1989 Rewind: Sweetie

Jane Campion made a splash in the mid-'80s with a series of short films that received considerable critical acclaim. Her first, An Exercise in Discipline: Peel, won the Short Film Palme D'Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. In 1989, she parlayed her new clout into a full-length debut, and I can safely say that Sweetie is a film unlike any other I have ever seen. Well, perhaps it's not so original; for all I know, Sweetie could be the logical, for lack of a better term, progression from her shorts, which I have yet to see (though I note that the Criterion DVD of Sweetie, which I can assure I shall be ordering soon, collects her short films). Regardless, Sweetie belongs on the short list of the all-time greatest feature-length debuts, and it boldly announces a fearsome talent in Campion.

Campion opens the film on Kay (Karen Colston), a timid, mousy woman somewhere in her 20s, having tea leaves read by a fortune teller. The teller spins the usual yarn, but Kay hangs on every word, especially when the fortune teller mentions a man in her future with a question mark on his forehead. As fate would have it, she heads to work only to find that one of her co-workers has just gotten engaged to a man with a mole on his forehead that aligns cosmically with a wayward curl of hair to form the symbol. She meets Louis in the parking lot, tells him that they're meant to be together, and the two start having sex right there under a car, quite literally under Louis' fiancée's nose.

The film then jumps 13 months into the future, the first of many narrative ellipses. The couple, last seen lost in mutual infatuation on the concrete ground of a parking lot, are moving into a house together. We can only assume things have been going well, as Louis celebrates the occasion by tearing out their clothesline to plant a tree. "It'll be our anniversary tree," he chimes. But Kay, already shown to be superstitious, remarks that the leaves are yellow and, despite reassurances that all the plant needs is water and light, she begins to fret that the tree will die, symbolizing a doomed relationship.

Here, the cracks in an otherwise arty but still relatively straight-faced story begin to form. Kay, distressed that the tree will die and take their relationship with them, tears out the sapling in the middle of the night and hides it under the guest bed. Soon after, she catches cold and moves into the guest bed, though she declines to return to the marital bed when she recovers, looking relieved not to have to worry about sex anymore. For his part, Louis doesn't seem to mind too much either, and when the two get in bed at one point to try and have a go at it, both of them undress methodically as if it were a job, and they come to a mutual agreement that it feels too much like mating with a sibling.

Before Kay and Louis can figure out where they stand with their relationship, however, Kay's family comes out of the woodwork, collectively suffering from their own issues. Kay's parents, Gordon and Flo, have decided on a trial separation, though why or how they've reached this stage they don't tell us. Flo heads off into the Outback, and Gordon comes to live with Kay for a while to keep his anger and grief in check. Gordon's appearance causes a subtle amount of stress in Kay's life, as she too must try to glean what happened between her parents as she tries to salvage her own relationship.

But whatever discomfort her father caused cannot compare to the re-emergence of her big sister Dawn, a.k.a. Sweetie (Genevieve Lemon). A spoiled brat that never outgrow being a child (and not in that playful way we refer to people as "big kids"), Sweetie breaks into Kay's house when no one answers the door, and her sister and Louis return to find Sweetie clearly in the middle of a romp with her new "producer," Bob. We glean from interactions between Sweetie and Gordon that the father doted upon the daughter and favored her above both the other child and the wife. His enthusiasm for whatever attention-grabbing trick Sweetie pulled as a child has ingrained in her a pathological need to be the center of attention.

Sweetie's return sets up a Freudian nightmare of sibling conflict: Kay, the paranoid superego versus Dawn the unrestrained id. Dawn, now overweight and hanging on to a junkie as her producer/agent in total oblivion that her dream of being a star died long ago, is seductive and wild. But she also acts like a petulant five-year-old and, as we are presented this story from Kay's perspective, Sweetie is presented as a tormentor of souls; in a brief flashback, we see only Gordon fawning over Dawn, but no younger Kay nor Flo. One cannot argue, though, that this middle-aged, spike-haired Loki sows a certain level of peevish disruption among the other characters, most notably in Louis, who, suddenly sharing living space with someone with a sexual appetite, finds his own sex drive reawakened, further straining his and Kay's relationship.

Yet Campion gives us enough space to draw our own conclusions about Sweetie. Kay, unsympathetic, cold and demonstrably selfish -- she tore apart a seemingly healthy relationship just because an old bat read her tea leaves -- is not exactly an ideal person herself, and Sweetie's actions betray as much psychological imbalance as Kay with her paranoia and superstition. When Kay at last tires of Sweetie's hellraising antics she kicks her sister out of the house, and Dawn's reaction is to run to Kay's room and shove Kay's collection of miniature horses into her mouth. It's certainly childish, but when she spits them out we see that the horses were fragile and they've broken, cutting up the roof of her mouth. In that immature tantrum is a very serious will to self-harm, which is revisited at the end when, in protest, she climbs nude into a treehouse and stomps its unstable floor. She's so trapped in a failed childhood that people speak to and about her as if a kid; even Louis, who only just met her, tries to calm a vengeful Kay when Sweetie tears the sleeves off of Kay's blouse. "We've already talked about it," Louis states calmly as if he and Kay were parents discussing their daughter's misbehavior, "and I think she knows what she did is wrong." As much as she is annoying, egomaniacal and borderline psychopathic -- she growls and barks like a dog when angry -- the chief sentiment I felt towards this creature was pity.

But if Sweetie is, by her placement in the title and at the top of the opening credits, the impetus of the film's story and Kay is the true protagonist, then Gordon is the key to unlocking all of this. Clearly he still believes in Dawn, and the scene where he jubilantly encourages Dawn to show off her "chair trick" -- involving her simply standing on a chair, tipping it forward and "riding" it down without falling -- is a moment of pitch-black comedy and a subtle level of psychological horror. The sheer banality of it is funny, as Louis cannot even pretend to care about it and walks away bored. Yet the way that Gordon pushes his daughter to perform this little party trick, and her own excitement at the opportunity to show off, demonstrates how both are trapped in a world of delusion, each unwilling or unable to see the reality of their lives or to inform the other. One night, Kay spots Dawn helping their father bathe, the nonplussed look on all their faces suggesting that sort of thing isn't new and that perhaps none of the have ever heard of an Electra complex. After Kay, Louis and Gordon head to the Outback to reconcile Gordon and Flo, the mother implies to Kay that the reason for their separation was his continued dotage upon Dawn.

I was struck throughout the film by Campion's visual style. For the first 20 minutes or so, I almost expected Sweetie to concern the slow suffocation of middle-class domestication à la American Beauty or its ilk. In reading this description of the plot after Sweetie's arrival, you might expect a searing family docudrama along the lines of, say, Secrets & Lies. But Campion has a decidedly off-kilter style, at least at this stage of her career. In some ways, her use of high, awkward angles, color saturation, and bizarre, depraved dream sequences invokes David Lynch, or at least a mainstream version of the modern David Lynch, who is quite mainstream itself. Thus, I wouldn't call her style surrealistic by a long shot, but at every moment Campion seems to be setting up the story as more a fable than a document of one twisted family. Strangely, the most interesting aspect in her script (co-written with Gerard Lee) is the gaps in narrative: what happened in that 13 months that turned lovesick "destined" lovers into a frigid pair who acted as though they'd been trapped in a loveless marriage for decades? What exactly is the deal with visual flourishes like that odd cowboy dance out where Flo moved for the month? Campion gives us only one flashback, which itself offers no information that cannot be gleaned from the rest of the film and, I suspect, exists only to provide us with an image of the young Dawn to be used at the end of the film. Visually, her most striking element is a number of extreme close-ups that isolate characters, even when they're in the middle of a dialogue.

That isolation adds a larger element to Sweetie's themes, which include a subtle commentary on how negligent or doting parents can affect a child's psyche into adulthood (one could also take from that a more feminist viewpoint of how these two fragile women were warped by the men in their lives). It suggests that these characters, or all of us, can't connect with each other: Kay's frigidity prevents physical connection with Louis, Sweetie's insanity prevents self-awareness which isolates her from others, and Gordon's delusion prevents meaningful connection with any of his family, despite desperately wanting to keep them all together.

Sweetie ends on a tragic note, but one that perhaps signals the potential for change. The death brings out Kay's humanity at last, which she could share with her boyfriend; we see a close-up of Louis' feet, soon joined by Kay's, and the gentle, cautious game of footsie suggests sexual reconciliation. Then the real coda follows, and it's truly one of the creepiest scenes in any film: Gordon has a vision of the young Dawn, singing off-key but adorably so. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this: has Gordon at last seen the real Dawn, the one who never grew up, only more grotesque? Is this what he always saw when he looked at his daughter, incapable of processing that his little angel grew up to be a demon? Is this a hallucination that provides comfort, or is it torture? I don't know, but frankly I can't decide which interpretation disturbs me more. I'm never complaining about my family again.

1989 Rewind: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover

Films concerning food, or featuring food prominently in certain sections, typically work up an appetite in their audiences. Eat Drink Man Woman, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, hell, even Ratatouille have me jotting down plans for what to buy at the store or what type of restaurant I'm going before I'm done watching them. Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover takes place almost exclusively in a restaurant, where the chef is such a master that he toils over the artistic presentation of the food as much as its taste. However, anyone who could come away from Greenaway's picture looking forward to any sort of meal has any iron constitution to be feared and respected.

I'll give Greenaway this: he doesn't pussyfoot around. In the opening scene, the Thief, a gangster named Albert Spica (Michael Gambon) has a man stripped and covered in dog feces to teach him a lesson about making his payments on time. Spica somehow secured himself ownership of a gourmet restaurant, and he believes that by eating there every night he can slip into the upper class by way of imitation. But his boorish behavior, as well as that of his crass crew, belies his hysterically transparent aspirations of social advancement, and Greenaway juxtaposes him with the genuine class and composure of the Wife, Georgina (Helen Mirren). Georgina is detached and bored, though one suspects her seeming patience comes not from being aloof but for catching a beating whenever she dares question her lout of a husband.

As Spica and his gang drive customers away in droves with their behavior, Georgina suffers in silence, until she spots a quiet man reading a book across the dining room. The two engage in an affair without even speaking to one another, making love under Albert's nose and very nearly being caught several times. Though they initially make no emotional connection through words, we can sense what the two see in each other: Georgina finds someone with her dignity and carriage, a gentle soul who gives her comfort in sex. The lover, Michael (Alan Howard), an intellectual bookshop owner who finds the idea of a woman sitting so quietly by such an ogre so interesting that he's drawn to her sexually. After days of engaging in secret sex -- which the Cook (Richard Bohringer) knows about but never remarks upon -- the couple finally gets to properly introduce themselves when Albert notices Michael reading at his usual table and invites -- in his own way -- the man to come to his own table and meet his wife.

The story between the four forms a Rabelaisian view of Thatcherian England. Every night, the same group of thugs comes to terrorize the employees and patrons of the restaurant, and even those of us who don't treat ourselves to the fancier side of cuisine can tell that the massive, ostentatious dishes served to the table are unappealing and serve only to fill a fat stomach (one suspects this is the kitchen's form of rebellion against its new, oppressive, know-nothing overlord). Albert gives the cook, the man he beat and smeared at the start, two trucks filled with meat, but the bitter chef refuses them. So, they stay behind the restaurant, their contents rotting until authorities at last come because the stench is overpowering [as a side note, I wonder if the images of the rotting meat, possibly the most shocking sight in a film that truly gives you your pick of the litter, are a reference to the symbolic rotting food in Roman Polanski's Repulsion; both mark the passage of time as well as the mounting of chaos]. It's a picture of the sickening excess and waste and greed of Thatcher's politics, presented to us with images that become progressively more shocking as the true depths of Albert's mania manifest themselves.

Greenaway is first and foremost a painter, having originally applied to the Walthamstow College of Art with the intent of becoming a muralist, and the influence of art on his film is evident even in its title. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Like the title of a painting, it flatly describes what's in it, but not what it means, what these characters do, how they think, what they represent. The way that Greenaway uses and frames these characters certainly makes use of his artistic knowledge as well, though I confess my shameful lack of knowledge with nearly anything to do with art precludes me from speculating on his influences. If you do know your stuff and/or are simply curious, you can find a marvelous analysis here. However, I can readily see a connection between Greenaway and another artist-cum-director, David Lynch. Greenaway's use of lighting and color recalls Lynch's contemporary, more mainstream artistic usage of color and lighting to evoke moods and ratchet tension (though this film features an astonishing score courtesy of Michael Nyman, supposedly the man who coined the term "minimalism"): occasionally, he floods the screen with so much red light that distinguishing between objects is nearly impossible, as if the frame of a Bergman red fade got stuck in the middle of the fade-out.

One could also draw parallels between Greenaway and Stanley Kubrick. Both have a commanding vision and a keen understanding of cinematography, art design and acting, but they also have a similar sense of detached satire. In 2001, Kubrick defined humanity by our tools, the objects that strip us of our humanity by doing all of our jobs for us. Greenaway's script certainly has moments of dark hilarity, particularly some marvelously foreshadowing -- when Albert learns of the affair, he says he'll kill Michael and eat him, and Georgina asks Michael why he keeps so many books, saying at one point that he can't eat them -- but Greenaway's vision is considerably darker even than the outpourings of Kubrick's twisted mind. Comedian Bill Hicks once fatalistically said, in response to the notion of the beauty of mankind, "We're a virus with shoes." Greenaway largely follows that line of logic for his film: he films so many disgusting scenes of scatological, sexual and violent content to break us down to our essences. He seems to be saying that humans are nothing more than urine, crap, bile, blood and whatever other juices and fluids our bodies secrete.

That anti-humanist sentiment might explain why the actual restaurant draws our attention as much, if not more, than the characters. Each area of La Hollondais has its own specific color scheme: the exterior, where Albert first exercises his wrath and where the meat rots slowly, is dark blue and foreboding. The dining hall, where Albert makes a pig of himself and frequently explodes, is red. The kitchen is a faint green, cooler and more inviting but also faintly sickly. Interestingly, the physical properties of the kitchen warp depending on the overall mood of the concurrent events: at times it is a model of order and cleanliness, a kitchen worthy of a five star restaurant. At others, however, it is a dank, festering display of medieval barbarism choked with great slabs of uncleaned food, with fetid steam rising everywhere as if the place were built upon a giant manhole. Hilariously, the bathroom, a place where one deposits human waste and where Georgina and Michael engage in adulterous sex, is virgin white. One could easily read from the color scheme that the lovers' actions are not sinful because they find respite and joy in one another, but it also clues us into to the director's unflappability concerning our bowel movements and an acknowledgment that they are not dirty because they are a biological necessity.

Having watched The Informers recently, I was struck by the similarity between Greenaway's vision of a society choking itself on excess and the work of Bret Easton Ellis. But Greenaway sets himself apart from Ellis' literary output with a sense of artistry and a firm grasp of satire that Ellis never had, and cinematically no one, not even Christian Bale with his Patrick Bateman, has come within a league of Michael Gambon's terrifying performance as Albert; Albert is so utterly vile that even I, a professed cynic, psychologically could not see him live. He's the sort of character who, if he escaped the movie unpunished, would inspire you to go straight to the top and demand your money back from Greenaway himself. One must also note Helen Mirren's fearless performance, bottling her character's fear until it creates tension simply by manifesting itself, not to mention the bravery of spending so much time nude on a set (Howard also deserves kudos for this).

A number of reviews have agreed, some of them verbatim, that the characters each symbolize a certain aspect of late-'80s England: the Thief stands for Thatcher, her arrogance and her policies that supported mass greed; the Cook is a dutiful laborer who does as he told but grumbles privately against his master; the Lover is the liberal intellectual railing against Thatcher's policies. The Wife, of course, is Britain, who is shackled to the Thief and suffers his abuse, but ultimately triumphs and slays the beast. Who would have guessed that a film featuring excrement, a stabbing, several scenes of torture, a grisly murder and cannibalism could end on an optimistic note?

1989 Rewind: Mystery Train

By 1989 and with only three films under his belt, Jim Jarmusch already had an identifiable auteurist stamp: his movies typically followed hipsters, loners and outright foreigners as they silently struggle to make sense of a physically and emotionally deteriorating America. Often, one or more characters identifies with the music of an artist, the camera rarely moves and the comedy is derived from moments of quiet irony and restrained oddity.

Mystery Train certainly contains all of these elements, and it points to future Jarmusch works Coffee and Cigarettes and Night on Earth by introducing several entirely different segments with alternating casts. The title, the name of one of Elvis Presley's most enduring hits, clues us in to what artist will inform the sparse soundtrack, and though the plots and characters change across all three stories, the King remains a constant force, directly or indirectly, throughout the film.

Centered in Memphis, Mystery Train, incidentally Jarusch's first color film, is a step forward not only technologically but thematically. His foreign or at least alienated characters attempted to figure out New York City (Stranger Than Paradise) and, nominally, New Orleans (Down By Law), and Memphis is the last great city of the American cultural mythos to explore -- sure, you can argue Los Angeles for the film industry, but too much of Hollywood's output is product, not art. New York is where foreigners first arrive and where intellectual communities spring up, New Orleans birthed jazz, and Memphis is ground zero for both country and rock 'n' roll. Of the three cities, the brash attitude and the glittering ostentation of Memphis most closely aligns with our postwar cultural mindset; thus, Mystery Train, by dint of its setting, is Jarmusch's most ambitious film yet.

The first vignette, Far From Yokohama, follows a mismatched Japanese couple visiting Memphis to visit Sun Studios. The irrepressibly sunny and chattering Mitsuko obsesses over the King and wants to visit Sun Studios and Graceland, while the stoic and sullen Jun argues for Carl Perkins. They rent a room from a motel that winds up the central location of each segment, managed by a flamboyant maitre d' (Screamin' Jay Hawkins). Jun remarks that Memphis is simply Yokohama with more buildings (echoing a sentiment Eddie expressed over New York and Cleveland in Stranger Than Paradise), and the closest the couple has to a full display of emotion is a heated debate over their respective artists, which is funny because they have a sex scene.

Jarmusch brilliantly layers this sequence to set up the conceit of the entire film: the difficulty of communication between people. That's been Jarmusch's main thrust in his previous features, but never has he explored this theme so thoroughly. Obviously, Mitsuko and Jun experience communication issues with Americans -- in a superb scene, the pair stands bewildered as a Sun Studios guide barrels through a speech she's given endless times; she speaks so quickly that I suspect that Jarmusch played it through the couple's POV as it further stresses how hard she is to understand -- but the key depiction of personal isolation in the vignette occurs between Mitsuko and Jun. Their deep, confrontational love for different artists is less an expression of preference than a representation of their inability to find common ground. Thus, in retrospect, when they momentarily share headphones to listen to the titular song, its a bigger emotional payoff than the sex.

That out-of-the-box approach to the writing defines the other two stories as well. Luisa, an Italian widow, finds herself stranded in Memphis with her husband's casket after her plane breaks down in A Ghost. Jarmusch uses steady tracking shots to follow her around the streets as she looks for a hotel to sleep the night, remaining constantly perpendicular with the character as if taking in the city from the windows of a car. These shots are simultaneously beautiful but emotionally vacant, like a tourist's journey through a city. She eventually reaches the same hotel from the first segment, where she agrees to room with a fast-talking girl named Dee-Dee who ran out on her man so fast she forgot to bring enough cash to rent a room. Dee-Dee never shuts up until she falls asleep, Luisa tells her roommate about her day, but when they part in the morning, the two, who both had suddenly found themselves without their lovers and therefore had something to share, leave without making any sort of connection.

In contrast, the final and most absurdist segment, Lost in Space, turns the stark disconnect between characters in the first two parts into the most open and accessible comedy in a Jarmusch film since the "Ice Cream" scene from Down By Low. Elvis showed up in the second act as a ghost, and Jarmusch reincarnates the King in this segment as the protagonist: Johnny's friends call him Elvis, and casting former Clash frontman Joe Strummer adds another element to the idea of the rebirth of Elvis and, by extension, rock. Elvis, Dee-Dee's boyfriend, lost not only her but his job, so he drinks himself into a suicidal stupor, and it's up to his friend Will Robinson and Dee-Dee's brother-in-law Charlie (Steve Buscemi) to sit on him. The three end up shooting a store clerk and hiding in the motel, where a brooding connection between Charlie and Johnny is hilariously severed when Charlie, who believes himself Johnny's brother-in-law, finds out that Elvis and Dee-Dee never married.

Jarmusch links the vignettes together in a final series of shots that seriously highlights how the characters are as isolated as they were at the start even as Jarmusch indulges in some terrific comedy. Johnny, Charlie and Will hop in their truck and try to sneak out of town and past the cops, despite the fact that the cops aren't even looking for them. The final shot shows them, as well as the characters aboard the train, turns the shot of the heroes riding off into the sunset on its head, and I didn't know whether to reflect on the film at that moment or burst out laughing.

Not a single line is wasted in the sparse dialogue of the film, but what makes Mystery Train even better is the way Jarmusch ties not only the characters and actions of each vignette together but elements from his catalog into the movie. Tom Waits reprises his role as DJ Lee Baby Sims from Down By Law as the voice of the Memphis radio station. Screamin' Jay Hawkins' presence alone is a reference, intentional or not, to Stranger Than Paradise, but when he remarks to an unlucky Charlie, "Boy, you got a curse on you," he's not only foreshadowing future events but coming close to the title of his signature tune "I Put a Spell on You." In that sense, Jarmusch uses Mystery Train to summarize and mark the end of his '80s work, and while I may prefer Down By Law, there's no denying the genius of this film.

1989 Rewind: Drugstore Cowboy

Gus Van Sant's sophomore effort is a reference-worthy entry into two separate, though occasionally linked, genres: the outlaw road movie and the drug film. Its title works on both levels. The term "drugstore cowboy" is an idiom for those who get high on prescription medication, and the film's protagonist, for a time anyway, has the swagger and rugged quality of a cowboy. What outlaw and addict movies often share are characters who generally don't see themselves as bad people, who certainly don't strive to be bad people, yet they just can't help but make a bad situation worse.

In Drugstore Cowboy, Van Sant follows a ragtag group of users who get their kicks (and their next hit) from knocking off pharmacies. At the head of the group is Bob (Matt Dillon), a reckless yet cautiously superstitious thief who organizes his raids around perceived changes in luck. When he's "hot," he will rob any place, anywhere, any time of day, no matter the chances; when he's cold, he can barely leave his house from worry. He's married to his high-school sweetheart, Dianne (Kelly Lynch), though what romance might have existed between them faded long ago.

Bob and Dianne form an immediate dialectic that changes over the course of the film but still defines the contrasting moods of Van Sant's script. Bob lives for the thrill of the chase; whenever Dianne broaches the subject of sex, Bob changes the subject to the next heist. (In fairness, I'd imagine that drugged-up sex doesn't stimulate nearly as much as a hit). Dianne, on the other hand, just wants the end result. The effort of planning and carrying out a raid is the price she has to pay for her happiness.

In lieu of children, Bob and Dianne "raise" two younger junkies, Rick (James Le Gros) and Nadine (Heather Graham in an early role). They look after each other because they need each other to pull off the robberies, and the group becomes a makeshift, thoroughly dysfunctional family. That dynamic gives Drugstore Cowboy an edge that most other outlaw/drug movies didn't have at the time, a dynamic that was promptly diluted to an oversimplified essence and injected into most subsequent stories of addicts.

But that's not nearly the only aspect that films like Spun or Requiem For a Dream plunder from this incredible work. Van Sant doesn't use dizzying editing sprees to put us in the mind of the addict, but his close-ups and sound distortion bear an open influence on future drug movies. We see an extreme close-up of a needle pumping an Rx cocktail into an arm as the soundtrack warps and bends through the liquid drugs.

The special care taken with these shots, compared to the ennui of the scenes in between hits, prominently displays the priorities and desires of these characters. Dillon subverts the teen idol into which he'd been made throughout the '80s with Bob, making him into a charismatic rebel who is slowly revealed to be a hollow wretch.

The worm turns when Bob visits his mother. Where we've seen him up until this point as a cocky thief who proves a strange sort of leader, suddenly Bob stands withering as his mother, without ever raising her voice, refuses to let her son in the house. She clearly loves him, but she knows that Bob will steal anything that isn't nailed down the second he gets inside, and Bob just stands there and takes it, because he knows it's true. At that moment, the film morphs from a distanced, almost fun look at the world of prescription addiction into a tragedy.

The tragedy multiplies when Nadine overdoses, leaving the other three with a corpse to rid themselves of just as the motel they're staying at is swarmed by police attending a sheriff convention. That sounds like the makings of macabre comedy, but Van Sant brings out the despair and the urgency of the situation, not the cheap setup; the only irony to be found here is of the bitter variety. Tellingly, the survivors are just as concerned with how this affects their hits as they are with the body.

Nadine's death gives Bob a moment of clarity, though, and he pledges to go to rehab and clean himself up. Neither Dianne nor the cops who constantly trail Bob believe him, and Dianne lashes out at the very idea of sobriety. So enveloped in her world, in which the only comfort comes from drugs, she simply doesn't understand the desire to cut out that one node of happiness. She even visits Bob in rehab with a large sack filled with goodies like a perverse Halloween haul, hoping to lure him back to the darkness.

Simultaneously countering and supporting Dianne's argument is the appearance of a defrocked priest from Bob's past who shows up at the same facility. In his prime he would share his heroin with all the youth of the neighborhood who needed a fix, and now he's a bent frame, bones visible from behind skin. In the sort of hotel that only addicts and prostitutes frequent, he lectures Bob on the coming crackdown on drugs led by the "right-wingers," yet his haunting presence does nothing but confirm the mindset of those who wish to take the substances that enslave him away. The priest is played by beat author William S. Burroughs, reflecting his own past as an addict and, with every cough and drawn out, ragged word, conveys a man stuck in purgatory, forever chained to his addiction as penance.

Van Sant's film, like the best of outlaw and druggie movies, presents its characters with neither glorification nor condemnation. But neither does he pull back until he observes his characters through a removed filter of artistic curiosity. He places the camera directly inside this hellacious world of crushing ennui, where the drugs do not, as in Requiem For a Dream, offer momentary escape but simply deaden these blank fools further to blind them to reality. In Bob and his quest for sobriety we see the hope of the addict; in Dianne the crushing illogic that binds them to their world forever. Van Sant's ability to capture the two sides with equal empathy is what makes Drugstore Cowboy such a beautiful film, one whose somewhat uplifting ending feels more organic than the bleaker depths of many of its imitators.

1989 Rewind: Say Anything...

Cameron Crowe's films are distinctive because he gives us characters that somehow straddle the line between offbeat quirk and total relatability. When you see a teenager touring the country while tricking Rolling Stone into thinking he's a qualified writer, your first inclination is disbelief, yet you know it could happen because that's how Crowe himself got his start. An energetic sports agent suffering a crisis of conscience who loses every client but a single football player who lets his mouth get in the way of his talent is just so crazy it works.

The characters of Say Anything... are no different. Its story concerns three people: a book-smart valedictorian who's sweet and friendly but was too busying studying to ever make friends, her protective father who enjoys more of a best friend relationship with his daughter, and the lad who attempts to woo the girl. Each of these characters, however, as well as the supporting actors who populate this world, has his own unique trait. Lloyd Dobler himself is often described as being so perfect that no guy can ever reach his level.

The film opens with Lloyd (John Cusack), Diane Court (Ione Skye) and all the other seniors graduating from high school. In her graduation speech, Diane has her first moment of connection with her peers when she admits that she's scared of what the future holds for her. Lloyd decides to ask her out before it's too late, and his gal friends Corey (Lili Taylor) and D.C. (Amy Brooks) back him up. Both clearly are somewhat in love with their best bud, and it's not hard to see why: Cusack plays Lloyd with a dopey, clumsy charm. He has a propensity for incessant talking when he's nervous, and his big dream is to become a kickboxer because it would allow him to make a living without working within the corporate world. Lloyd espouses this political opinion with such a humble matter-of-factness that you can tell he genuinely believes it and is not simply putting on a show.

He's also unflinchingly sweet. When he calls Diane to ask her out, he gets her dad Jim (John Mahoney). He stumbles through an awkward conversation and sort of flubs, "She's pretty great, isn't she?" to which the dad can only smile and attest. When Lloyd eventually does get a hold of her and she agrees to come to a graduation party, she has to field questions from rude partygoers as to why she would come with Lloyd. Without hesitation, she says, "He made me laugh." Diane is that girl in high school that everyone noticed but was too afraid to approach. Coupled with her own obliviousness to the school around her, she's just as naïve and maladjusted as Lloyd; she's just smarter and not as awkward.

Lloyd and Diane's relationship must be one of the most romantic in all of cinema. When the two do eventually have sex, we are treated to an actual love scene. Not a sex scene, a love scene. The day after, Lloyd sends Diane a short note that expresses his feelings for her beyond getting in her pants, and Corey and D.C. are visibly moved. Diane is so taken with Lloyd's complete earnestness that the two grow close in no time, much to the dismay of Diane's father. Diane keeps nothing from Jim, and even admits that she and Lloyd had sex. The initially genial man who lavishes gifts upon his daughter and recognizes Lloyd as a harmless and sweet sap grows increasingly cold, until we discover that he's been defrauding the IRS and stealing from the residents of the nursing home he runs.

Jim's dark secret struck me as unnecessary the first time I watched Say Anything..., but after a few more watches and a few listens to the commentary, I see it as vital to the story. Watch from the beginning: Jim knows that the hammer will fall any day, but he keeps up the façade just long enough to ensure that his daughter receives her fellowship to England. He wants to keep everything together until he can get her out of his corrupt life, and the title takes an ironic undertone as we see what appeared to be an ideal father-child relationship crumble to reveal itself as a part of a giant lie. Re-watching the film gives me an understanding and a sympathy for Jim, despite the heinousness of ripping off a bunch of invalids.

The supporting characters are no less interesting. Jeremy Piven makes a great cameo as a wild, drunken fool, while Phillip Baker Hall's IRS agent creates a sinking feeling in your stomach when he tells Diane that her father is guilty in that deep, merciless voice of his. Lili Taylor, though, walks away with the entire film. Corey is neck-deep in a tumultuous relationship with a callous, cheating jerk named Joe, but her reactions to her despair never fail to make me laugh. Crowe frames every shot placed in her room to contain a picture of Joe or something he wrote. At the graduation party in the first act, she spends the entire night playing a myriad of songs, some remorseful, some angry. Lloyd notes to Joe, "She's written 65 songs...They're all about you. They're all about pain." Taylor has a way of getting big laughs effortlessly, but she also conveys deep pain and a thinly veiled longing for a person like Lloyd.

Everything about this film is perfect. It doesn't make grand proclamations about the human condition, nor does it feature any memorable direction -- it was Crowe's first time behind the camera, though his camerawork has never been the main draw of his work. However, the direction fits this simple but profound piece, and it captures the story perfectly. The actors are so natural that you stop viewing them as characters despite their quirks, and they become so much more memorable for it. When Lloyd gives his fantastic speech to Jim and his business partners about not wanting to work in any occupation that buys, sells or processes, he casually mentions that his army dad wants him to enlist, but he "just can't work for that corporation." It's a brilliant line, but Cusack delivers it so casually you'd just assume the Army was a corporation.

The actors only bolster Crowe's knowing script, one that contains its fair share of platitudes about love that are on-point enough to stave off cloying sentimentality. Honestly, Crowe must be the finest director of sentimental pictures since Frank Capra: neither is perfect, but they have a knack for capturing a fundamental optimism and hope even in the midst of darkness. The difference between the two is that Crowe's films are more intimate more -- as he says in his commentary for Almost Famous -- "shamelessly personal," and I just can't help but love them.

1989 Rewind: Batman

Perhaps it's fate that I've always loved Batman. Growing up, I never read comics but I watched this movie religiously, tuned in for the legendary Batman: The Animated Series whenever it was on, and my bedroom was decorated with all things Batman: Batman wallpaper, Batman bedspreads, Batman toys. And I was born only a few weeks after Batman premiered, so I like to think that the ubiquitous advertising imprinted my fetal brain. In fact, considering how my mom always waits two weeks to see every new film anyway, I'm convinced that I was so excited to see the film for myself that, soon after she left the theater, I decided it was time. And then the stork came to deliver me because that's the only way this theory can be more absurd.

Regardless, Batman is likely the single biggest icon of my youth, which makes it all the stranger that I have not revisited this film in, oh dear, nearly six years. I hadn't sat down with it since before Batman Begins came out, so I spent a good 10 minutes in the store holding the Blu-Ray in my hands wondering if I should shell out the cash. How would Burton's film stack up now that the frame of reference included Christopher Nolan's superb installments and not just Joel Schumacher's travesties? I finally caved and timidly loaded the disc into my player.

To my great surprise, Batman holds up, albeit in ways I could have never expected. As a Batman film, it's almost laughable: it retcons the backstories of both Batman and the Joker to entwine their fates at the expense of any plausibility. The Joker's backstory as a whole grates; clearly Burton, openly averse to comics, based it on the backstory given in Alan Moore's seminal book The Killing Joke, but what he and writer Sam Hamm failed to take into account is that the book openly reveals that past to be a figment of the Joker's mad imagination, and he's a character who should never be explained. Hamm pleads innocent, however, to the Joker being tied into the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents and cites a writers' strike for him not being able to stop this nonsense from happening.

Batman also suffers from some weak supporting characters. Kim Basinger works well within an extremely narrow range, but Meryl Streep couldn't have given Vicki Vale enough of a personality to hang a hat on. Women have long been fabricated in Batman movies expressly to provide a love interest to a man who is too absorbed in his own pathos to ever hold down a steady relationship -- not even Nolan handled this aspect well, though at least he found a way to make Rachel important to the story -- but Vale just sucks the life out of scenes. Even worse is Robert Wuhl's Knox, a snobbish reporter who smacks of the clinging third wheel Albert Brooks played to Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, only not nearly as funny.

Nonetheless, the film succeeds, and it succeeds brilliantly. Not as a Batman or even a comic book movie, mind you, but as a demented slice of neo-noir. Burton's Gotham City is neither a realistic city nor a comic book city; instead, it is a glorious hybrid of German expressionism, Gothic architecture and Art Deco. As with Taxi Driver, colored steam hisses out of vents and manholes at all times, the streets are wet with fetid, stagnant water and the city as a whole almost feels like a criminal.

Michael Keaton's casting caused a great deal of controversy at the time, but he proves to be a great Batman, the best of the entire series, in fact. He can alter his voice and body language between Bruce Wayne and the Bat without lapsing into death metal growls (sorry, Christian), and this comedic actor brings serious intimidation to the part. He's such a natural in the role that he almost overcomes the complete lack of writing on the Bruce Wayne side of the character. The film's chief flaw, Bruce isn't so much mild-mannered as downright milquetoast.

I'd wager that's because Burton put all of his energy into capturing the Joker. He never nails down what makes the character so interesting -- that he reflects the sort of person Batman has to struggle daily to prevent himself from being -- and the closest he comes is a simplistic equation of the two as "freaks." But Jack Nicholson is the reason remember the film: of all the roles in which Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson, none benefits as much as the Joker. A synecdoche of the film proper, he straddles the line between the campy, over-the-top nature of the old serial (which bears more similarities to the film than any of the makers would care to admit) and a more serious tone that Burton and everyone else involved with the project. While I find Keaton's performance far more of a revelation than Nicholson's, his Joker leaps off the screen with his gleeful, prankster insanity.

Burton obviously designed the film around his set pieces, but that makes for a visually resplendent noir, one that you can't help but love. Audiences in 1989 certainly did, as Batman was the biggest phenomenon ever, even bigger than Star Wars. Where movies like Star Wars or The Exorcist became mass hits through word of mouth and saturation booking, Batman became the first film to make a spectacle out of the marketing itself. A retrospective documentary of the entire first run of Batman films, broken up over the four movies, discusses the marketing, and images of fans buying merchandise months before release, of vandals stealing posters from bus stops and entire walls plastered with that simple, effective logo are staggering.

I wasn't there -- well, I guess I kind of was, but it's impossible to fondly recollect fetal memories -- but Batman is as much a nostalgic experience for me as it must be for all those who worked themselves into a frenzy for this movie. As such, perhaps my opinion is weighted by fond remembrances of my childhood. I do see the flaws, however, and they are glaring. I simply don't think they detract enough from the experience of walking through Tim Burton's world. It's actually better than I remember, because now I don't feel the need to hold it to rigid continuity (as if comic books only follow one set timeline anyway). While Basinger and Wuhl take away from the film, the two leads as well as strong actors such as Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, William Hootkins and Jack Palance keep you paying attention to them, which is impressive considering how tempting it is to simply sit back and admire the sets. Not even Prince's dated, ill-fitting soundtrack ruins it thanks to it playing second fiddle to Danny Elfman's excellent score (and that theme...oh, that theme). While it's nowhere near the best of 1989 I've seen, it remains a personal favorite and a film I'd care to re-watch just as many times as I would Nolan's franchise.

1989 Rewind: The Decalogue

"God is very simple, if you have faith," says the aunt of a young agnostic in the first installment of Krzysztof Kieślowski's ten-part series The Decalogue. But that's the thing, isn't it? Faith is always easy for those who have it, those who have never paused to reflect upon it. The people who need it most, however, will only ever see madness and illogic of it. You likely wouldn't expect Kiéslowski, himself an agnostic if not an outright atheist, to write and direct a series on the Ten Commandments, but then how many of the atheist Bergman's films are the greatest movies on faith ever made?

Besides, The Decalogue reflects Kiéslowski and co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz's manner of handling themes metaphysically and intimately. These 10 films neither praise faith nor condemn it, nor do they deal exclusively with one commandment at a time. For example, Part III, concerning the commandment "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy," barely ties into that commandment and instead focuses on a lie. Many of the short films deals with more than one commandment at a time, with characters from other parts slipping in and out of the camera's peripheral vision as they move throughout the apartment complex the characters all share.

Each part was written by Piesiewicz and Kiéslowski and directed by Kiéslowski, but they used a different cinematographer each time to reflect the shifting tone of each chapter. Part III and its Yuletide setting are festive, while Part V, "Thou shalt not kill," is appropriately unsettling. Each of the films uses the sort of soft, cheap stock made for TV at the time, butKiéslowski makes them no less mesmerizing than his glorious Three Colors trilogy. He knows just how to light his characters, the angle and color, to emphasize his themes and their thoughts without being too obvious about it.

Each of the short films works because the director uses the Commandments as a loose guideline for an idea, not as the rigid backbone of the episode. Part VII, "Thou shalt not steal" revolves around a kidnapping, but it is the mother who takes her own child, away from the child's grandmother, who poses as her mom. A Jewish student reveals to a professor that she is the girl the woman denied shelter to when she was hiding from the Nazis in Part VIII. The lie of the professor's life sparks a conversation between the two that brings the truth to light, but not in a way you might expect.

You see, these are real people, not artistic abstractions. Kiéslowski has the ability to take Bergman's philosophies and torments and let them flow naturally through conversations, not the despaired outcries of creations every bit as manufactured and meticulously placed as the rest of themise-en-scène (not a criticism, mind you). The intelligent scientist and his genius son program a computer to tell them when the local lake has iced over enough to be safely skated. The two place their faith in the machine, to tragic results. When the father turns to God in the end, this is not the moral of the story but rather the outgrowth of a man who's previous faith was shattered. The entire point of Decalogue I is not to mock science but blind faith in any philosophy.

The actors are uniformly superb, precisely because none calls attention to himself. In Part VI, the best of the 10 films, a young postal clerk falls in love with a woman and begins to spy on her. When he finally professes his love, she humiliates him sexually to prove that there is no such thing as love, only sex. The lad, played by OlafLubaszenko, is believably timid and ultimately sweet-natured, while the woman (Grazyna Szapolowska ) is hardened and jaded without coming off as artificial or overly bitchy. The story takes a number of turns as the boy attempts suicide, only for the woman to fall for him after all. It becomes a sort of battle of wits between the two, one that moves far outside the framework of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and becomes something far more resonant for it.

The plotting of this world is sublime. In the professor's lecture in Part VIII, a student brings up the philosophical debate of Part II, wherein a woman decided to abort her lover's child based on her near-death husband's outcome and placed much of the responsibility for choosing on the doctor. In eight of the episodes, a strange man sits outside the apartment complex, silently watching events unfold. The director admitted he had no idea what the man stood for, but the obvious and popular response is that he is either Jesus or an angel, watching with displeasure as these characters commit their sins though never intervening.

The Decalogue is by turns bleak and hopeful: Part VII shows our young mother stripped once more of her child, while the ethical discussion of Part VIII renews the student's faith in humanity. Part X is the closest the director ever came to outright farce. These stories always seem to hit just the right notes and effortlessly display the myriad of emotions of the human condition because everything is so natural and underplayed. What we have here is one of the greatest achievements by any artist of the 20th century. Though planned as a TV miniseries and shot with TV stock for little cash, it is one of the towering works of cinema. I sit here now holding my rental copies and resigning myself to returning them, forcing myself not to break out the debit card and order a copy of my own (I need a job). If you're interested in foreign cinema or film in general, you simply must view this extraordinary, moving, dense yet completely engaging work.

1989 Rewind: Ghostbusters II

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I like Ghostbusters II. Yes, it's so derivative of the first, unbelievably superior film that I didn't even bother writing a review for that one since I'd re-cover too much ground, but that just goes to show that the first was so good even a shameless retread is worth watching.

Even though I like the film, I must recognize that the first 10 minutes border on the insulting. It's not like Ghostbusters established much of a mythos -- though it did spawn a beloved cult cartoon -- but Ramis devotes the early parts of the film to shamelessly expositional dialogue to explain all of the stuff that happened in the interim between films. I don't believe that a comedy film shouldn't have plot, but why on Earth must we sit through hearing about Dana's (Sigourney Weaver) break-up with Peter, her marriage to that musician dude and their divorce, not to mention how the Ghostbusters are somehow now kaput despite a hero's welcome at the end of the last film? And don't even get me started on Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston (Ernie Hudson) showing up at a kid's birthday party for some desperately needed cash only to dance to the actual Ghostbusters theme song.

Its plot, though clearly strung together to allow for bits and witticisms, actually works. It takes some contrived steps to make the Ghostbusters the underdogs again -- the city of New York served them with a restraining order from catching ghosts after all the collateral damage they caused last time -- but it lets them essentially stick to all of the character traits the actors hammered out so well the first film. Now they must contend with a mysterious slime filling the tunnels and a painting containing the soul of a 17th century tyrant seeking to become corporeal again by possessing Dana's baby.

Really though, Ghostbusters II, like the previous film, is all about the cast. Hudson gets the fewest lines, but his presence is necessary to give this group a working man feel as opposed to a group of nerdy, irresponsible scientists. Ramis and Aykroyd throw this off a bit by telling one too many nerd jokes, which go beyond the cheeky, literate humor of the first and into hoping that the audience will laugh at that which they do not understand. Nevertheless, they have enough peevish delight in them to give the characters a certain endearing dopey quality. Rick Moranis, who nearly stole the show the first time, has a bigger part and manages to add some dimensions to his bashful fool. When he tosses out a line like "Well, I used to have a roommate, but my mom moved to Florida" without a shred of irony, you know you've struck gold.

Of course, it's Murray, who crystallized everything that would make him BILL MURRAY in the first film, who carries the film as he scores hit after hit as the drier-than-the-Sahara Peter Venkman. He broke up with Dana because of commitment issues, but you get the feeling he did it just so he could keep chasing her. Every single word that flies from his lips has that glorious and utterly inimitable combination of an abyss of cynicism and a boyish gleam. There's a reason why his collaborations with Ramis remain so rewarding: they were the perfect fit. When Egon investigates Dana's apartment and clinically says, "I'd like to run some gynecological exams on the mother," no one on Earth but Murray could deliver Peter's response, "Who wouldn't?" and make it even funnier than it is on paper.

As with the previous film, Ghostbusters II climaxes with an over-the-top effect that's as hysterical as it is thrilling. The Statue of Liberty gag would be seen as absurd and narrative-killing in any other feature, but how exactly do you jump the shark on a franchise that previously featured a giant, killer marshmallow? I find myself laughing almost continuously through the scene, and the overly action-y showdown at the end does little to detract from the laughs.

Despite great scenes like this and assured acting from the returning cast, Ghostbusters II still suffers from stale rewrites and some dialogue that's just too straight-faced for its own good. Peter MacNicol also grates as the skittish foreign servant of Vigo, while Kurt Fuller's mayoral assistant reeks too strongly of the EPA agent from the previous film. Having said all that, I still enjoy the film. Where Ghostbusters is a stone-cold classic, this sequel is more of a rainy day movie to lazily pop in when you finish the first film and want just a bit more Venkman. And who out there doesn't want more Venkman?

1989 Rewind: The Abyss

James Cameron's The Abyss plays like a mixture of his superb Aliens, Spielberg's fantastical Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the anti-war message of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It takes the dire warning of the latter, filters it through a fairly warm climax and then makes a gripping thriller out of it. That bizarre combination will likely forever confine it to the annals of cult classics instead of receiving the mainstream love of Cameron's Aliens and Terminator 2 (as well as some movie about a boat or some such), but The Abyss is a magnificent piece of science fiction that consolidates its various tones not perfectly, but better than you'd expect possible.

When a U.S. nuclear sub strikes an unknown object resting near the Cayman Trough, the Americans rush to recover the sub and its contents before Russians get to it and tear it apart for intelligence gathering. They decide that the quickest way to deal with things is to drop a Navy SEAL team onto a private business platform nearby to use as a base of operations. The platform workers, led by Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris), initially refuse to place themselves in the way of anything approaching danger, until the military offers them all triple pay.

The SEAL crew is under the command of Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), who brings not only his squad but one of the underwater platform's designers, Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), Bud's estranged wife. So, as divers set out to recover the sub as well as investigate the mysterious object that sank it, the Brigmans must argue over their relationship. Mercifully, Cameron has enough wit and enough severity to never let these moments lapse into either melodrama or farce.

Soon, the crews discover that a strange presence is floating around the area, incandescent lights that dart faster than any animal or machine could possibly move. No one can guess what its purpose is, but its proximity to seemingly everything that goes wrong in the rescue attempt leads some to fear it. Coffey, suffering from nerve disorders because of the dive, believes it to be a threat and sets about exterminating it over the safety of the others aboard the platform.

What is it about the ocean that make it claustrophobic? The only way you could find something more expansive would be to move into outer space altogether, yet it always seems to be so confining. Perhaps it's because seeing a person, or a group of people, holed up in a tiny pocket of the sea is a story of isolation. The dives through the twisted mire of the submarine wreckage carry with them that subtle threat of getting lost and never finding the way back to the platform, while shots within the platform clang with the hollow echoes of all that metal, which reflects the harsh lighting until you're always staring into blinding rays.

Three separate plots all provide nail-biting thrills: the submarine salvages offer up early dread, but it's when the platform takes heavy damage in a hurricane and floods that Cameron dials up the tension. The best part of Titanic was always that sense of doom as Leo and Kate tried to escape the sinking ship, but it's got nothing on the terror here. After all, they're already underwater: any breach is fatal. Later, Coffey goes completely mad in his illness and threatens to take the whole platform with him.

There isn't a particularly weak performance here -- the crews, as in Alien, act as you'd expect workers to act -- but the three leads are all exemplary. Biehn doesn't snap in his madness but instead shivers and huddles with himself, assured in the knowledge that everyone is out to get him. It's too easy to compare Lindsey to the great Ellen Ripley, but both are intelligent women who are every bit as capable as the boys (and might just have a lick more sense, to boot). But it's Harris, that superb character actor who never seems to let you down even if the films he's in do, who carries it all home. There is a scene, late in the film, in which he must revive his wife; when the defibrillator appears ineffective, he pounds her chest screaming "Fight! Fight! Fight!" until at last, voice ravaged, he desperately pleas in a hoarse, broken whisper. Supposedly Cameron made them do this scene so many times and with so much vigor that both actors turned against the director afterwards, and indeed it seems as though there is no acting involved on-screen. But that one moment stuck with me the first time I watched the movie and it moved me again this time.

I admit that I watched the director's cut of this film, which came out in 1993, possibly making this an invalid entry into the 1989 series. However, I'm still counting it because the theatrical cut is an unfinished film. Now, people say that about a lot of cuts when the director had to cut some scenes, but I mean this literally: the whole alien aspect of the film makes absolutely no sense in the original cut. Here, however, we see them as both peaceful diplomats and deadly harbingers. Their message is similar to Klaatu's: stop fighting, or be destroyed by forces we cannot possibly combat. The CG elements of these beasts are dated, yes, but they hardly look worse than those found in the watershed Terminator 2 (though obviously some of these were added after that film gave Cameron the clout to finish this one).

Where the theatrical cut tacked on an anti-climactic alien subplot to a damn good thriller, this version gives it the meat it needs to make its point: that the infighting and sadism that rises in these stranded SEALs and crewmen when circumstances bring out their base instincts must be controlled and suppressed, lest it consume us all. It's still not a snug fit, but at least it makes sense.

There's hardly a flaw to spot in the film: the leads are all superb, and the story, fleshed out in its director's cut, is gripping and -- in the end -- inspiring. Holding it all together is Cameron's wonderful direction, which makes great use of every object that appears in the frame. The diving scenes have an unsettling serenity to them, while the platform shots convey the shrinking confines of these people's minds. I suppose The Abyss is a bit like Coppola's The Conversation: sandwiched between two lauded classics, it inevitably got lost in the public consciousness. Also like The Conversation, it's every bit as good as those masterpieces that surround it.

1989 Rewind: Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone may be traveling down the long slope to mediocrity -- W. was a surprising success, but even then only if your expectations have been worn down by such work as Alexander -- but there was a time when he was the most promising writer-director America had to offer. By the time Born on the Fourth of July was released in December 1989, he'd won an Oscar for his writing (Midnight Express) and damn near cleaned up with Platoon, his masterful depiction of his service in Vietnam. But Stone wasn't done with 'Nam, not by a long shot. Born on the Fourth of July, the second of three films that overtly concern the war, follows the war home, chronicling the traumatic re-adjustment of our wounded veterans.

As Stone establishes in the first half hour, Ron Kovic was the sort of young man that would make any parents proud and only seemed to confirm the American ideal of the '50s and '60s. Athletic, intelligent and a devout patriot, Ronnie wants nothing more than to serve his country like his father did in WWII. When Marine recruiters come to school and speak proudly of being the first called into an engagement, Kovic is inspired. The Marines say the war won't last long, he breathlessly informs his friends, "so if we don't sign up soon, we'll miss it." His mother is thrilled when he comes home and announces he's dropping out to enlist, believing her son to be doing God's work, but the veteran father is concerned.

Ronnie's tour of duty only occupies about 12 minutes of screen time, but Stone of course knows how to make them count. In the middle of a NVA ambush, Ronnie inadvertently shoots a fellow Marine; when he tries to confess to his XO, his superior officer simply brushes him off and assures the boy it's not his fault. In another skirmish, his platoon is surrounded, and Kovic is hit.

The attack sends him to a horrific VA hospital overrun with rats, drug use and uncaring doctors. I've heard that it's best to treat wounded soldiers as if they're still on the front lines and not to pamper them, but these men are treated with callous indifference. Ronnie, once a star athlete, must now hear the news that he's paralyzed from the mid-chest down and will never walk again.

So, he returns home, ashamed. At first, he continues to support the war on the basis of his loyalty to his country. He clashes with his younger brother Tommy (Josh Evans), now an anti-war activist, and must now face a once-proud mother who cannot bear the shame of having a disabled son. Slowly, Ron comes undone, disillusioned with the war and the military that doesn't care for him or anyone else maimed in Vietnam.

Tom Cruise may be known -- in acting terms, at least -- for his looks and his smile, but I maintain that he's a criminally underrated actor. His work in Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, A Few Good Men and a number of other films ranges from quite good to excellent, but nothing can compare to his performance as Kovic. His transitions from fresh-faced youth to terrified, confused soldier to broken vet to a figurehead of the anti-war movement never miss a beat, never feel rushed and never fail to convince. The only time you can even identify him as Tom Cruise the megastar is in the first hour when he's that handsome, innocent youth and the idealistic soldier; when he returns, he's as much a changed man as Kovic was. It's telling that the real Kovic gave Cruise his Bronze Star at the end of filming.

Through Kovic we see how Vietnam forever destroyed that postwar vision of the purity of the American family. Timmy represents those who rebelled against family and friends to protest the government, while Ron shows us how even those who fit the bill of that ideal were corrupted by the senseless conflict. You forget what a naïve kid Ron really is, until he loses his virginity to a prostitute. As he tearfully screams to his mother before leaving home, he lost the use of his penis before he "even learned how to use it." For this All-American to be reduced to awkward sex with a prostitute, which he misconstrues for true love, sheds harsh light on how he and many others who served and were wounded or killed had their futures ripped from them.

Stone's never been one for subtlety, and Born on the Fourth of July suffers at time from obvious dialogue when moments like his time with the prostitute conveys more than pithy statements. But he also knows how maintain your attention, either through the actions on-screen or the masterful way that he captures them. What makes Stone's early films so captivating is how he just never let up, hitting us with a barrage of images so quickly you didn't realize how revolutionary so many of his techniques were until the film ended and you could actually take a breath. His script conveys the outrage he feels over the mishandling of our veterans, a problem that exists to this day, but there are also flashes of pitch-black humor: while relaxing in a sort of disabled vet's paradise in Mexico, he gets into an argument with another wheelchair-bound veteran (Willem Dafoe) over whether they killed babies in 'Nam.

Stone won his second Best Director Oscar for the film, and it is richly deserved. Born on the Fourth of July, heavy-handed as it can be in spots, is one of his enduring masterpieces alongside Platoon and JFK. Cruise's performance is the finest of his career, yet we must not forget superb supporting turns from Kyra Sedgwick as Ron's high school sweetie turned college demonstrator, Dafoe's initially calm and genial Charlie and Raymond J. Barry as Ron's concerned, loving father. This is the second film from 1989 I've watched about the Vietnam War, and it's by far the best. I have a long way to go, but I'll be surprised if I find many films from the year I enjoy as much or more than this.

1989 Rewind: Casualties of War

For the first hour of Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, I simply could not accept it. Its characters were too savage, its dialogue too obvious and too much of it felt simply like a retread of common Vietnam tropes. Then I reconsidered it and, though the dialogue is still weak, Casualties of War contains some of the best acting to grace a war film, as well as one hell of a dark message.

Most war films introduce us to our characters as rookies or at least at a point when they still have a modicum of optimism about them. These men are grizzled, but still lighthearted, give or take a low-ranking officer or NCO. Into this group comes a fresh-faced, idealistic volunteer who will invariably act as the sole voice of reason when the more experienced men finally snap, which they tend to do when the gentlest of the veterans, the conscience of the group, fall prey either to enemy or friendly fire.

Casualties of War follows this to a T, but where it takes a bold step is in its decision to kill that calm vet (Erik King) in the first act. Cpl. Brownie takes a bullet to the neck when the VC ambushes the squad on break, immediately driving a wedge between the noble youth, Pfc. Max Eriksson (Michael J. Fox), and the rest of the troops, led by Sgt. Tony Meserve (Sean Penn). For the first stage of the film, there is an unspoken, underplayed struggle for the soul of Brownie's replacement, Diaz (John Leguizamo).

"War is hell," as the old adage says, but De Palma really puts it to the test when Meserve takes his men to the nearest village looking for revenge for both the deaths of his men as well as the attack cutting their leave short. The troops devastate the village looking for Viet Cong, and Meserve at last snaps and takes a young girl with the squad in retaliation. Eriksson reflects our horror when Meserve announces that she'll "tend to the men's needs."

De Palma structures Casualties of War around a terrifying gang rape scene, one of the most disturbing and repulsive (yet not exploitative) ever filmed. Eriksson tries desperately to sate the men before they cross that line, and even manages to convince Diaz. Then the other three, who have been waiting for their moment, pounce on him. Meserve, driven totally insane at this point by the jungle, cannot understand why Eriksson can't be a team player, so he lobs insults at the young soldier. He must be a communist sympathizer or, worse, a homosexual. Meserve makes open death threats as his two lackeys chuckle. Diaz, cowed by the lashing, falls in line with the others, and Eriksson must watch as the four men take turns with this poor, shrieking girl. Later, the squad stages a fight with some VC soldiers, and during the fight all four of the rapists end up shooting her for trying to escape.

The stark horror of the rape sequence might seem enough to burn the film into our retinas, but really it works because of the actors. Fox might be typecast as the wholesome kid just trying to do the right thing, but he's a believable soldier, one sent to die simply because his name came up in a "lottery." Leguizamo, King and John C. Reilly excel in some of their earliest performances (this was Reilly's debut) and round out the cast nicely. But Sean Penn's deranged Meserve will keep people coming back for more. As we are dropped in the middle of their tours with these men, we don't see Meserve slowly fade into some sort of animal: he's like that from the start. On the surface, he looks like the sort of soldier the Army would be desperate to prop up as a poster boy: loyal, uncompromising, intimidating. Yet he is a force of darkness, everything wrong and amoral concerning the US involvement in Vietnam personified. He's so deluded that he actually convinces himself that his sex slave is a VC prisoner. A recurring theme of De Palma's work is his linking of the man's sex drive and his capacity for shocking violence, and it's unforgettably displayed here but it wouldn't have worked if you didn't fully buy Penn's madness.

This second act is riveting and horrifying. It paints the jungles of Vietnam as a place where the American ideal, the human ideal even, died slowly and painfully. That's why the third act feels so tacked on, a paltry excuse to give the film some sort of uplifting coda, possibly to avoid outrage over the depictions of these soldiers. Upon returning to base, Eriksson pleads his case to all who will listen, but the top brass, in profane, definite terms, tell him to drop the matter. The last thing they need is another PR nightmare. But Eriksson persists, and justice is had.

After everything that preceded these last 40 minutes, the ending feels hollow. De Palma did such a great job of laying bare the atrocities good old American boys could commit when placed in a situation entirely beyond their ken, and this might have been one of the great Vietnam films had it simply ended with the men returning to base, leaving all the evidence back in the jungle but carrying everything with them. To show the nightmare of their existence and try to say "Oh, but one person really can make a difference" after the second act does nothing but viciously repudiate this brings the film to a screeching halt. And it certainly doesn't help that the actors must deliver David Rube's lines; Rube is a playwright and it shows, as the characters seem to be projecting their lines at an audience instead of interacting with one another. As a result, Casualties of War starts strong but finishes with a whimper, one that in no way affects the excellent work from its actors. Sean Penn fans, or even detractors, should find this an excellent find, as it contains one of his best performances.

1989 Rewind: Lethal Weapon 2

I planned to start my 1989 retrospective with something perhaps a bit more artistic, but screw it, I was on a roll. Lethal Weapon was the kind of hit that would undoubtedly get a sequel, which must have sent chills running down the spines of geeks back in the late '80s. After all, those were the halcyon days of blowing crap up, but it all fell apart in the sequels. Rambo, Predator, Temple of Doom, they were all major letdowns (Aliens is exempt, as nearly a decade passed between sequels and the original was a horror film, not an action extravaganza).

It is therefore a total shock that Lethal Weapon 2, the follow-up to a film with some of least attention to the plot of any action film in the '80s -- and Lord is that saying something -- is every bit as good as the original. This is all the more impressive when you consider that this film actually has themes it wants to address, which easily could have spelled doom for a franchise built upon the line "I'm too old for this shit."

The first thing that caught my eye when I watched this film for the first time was its acknowledgment of past events. I would expect Murtaugh's house to be completely rebuilt following the events of the previous film, and indeed for any concrete details of that film to be forgotten period. But, sure enough, Murtaugh must cope with the arduous repair process as well as the loss of police car.

Initially, plot doesn't even enter in the frame. Donner and writer Jeffrey Boam, working from Shane Black's story, know that people tuned in to see Gibson and Glover do their thing, and the first 10-15 minutes involve them chasing low-ranking bad guys and trading barbs. There's a particularly funny bit involving Roger's daughter starring in a condom commercial, which the entire department watches thanks to Riggs' big mouth.

Eventually, though, we meet our baddies. As with the last batch, they're drug runners, but with a new twist: they're also South African diplomats and thus immune to any investigations. To be honest, the film's chief flaw is its loose grasp on diplomatic immunity, as these guys seem to think that they are immune no matter what they do. Their South African background opens up a racial subplot on account of the tension over apartheid, but thankfully it never gets in the way. Mainly, it serves to set up one-liners for Roger.

Aiding Martin and Roger's quest to break these villains is Leo Getz, an accountant and money launderer for the diplomats. Joe Pesci, normally the intimidating, thuggish wee-man, instead plays Leo as a total incompetent, a babbling fool with a gift for numbers but not human interaction. He so thoroughly annoys his protectors you think they might just turn him over to the South Africans to stop the noise. Pesci nearly steals the show as the manic Getz, with his shrill rants on minutiae and his constant use of the word "OK."

Having a plot could have dangerously distracted us from all the fun that made the original so great, but Donner makes good use of his bigger budget with some jaw-dropping stunts, including a brief but thrilling car chase and two all-out assaults on the South Africans. There are Bond-esque one-liners thrown in for good measure, but the characters know how ridiculous those things are.

Lethal Weapon 2 does not benefit from its extended cut as its predecessor does, but I can't find an area where it hurts it, either. Everything about it is bigger and badder, but it also has a narrative as compelling as its characters this time around. Some of the lines addressing apartheid and the juxtaposition between evil South Africans and tolerant American cops -- in the LAPD, no less -- are too simplistic, but it's all worth it for a line as deliriously cheesy as "They've been de-kaffirnated." It may not be high art, but Lethal Weapon 2 is one of the most worthy sequels ever made, and something you should always keep handy for a rainy day.

Announcement: 1989 Retrospective

Before I start this, I should go ahead and address something, because soon what few people visit this site long enough to read anything but not long enough to read it carefully enough to see how silly and shallow it is are going to accuse me of egoism. So, here goes: I don't give a damn about birthdays. I never have, and I imagine that I never will.

OK, that's settled. However, next Sunday I turn 20, and I might have had the closest thing to birthday excitement in my life. What better way to celebrate, I thought, than to take a look back at the films of the year, the ones I've watched since my childhood, and ones I've yet to see? Yes, this is my life.

So, at least once a week until the end of the year, I will visit and review a film from 1989, and I might even come up with a 'Best of' at the end of the year along with a list of this year's finest. Mostly, though, this is little more than a strange nostalgia trip, one that involves no films I actually saw at the time but a few (Back to the Future Part II, Ghostbusters II, The Little Mermaid) were significant films from my childhood, so there should be some wistfulness to the project.

To keep track of 1989 films profiled, you can click the '1989' tag at the bottom of this post or simply use the actual link: http://armchairc.blogspot.com/search/label/1989. As you can see, I've already got one film profiled from my normal reviewing (I'm surprised there aren't more), and I don't see the need of going back to it. So, if you're as introverted as I am, or you simply get a kick watching someone invent flimsy excuses to continue avoiding human interaction, join me.

Johnny Handsome

Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome has so much going for it that I just can't fault it when it trips ten feet from the finish line and wretchedly crawls across the finish line. It's both his and Mickey Rourke's last film of the 80s, and a sort of last gasp for the both of them, though Rourke finally climbed back on top with Sin City and of course The Wrestler. Rourke alone should alert you to the necessity to watch this film regardless of its overall quality, as the man quite simply walked away with the 80s as far as I'm concerned.

Rourke stars as the titular character (née Johnny Sedley), a small-time career criminal who ends up on the bad side of a botched heist and spends the rest of the film plotting his revenge against the people who sold him out. He got his nickname due to the horrible facial disfigurement he's suffered since birth, scars that both swell his head and force him to speak with a lisp. Later in the film, Johnny recounts how, as a child, a young boy ripped off his jack-o-lantern mask on Halloween and said "Johnny don't need no mask," and Johnny responded by beating the poor kid senseless. Rourke brings all his tortured soul to the part, and only makes this creature even more wretched and pitiable.

An older man named Mikey looks after Johnny and includes him in his robberies. For a particularly big heist, Mikey recruits the help of two pieces of street trash, Sunny and Rafe (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, both of whom play just about the best scumbags you could ever hope to find) in order to pull things off successfully. The robbery goes bad, and Rafe ends up killing Mikey, while Johnny gets captured and sent to prison.

While there, a Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman) mocks him and his looks but, after an inmate stabbing leaves Johnny in the hospital, a doctor (Forest Whitaker) takes pity on the man. Believing that Johnny's life choices are the direct result of the shame he feels from his disfigurement, he offers to reconstruct Johnny's face and to hire a speech pathologist to rid him of his lisp in order to provide a fresh start. After a few weeks of painful surgeries, we see Mickey Rourke's beautiful face freed from all those prosthetics.

Soon Johnny gets paroled and finds a job and even starts going out with a girl who loves him (Elizabeth McGovern), but there's only one thing on his mind. Drones correctly guesses that Sunny and Rafe would never recognize the new Johnny, and sure enough he hatches a plan to win the couple's trust with another robbery that would get him close to his foes. He even toys with them at first to make sure they don't see it coming; "There's something familiar about him," wonders Sunny after Johnny tells the two that he knows them.

For such a short film, it plays out with a great deal of tension and suspense. Until the ending that is. I won't give it away, but some characters suddenly get smart while others don't think at all, and the short length suddenly becomes very, very apparent. The film runs barely over 90 minutes, and the final bit unfolds after an hour and a half has passed. I can't really say why the ending doesn't stick with me other than the fact that it seems to thoroughly clichéd as to be interchangeable with any number of "guys trying to break out of lives of crime" stories. Hell, Mickey Rourke himself built his career in the 80s on films that had endings too similar to this.

Nevertheless, the film remains a must-see on the basis of its fantastic opening heist sequence and the acting performances of Barkin, Henriksen and Rourke. Rourke in particular knocks it right out of the park; he puts so much pain into the role that it breaks through even the prosthetics and only magnifies on his actual face. I think the film was written with any actor in mind, but when Rourke took the part and made it his own suddenly the short running time became noticeable. For my money, his portrayal here is in his top five performances, and for that reason alone you should track this above-average piece of 80s noir down; I believe the DVD is being reissued soon anyway, so you're in luck.

The Killer

Written and Directed by: John Woo

The fact that John Woo's Hong Kong output remains largely out of print in America never fails to astound me. The vaunted action auteur hit big in the mid 80s with his action hit A Better Tomorrow (which wound up the highest-grossing Hong Kong film ever made at the time) and continued with a string of critically and internationally successful action melodramas before leaving for Hollywood in the wake of his last epic Hard-Boiled. For whatever reason, Woo never recaptured the spirit of his Hong Kong films when he moved to America, but film buffs the world over still love him for his classic work.

Of these films, The Killer ranks as his finest. His subsequent Vietnam War piece A Bullet in the Head is his most contemplative, and the aforementioned Hard-Boiled is his most action-packed (complete with a climactic 40-minute shootout in a hospital). Yet The Killer remains the finest distillation of Woo's talents, mixing ridiculously OTT action with melodrama and an overall message (there are a LOT of allusions to the Tienanmen Massacre) without letting any one aspect overpower the other.

Hot off the heels of A Better Tomorrow II, which Woo disowned following enforced reediting, the director brought his muse Chow Yun-Fat back to play yet another hired killer. This time, Chow is Ah Jong, an assassin who rethinks his profession with he accidentally blinds a young woman with the flash of his muzzle. Racked with guilt, he agrees to one last job in order to pay for a cornea transplant for Jennie

The Killer overflows with hallmarks of Woo's stories: Ah Jong is a noble killer, a police inspector (Danny Lee) must contend with the stifling bureaucracy of his job and the limits of the law in his attempts to bring criminals to justice and it all comes down to a massive shootout. Also on display are Woo's usual visual tricks, from gratuitous slow motion to rapid editing. And there's bullets. Lots and lots of bullets.

Ah Jong's final job is to kill a politician when he makes a speech. The scene unfolds with great tension thanks to Woo's precise use of music and disorienting cuts and makes a single gunshot as resonant as the extended shootouts. Unfortunately for Ah Jong, the police spot him and now the organization who uses his services decides to kill him for his slip-up. Now Ah Jong must worry about getting money for the operation, dodging cops and dealing with the waves of criminals coming after him.

Woo alternates between the action scenes and the more dramatic moments with a deftness severely lacking in his other work; he manages to make the tender scenes between Ah Jong and Jennie and Inspector Ying's personal story interesting and relevant rather than making the audience feel like we're just being given a breather between action sequences.

The ending climax unfolds in a good old-fashioned Mexican shootout, complete with church. It's not as visually resplendent as the epic hospital sequence of Hard-Boiled, but it's nonetheless a textbook example of Woo's mastery of action and his ability to keep an audience thoroughly captivated. How did Hollywood rob him of this talent?

The final moments, possibly the most affecting in Woo's oeuvre, ensure the film as the director's best. Ah Jong, who teamed up with Ying for the shootout, tells his unlikely ally to use his eyes for the transplant should he die. But a sadistic attack from one of the head criminals leaves Ah Jong himself blind. The long shot of Ah Jong and Jennie, both now blind, crawling around searching for each other is absolutely devastating; I don't know if I can think of a single more genuinely emotional shot in an action movie (Seven Samurai excluded, which is too innovative to fit in any one genre).

In the credits, Woo dedicates the film to Martin Scorsese. Rather appropriate, considering this is perhaps the only gangster film remotely as visceral and gripping as Scorsese' GoodFellas. Woo's films may come off as a bit too melodramatic for Western audiences (I certainly thought so when I first went through his Hong Kong output), they work magnificently as bloody pop operas. It may glamorize violence a bit more than Scorsese's more horrifying bloodbaths, but Woo uses it for the same reason: to cleanse flawed, often evil or at least criminal characters in a violent catharsis worthy of Flannery O'Connor. In short, The Killer is nothing short of a masterpiece, and one of the top five action movies ever made.