Back to the 80s: Al's favourites from the VIFF Centre's upcoming series

Having knocked it out of the park last year with a series of stellar 1970's films, the VIFF Centre has programmed a series of 60 1980s American films, starting soon. A series pass is only $199, and there is an option to buy a 10-pack for $99 (Indigenous peeps get in free, I'm told!). It's a very exciting series of movies, with several must-sees included. Without harping much on the things I hated about the 1980s - me 'n Robin Wood both! - here are the films nearest and dearest to me, the ones most likely to get me out of the house, the ones that tap into what nostalgia I do have for the 1980s - which is the nostalgia of an alienated white suburban punk, basically, searching the shelves of video stores of Maple Ridge for a lifeline to a world that made sense, because what I was seeing around me wasn't it, and Culture Club, the Tom Tom Club, Bananarama and so forth were NOT HELPING. This was, after all, the era where I was beginning to get out to movie theatres in earnest, the time of my formative cinematic experiences, the time when I was learning to love movies almost as much as I love music. All of these are films I have seen more than once, sometimes first run theatrically, all of them viewed in the decade of their first release. Some I have seen a dozen times or more, and yet may well see again this summer... 

Repo Man: Have I ever even seen Repo Man theatrically? I don't think so; that alone is reason for excitement. The vast majority of my screenings of it were on VHS, but I've owned at least three different versions of it on DVD and blu. I've also  interviewed writer/ director Alex Cox and the actor who plays Kevin, Zander Schloss. I still get joy from this film, many viewings later; it seems more and more of an unlikely accomplishment, a real slip-it-past-the-goalie move, the least likely film of the decade, in many ways, and the one that probably helped me most with that aforesaid alienation. My friends and I - the ones who made me watch the films I am less enamoured of in this program, like Ghostbusters and Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, despite my protestations - did not always agree about films, but Repo Man was a movie that we could recite dialogue verbatim from, because we watched it so many times: Did you do a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days? We didn't even GET the whole Kiss Me Deadly angle, but we would, on encountering a random synchronicity, sometimes mutter "plate of shrimp" at each other, or roll our eyes when at the mall and say "ordinary fucking people, I hate'm," just loud enough for each other to hear. It kept us sane, because Maple Ridge in the 1980s was NOT a very fun place to be growing up (I imagine the internet has improved things, but it didn't exist for us). Do you realize that Timothy Carey was almost cast as Bud? This guy - you've seen him in a Kubrick or a Cassavetes (or maybe even the Monkees' Head, befitting the Nesmith connection to Repo Man):

The experience of approaching Carey is very entertainingly detailed in Alex Cox's memoir, X Films. Also, you know From Dusk till Dawn? The vampire band? 

The singer, Tito Larriva, scored Repo Man with his band the Plugz, three of whose songs appear in the film; the rhythm section of the Plugz also accompanied Bob Dylan on Letterman, more on which here, while their drummer Chalo/ Charlie Quintana lived for years in Vancouver. Why is the Plugz' Better Luck not available on vinyl? Someone really needs to reissue it...  

An American Werewolf in London: Robin Wood, in his essential Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond, linked above in PDF form, writes about An American Werewolf in the context of the 1980s buddy movie: 

[t]he ambiguity or evasiveness of the buddy movies can be read positively in the context of the collapse of confidence in normality and in relation to Freudian theories of constitutional bisexuality: the men are explicitly defined as heterosexual yet involved in what can only be called a “male love story.” It is striking that, just before the sudden outcrop of explicitly gay movies, the buddy cycle virtually ends. My Bodyguard, with its extraordinary motorbike-riding montage sequence in which the two male teenagers are seen trying out all available positions, is perhaps its last fling; An American Werewolf in London might be seen as a corrupt mutant form, the male relationship made repulsive and impossible by the fact that one of the partners is progressively decomposing throughout the film.

Less reflective people I know roll their eyes at the idea that there's anything queerish between David and Jack, but I think if you don't read this film as being steeped in male ambivalence about heterosexuality, sorry, but you're not actually reading it at all, you're just watching it. Jenny Agutter is incredibly sexy in the film as Nurse Price, but Jack knows there is something wrong with him, something that involves secret, guilt-soaked rendezvous in porno theatres with a male friend, not to mention wearing women's clothing and waking up naked in the zoo (which I guess technically is not a regular feature of gay life, but still...). Consider this Spanish lobby card:

Anyhow, this is the only R-rated movie I tried to get into before I turned 18, but I would not lie at the box office, and so was turned away: "But I've already seen it with my father!" ('Struth, but it fell on deaf ears). I have seen it a dozen times or more since that time. For a John Landis movie, it's quite horrific at times; for a horror movie, it's quite funny (it even has Frank Oz in it!). Note: if you have not seen John Landis' earlier film Schlock, it actually has a strong relationship to this film (tho' I cannot say how without spoilers), and will enrich your appreciation of it; it will also expand your understanding of Landis' fixation on a certain line of dialogue from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which recurs throughout Landis' films, even his "Thriller" video, which riffs on Werewolf a little. By the by, you can see Schlock on Tubi for free. Landis has lost a fair bit of money, we gather, making sure that the film remains available, which he gripes affably about on the commentary for the blu (a great buy); I like him for this a lot. 

Suburbia: There are lots of good reasons to see this film, some of which apply to me, some less so, like being a big fan of TSOL's most artful, gothiest album Beneath the Shadows (songs from which get performed) or being fixated on Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers (he acts in it, and very well, too, creating a fun character as Razzle, the kid with the pet rat). 

...Or maybe you're a big fan of Slayer's cover of "Richard Hung Himself" and love the footage of the band who originally recorded it, D.I., performing it live; or the clips of the original Vandals, with Stevo, doing "The Legend of Pat Brown," based on a true story about a rather antisocial punk rocker, recounted in a very street-level narrative here (he really did try to run cops down with his car). But as much as I enjoy those performance clips - as much as they were a draw for me as a kid - I actually find the story to this film pretty moving (if at times bleak). It's basically the Roger Corman equivalent of Italian neorealism, as applied to the South California punk scene. It captures the prejudice and skepticism punks received in the 1980s, and speaks to our self-pity the way Die Hard speaks to the self-pity of manly white dudes everywhere. And yet as much as director Penelope Spheeris - who had previously made The Decline of Western Civilization and went on to more commercial fare like Wayne's World -  clearly enjoys her punk characters (real punks playing extensions of themselves, more-or-less) she doesn't try to flatter them or paint them as heroes. I interviewed Spheeris about the film when I hosted a screening of the movie a few years ago, apropos of my 50th birthday (and the third anniversary of Todd Serious' death); this will be a much nicer version of the film, which has since been restored and presented on an affordable blu. I think Erin of the Rebel Spell and Alien Boys, who came to the show, described it as "grim," but it's also pretty honest... 

Near Dark: Kathryn Bigelow is, in many ways, the most disappointing filmmaker of the 1980s, because I absolutely loved two of her films from that decade, Near Dark and Blue Steel. As she got increasingly enfranchised, she seemed to be drawn more to macho-boosting, "tough guy" films that flattered the centers of power, catered to their dubious political narratives, tacitly embraced "enhanced interrogation," and in the case of Detroit, just flat out seemed morally suspect, wallowing in the phenomenon it purported to be criticizing (which you could also say about The Hurt Locker). The breaking point initially came with Point Break, for me, but I've since come to terms with that film, my initial rejection of which had a lot to do with the fact that Keanu Reeves couldn't act his way out of a barrel back in those days (there's a scene in the film where a character describes the emotions she sees playing on Keanu's face that STILL reads like an attempt by Bigelow to make the audience realize what Reeves was supposed to be emoting, in the absence of any expression at all). I now enjoy what she does right up to Strange Days, but beyond that, I see very little trace of the things I loved in her early films (sorry, Ms. Bigelow. I guess your three Academy Awards must be some consolation). Near Dark - co-written by The Hitcher's Eric Red - in an unapologetic, highly inventive genre film, a vampire western with a love story. Blue Steel, not screening - maybe because it is technically from 1990, which to me is the last year of the 80s - is a feminist cop thriller about the male attraction to violence and how women have to come to terms with that (Jamie Lee Curtis' best role, maybe?). Blue Steel is probably the most interesting film Bigelow ever made, but Near Dark is the most fun, especially if you're a fan of the late great Bill Paxton, or Lance Henriksen, or Jenette Goldstein; they play three of the central vampires of the film (note: pretty much ALL of you have seen Goldstein somewhere else, but I bet most of you don't realize where!). We had some memorable lines from this one, too, my buddies and I,  none better than "I hate'em when they ain't been shaved." And the Cramps are on the soundtrack, too! Damn we watched this a lot; it even looked great on VHS, y'know? I have never seen Near Dark theatrically. How can I resist?

By the way, you Bill Paxton fans, did you realize that he co-directed the "Fish Heads" video? I am sure some of you did. It's just not as easy to impress people with this shit now that the internet is around. 

Blood Simple: This is a film that I actually had a hard time with the last time I revisited it, since a) I thought the Coens were silly to cut a few minutes out of it, apparently done solely for the perverse pleasure of having a director's cut that is shorter than the original; some of us have seen the film enough times that the missing lines leave an echoing gap in our experience of the movie, even if they're pretty silly/ negligible. Also, b), it was, for whatever reason, not a film that looked all that great when viewed with a flatscreen TV and blu-ray player. I had remembered it as gorgeously cinematic (even on VHS), but it looked oddly shot-on-video on my current setup, which was distracting as hell, because again, this is a movie that used to look pretty damn good on VHS and DVD. Nevermind all that, though: it's a great film, a stunning debut, and I'm sure it's going to look just fine on the big screen. People who hold to Roger Ebert's Walsh-Stanton rule, that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad," who have somehow not seen this film, should amend that forthwith, as it features what surely is M. Emmet Walsh's greatest performance. It also probably has Dan "Carla's husband" Hedaya's and John "Stathis Borans" Getz's best roles, too, though Frances McDormand gives herself more competition later on in her career; she's good in it, but she's a bit of a Helen Mirren figure, an actress who comes into her full force as she gets older. She mostly just has to be confused in Blood Simple, but boy, is her character good at that. 

I think if I had to pick my favourite murder scene of the 1980s, it would be this one:

Anyhoo, my friends and I used to talk about this movie, maybe sometimes with the aid of diagrams, to try to keep track of what everyone thinks is going on and what it means; as teenagers, we analyzed this film like it was Shakespeare. No one trusts anyone; everyone operates on assumptions; everyone misperceives everyone else, with only one character coming to a flash of realization as to the full depth of his own confusion, the instant before he is shot dead. There was a six year period when this was the high watermark for Joel and Ethan Coen, for me, the film of theirs that I loved, that made everything else they did (Raising Arizona, that is) seem kind of trivial. It remains their most European film, their most noirish film, and one of two films of theirs (the other being Miller's Crossing) that I love in a deep, personal, unqualified way, even though I have not seen it in some time. And again, I have never seen it theatrically! 

The Big Chill: ...But this film I did see theatrically, more than once, because in 1983, we still didn't have a VHS player at our house. Maple Ridge did have a theatre back then, however, the Stardust, and there were a few films I went to see repeatedly there, like The Big Chill and (another 80's favourite not repped in the series) Ordinary People. I think I had seen The Big Chill theatrically at least three times before we finally got a VHS player, whereupon I rented it and dubbed it onto VHS. I continued to watch it afterwards almost obsessively, between the ages of 15 and 17, because in 1983, the 1960s had a deep fascination for me, and because I was hungry to teach myself how to "read" film. I associated the popular culture of the 1980s with easily consumed, mindless trash - the Bananarama factor, let's say. Most of the movies, most of the music, almost all of television, hell, almost all of what passed for popular culture seemed cloying and annoying and false, brightly coloured, noisy, trivial confections designed to distract the masses from asking questions or being upset about things that were worth being upset about or noticing just how insane the world we were living in was. I've since come to terms with a lot of that - or at least run out of energy to object to it - and am prone to a certain nostalgia even for things I found irritating in the 1980s; hell, I even spun a Cyndi Lauper album BY CHOICE the other day and loved it - but back then, with very little trace of authentic culture to grab onto on the radio and television, with me still a year or so shy of "discovering" punk, and no internet to help me connect to other ways of thinking, I was prone to the same 60s nostalgia that people FROM THE ACTUAL 1960s had in spades. All the best rock music seemed to be from the 1960s and early 1970s; there were glimpses in song lyrics and in the films one saw on late night TV that people WERE taking the problems of the day seriously back then, that a politically-engaged, intelligent, focused popular culture HAD existed, that there had been popular ART being made, not just crap, before the 1980s came and stuffed our mouths, eyes and ears with brightly-wrapped, nutrition-free candies. How had we gone from Woodstock to Bananarama in the space of a generation? What the fuck had happened to our culture? How could a sensitive, intelligent kid not feel like he had to make sense of the 60s?

...so it was natural that I was fascinated by The Big Chill, about a group of friends from the 1960s coming to terms with their inheritance in those same 1980s, trying to understand, in the wake of a friend's suicide, what any of what they'd experienced together meant and what, of their past, still mattered to them. I wrote about the film at some length here, having revisited it shortly after the death of William Hurt. It holds up; if you try to tease a theme out of the film, you will find one, interwoven through a rich, complex web of character relations and sharply-written dialogue. The cast is great - especially Hurt, Mary Kay Place, Glenn Close, and Jeff Goldblum. There's also a great early role for Meg Tilly, whose character I adore and who does get points from me for being a bit of a homegirl (she lived near Maple Ridge for quite some time; I never have had cause to interact with her, but her partner back then, Colin Firth, was one of two celebrities I met while working at the Maple Ridge Rogers Video, the other being Art Bergmann; Firth actually came in to rent a movie, and I recognized his name, having seen him in a couple of films. He was shy about my attempt to engage him, though, and never returned to the store - I periodically checked his account to confirm this).  

Incidentally, I loved the character of Nick - William Hurt - so much that I went out and bought a corduroy jacket at a thrift store, in emulation of him, which I wore to junior high school. I was not a drug dealer; I was not even a drug user. I just loved the character of Nick. 

sex, lies and videotape: As was not the case with Kathryn Bigelow, who made a few great films early on, I only ever really loved one Steven Soderbergh film: this one (Schizopolis is kind of fun, too, mind you, but I've only seen it once). When this film - the forbear of dozens of multi-word-titled copycats like Sex, Lies and Naked Thighs - came out in 1989, I associated it with arthouse films that were being made at the time by Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing and Speaking Parts), Peter Mettler (The Top of His Head), and even some European cinema that made it into Maple Ridge, like Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch and Wim Wenders' The State of Things: self-aware, self-reflexive cinema that was as concerned the morality of filmmaking as it was with its characters, that called the viewer's own consumption of images into question, that asked you to think about what you were watching, HOW you were watching, and why... It was a type of cinema I was very given to back then, as I was asking questions of my own morality and image-use (what can I say, voyeurism, pornography, and masturbation are very relevant themes to a 21 year old, and they're all over the Soderbergh in question). There were more garish, outlandish examples of films that folded back on themselves (Body Double, say), but Soderbergh's debut had such a sincere, serious, self-questioning aspect that I rather fell in love with it. I made multiple trips to the theatre to see it first run; I bought and read Soderbergh's screenplay; and I even - when the VHS came out - made an audio recording of it so I could LISTEN to the film, without images (maybe the only time I have done that; I got almost all of it onto one audiocassette and listened to it through on headphones more than once). 

Alas, whatever sincere self-questioning you see in this film (and the others I mentioned) seemingly disappeared in the early 1990s, replaced by winking postmodernism (Tarantino and his imitators), Godardian irony (Araki, Hal Hartley), and, in the mainstream, big budget spectacle (Michael Bay, James Cameron, the continued dominance of Spielberg, etc). Even Soderbergh got dramatically less interesting. Maybe I just stopped noticing the right films, but sex, lies and videotape truly seems like an anomaly now - like if David Holzman's Diary had become a mainstream hit? 

In some ways, the key film of the decade - the film that contains qualities of the American cinema of the 1970s and prefigures the even shallower 1990s, is the next film under discussion, from 1982: 

First Blood: I assume we have all seen this movie at some point, but perhaps our memories of it are clouded by its less worthy sequels, two of which are reactionary, sub-cinematic Reaganite crap, and two of which are hyperviolent, lowbrow exploitation films (I actually quite enjoy those two, but they're definitely not the most sublime cinematic pleasures out there; they're basically splatter movies by another means). Even if you admired First Blood when you first saw it, and remember that it is a Ted Kotcheff film and also one of the very first acting roles - the second feature film role - of Bruce Greenwood, whom I assume is one of everyone's favourite Canadian actors, if you haven't seen it since the early 1980s, you probably will be surprised to revisit it. I certainly was. Filmed largely around Hope, BC., it is one of the few violent action films that climaxes in an explosion of tears. Which is actually a pretty radical, moral thing. The 70s pivot into the 80s, really, around the figure of John Rambo; the Rambo of First Blood owes to the battle-scarred, PTSD-afflicted vets of  70s films like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Rolling Thunder, and maybe even Taxi Driver (I gather there's some controversy about whether Travis was in Viet Nam, but it's certainly a believable theory). What comes later in the franchise, with Rambo the film, is rah-team bullshit and vicious wish-fulfillment (particularly visible in the fourth film, where the Burmese soldiers are basically the equivalent of the aliens in Aliens - an excuse for killing, with their humanity (and the actual politics of Myanmar) completely irrelevant. The film might as well be set in a fictional country, so as to avoid offending no one. We just want to see Rambo blow people up, and boy does he ever...

...by extreme contrast, First Blood is an honest, touching, powerful film about trying to reintegrate into society when the powers that be don't want to give you a break. It's a great movie, a moral movie, and an important movie, regardless of whatever has come since, and I'm really glad it's screening, because I missed all that 40th anniversary stuff that went on in Hope last year, and I'd love to see it on the big screen. It's been over 40 years since I last did!   

Matewan: I am running out of steam, and have nothing much fresh to say about this film, my second-favourite John Sayles movie after the under-appreciated Limbo, and as yet the only film of his to get the blu-ray release it deserves, via Criterion. Will Oldham fans out there should definitely see it for his role in the film, as Danny, the young preacher and union supporter (that's him, above!). The film was also the first great film to feature Chris Cooper, as a union organizer, and has a fantastic role for longtime Sayles collaborator David Strathairn, as well as Mary McDonnell (who later paired again with Strathairn in Sayles' Passion  Fish) and James Earl Jones. This is a moving, historically-based film about a devastating but important chapter in American labour history, involving coal miners in West Virginia who attempt to organize. My only quibble with it is that the company guns are almost cartoonish in their repugnant, irredeemable evil; Sayles is unable to rise above his own convictions and values to make them fully human, they're just bad guys. Otherwise this is one of Sayles' greatest accomplishments, and a film anyone concerned with labour history should see.   

Aliens: If I may seem like a snob above, picking the most counterculture-y, artsy, serious-minded and/or subversive films in the program as favourites, while snubbing "the fun stuff" like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Back to the Future, let me say this in my defense: of all of the films in the Back to the 80s series, the one I am most excited to see on the big screen is Aliens, which I still hold to be James Cameron's best film, and which I saw theatrically three or four times back in the day. I am not immune to a good action movie or a good shoot'em up; Aliens is maybe one of the best, and I'm doubly excited to learn that the version the VIFF Centre will be playing is the extended one with Ripley's backstory included - the stuff that made Sigourney Weaver sign on to the film, the stuff that motivates her protectiveness to Newt, which was later cut from the theatrical release. That missing footage is out there on home video, possibly in your own home video collection, but the extended version does not screen often, and (in Weaver's opinion as well, I assume) it IS the right way to see the film. 

Surely this is Sigourney Weaver's best role, the film she should be proud to be remembered for; it is almost definitely Michael Biehn's best work, too (an actor I really liked at the time, whose career did not really live up to the promise he showed in the films of James Cameron, but who is great in The Terminator and The Abyss, as well). It's going to be a pleasure to see this film in the "proper" cut on the big screen, which I've never had the chance to do, and to appreciate the fine work of Cameron, Weaver, Biehn, and the production designers and so forth behind this superbly-realized ball of excitement... 

...but while we're talking about the cast, as strong as it is, does the actress who plays Vasquez not utterly steal Aliens? Is her tough-talking Latina warrior not one of your very favourite characters in any action film, ever?  In the face of so much talent - Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton again, too! - the actress who plays Vasquez creates one of the most indelible tough-gals in cinema history. Howard Hawks would shit himself. It's funny that she's not better known, because...

Wait a minute. Who played Vasquez, anyhow? 

Yes, folks, that's Diamondback from Near Dark, Janette Goldstein. Maybe you already knew that; I didn't, not for an embarrassingly long time. While I'm guessing with a name like Goldstein she isn't actually Latina, and may even be wearing a bit of makeup to get her skin the right shade, she is so thoroughly believable in the role that it's almost impossible to object. If Michelle Rodriguez had been available back then, perhaps that would be a grounds for complaint, but Rodriguez was only nine when Aliens was released. So it's that same trio, Heriksen-Paxton-Goldstein, who make Near Dark so special, also at the very heart of Aliens. How 'bout that? 

So those are my top ten picks, the films nearest-and-dearest me, that will be screening at the VIFF Centre starting next week. 

There are at least another half-dozen films I might check out, films I love and have not seen on the screen in years, if ever. If you'll forgive me, I'll let you search out your own links on the VIFF Centre website. Some of the other films I'm thinking about hitting include Brazil, Down By Law, They Live, Scarface, Lost in America, and Streets of Fire, though, fun as that movie is - featuring a memorable role for Lee Ving of FEAR (below, with Willem Dafoe) and an appearance by the Blasters - I'm a bit sad that that was the Walter Hill picked. It's definitely a great night out at the cinema, a real crowd-pleaser of a film - a rock'n roll musical with songs by Jim Steinman of Bat Out of Hell fame; but I've always been more a Southern Comfort kind of guy, myself...

But it's still a hell of a series, even if you overlook those films I don't want to even think about. At least there's not a whole whack of John Hughes! 

...And then there's the films I have not seen. I am particularly curious about Born Into Flames, which feels like a film I should have seen in my 20s (except it wasn't possible). I saw Lizzie Borden's NEXT film, Working Girls, theatrically, and found it pretty bleak, but I somehow have completely missed this film, as well as another to-be-screened female fronted film of the time, Love Letters, with an early Jamie Lee Curtis performance - and directed by the person who made The Slumber Party Massacre! Finally, there's Hollywood Shuffle, about racial stereotypes in Hollywood, which also sounds very intriguing. Plus I've never seen Desperately Seeking Susan or done justice to Once Upon a Time in America, which I am assured is a masterpiece that I need to reconsider. Maybe I will? I don't think I've seen the full version to completion, to be honest (I turned it off, which won't be an option at the theatre).  

See you at the VIFF Centre...?