experiment.  Now this could be due to my impatience at exposition, and my lack of clarity over where the factual history of this "based on true events" story ends and the fictional thriller begins.  But I did rewatch it somewhere in the 90s, after I had a slightly better grasp on the material, and I felt about the same on its dramatic merits.  The most plausible factual history is still hazy but maybe the Navy once conducted an invisibility experiement which accidentally microwaved a boatload of sailors, and the pure fictional fantasy involves all of the other time-travel stuff.