Dudleyas grow in canyons here in California. I have one planted on the side of my house, but it was hit by a car so it looks all mangled now. Mine has crazy tendrils that will start flowering any day now.
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More photos after the jump!
Joe: I agree with you about the stills. The more the better, and the more relevant to the movie the better. What else would I have done differently? Hmmm. Well, for one thing I would have chosen movies that would have (possibly) interested readers rather than just ourselves. I think a couple of readers commented at the beginning of the series that they wanted us to do Commando, and I think we should have gone in that direction. That could have been followed by Red Dawn or Conan the Barbarian. Also -- and I don't know whether you would have vetoed this idea -- I wish we'd used a basic template for all the reviews. Readers are looking for bite-sized pieces of information these days, and a lot of review sites and magazines are catering to them by breaking down their reviews into brief sections, each with a bolded subheading, like "What Worked," "What Didn't," "Things to Watch For," "Random Observations," etc. Even the AV Club, which has some of the smartest criticism on the net, does that for a lot of their reviews. I think some readers might have taken one gander at our articles, seen these big, imposing paragraphs, and moved on. Using subheadings or categories would not only have made our job easier, we could have used it to track specific themes throughout the project, like "What Does This Movie Tell Us About the 1980s?"
Which brings me to my next question -- what did these movies tell you about the 1980s that you didn't already know or that you had forgotten? I, for one, had forgotten just how big the Cold War still was back then. We had two action-packed comedies, Top Secret and Spies Like Us. which were essentially about smartalecky American "good guys" traveling abroad and teaching those rotten commies a lesson or two. The Cold War was great for comedy, so much more pleasant than the current War on Terror. And since the "bad guys" in the Cold War were mostly white, there was less possibility of ugly racial overtones in these comedies. I guess I miss the Cold War. How about you? Any thoughts on how these flicks reflected the decade in which they were made?
Craig: Well, since all but a handful of the films we watched were made and/or set in America (the few exceptions being The Elephant Man, Top Secret!, The Meaning of Life, Time Bandits and The Fly), they really tell us more about what this country was like in '80s than anything else. (It's quite telling that we didn't watch a single film that wasn't filmed in English.) Some of the films we picked showed us how we looked to filmmakers from other countries, with the prime examples being Superman III (a film set largely in the American heartland that was made by an expatriate American director based out of England) and Shock Treatment (ditto, only removing Americans from the equation almost entirely). Some showed us how Americans hold up when taken out of their comfort zones (as inExplorers, with its trio of young adventurers catapulting themselves into outer space, and the two Cold War films you mentioned). And some showed us how we react when our neighborhoods are invaded by alien beings both benign (E.T.) and malevolent (Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Little Shop of Horrors). (It's a shame we didn't get around to Joe Dante's The 'Burbs; that would have been a perfect corollary for the latter.)
If this project reminded me of anything that I might have forgotten, it was that there was a place for sophisticated children's entertainment long before Pixar came along. (Tellingly, Pixar got its start in the mid-'80s with a series of computer-animated shorts, but it wasn't until halfway through the following decade that it made the leap to features with the first Toy Story.) Looking at films as disparate as Explorers, E.T., The Muppets Take Manhattan and Time Bandits, I was struck by how they refused to talk down to their audiences and even slowed down periodically to let things sink in and give their bigger moments the proper weight. Nowadays it seems like studios are under the impression that if the pace of a kid's film slackens for even half a second their audience will grow bored and, I don't know, use their mobile phone to Tweet that the new Shrek is boooooooooring.
Another thing I was reminded of was how readily mainstream filmmakers like Joe Dante, John Landis, Robert Zemeckis and Richard Lester were able to sneak subversive content into their big-budget, studio-sanctioned fantasy films -- and how only one of them (Zemeckis) is still considered mainstream today. Then there are the mavericks like David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg who have always followed their own paths and, by remaining true to themselves, were able to come out the other end of the decade with their careers and reputations largely intact (even if some of them are more battle-scarred than others). Then again, by the time the '80s rolled around the distinction between mainstream and maverick was already starting to become irrelevant. Maybe if we'd tackled some independent films we would have a better perspective on this, but that movement didn't capture the public's attention until the very end of the decade with the left-field success of sex, lies and videotape -- and that's a film that I believe belongs more to the '90s. Bearing that in mind, I doubt I would want to spend a year of my life poking around the films of that decade. Would you?
Joe: Eh, no. The "Nineties nostalgia" thing has never really gotten off the ground, has it? Sure, there have been some attempts -- The Wackness, VH1's I Love the '90s, etc. -- but I don't see that movement gaining any real traction. I said repeatedly during this project that the 1980s were sort of a second 1950s, but somehow the 1990s skipped the idealism and upheaval of the 1960s and headed straight for the jaded cynicism of the 1970s. It was the "too cool to care" decade, and while it produced several fine films, I see no particular cinematic trends worth following in those years. I mean, does anyone want to sift through the glut of post-Pulp Fiction Tarantino wannabes from the mid-to-late-1990s? Maybe someday, "decade-defining" movies like Singles and Reality Bites might make for interesting case studies, but I think if I were to watch them today I'd just be a little embarrassed by them. The 1980s, meanwhile, are just far enough removed that I can watch movies from that time period and sort of marvel at all the little details. "Oh, I remember when people dressed like that!" or "Hey, I remember when that song was popular!"
Craig: Fair enough. Speaking of which... Ooh, ooh, what do you do? No one else can dance like you. So what's all the fuss? There ain't nobody that spies like us. Hey, hey, what do you say? Someone took your plans away. So what's all the fuss? There ain't nobody that spies like us!
"Oh, my gosh. Does that suck?" - FRANK XAVIER CROSS, a man who knows how to inspire confidence in his underlings
"The original tone of this film, as you can hear in the music, was much darker than what ended up on screen. Although the score was a pleasure to write, it was pretty much buried in the final film. Another one of 'life's bitter pills'...Oh well."Tantalizing. Clearly, what Scrooged needs is an in-depth, book-length expose along the lines of The Devil's Candy or Losing the Light (about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, respectively). Instead it barely gets two pages in Dennis Perrin's Mr. Mike: The Life and Work of Michael O'Donoghue, which is disappointing because it seems like Perrin could have dug a lot deeper than he did. If there's any one project that could have defined O'Donoghue's post-Saturday Night Live career, then Scrooged, which he co-wrote with frequent writing partner Mitch Glazer, was it.
This sequence is the strangest in the film. The words are there, but the heart is lacking. Murray stands center stage and rants and raves about the spirit of Christmas, but it's not an inspiring speech and certainly not a funny one. It sounds more desperate than anything else, and it continues at embarrassing length. It looks like an on-screen breakdown.Interestingly enough, a breakdown is exactly what screenwriter Mitch Glazer thought Murray was having while he watched the scene being filmed from the sidelines. For his part, O'Donoghue's response was more acerbic. "What was that? The Jim Jones Hour?" he said, a remark that earned him a punch in the arm from director Richard Donner. A perfect encapsulation of the screenwriter-director relationship in Hollywood, perhaps?
Finally, he demands a miracle, and his secretary's little tyke is dragged forward to demonstrate that he can actually speak at last. Then the entire cast and crew line up behind Murray to sing of Christmas cheer, and I can't remember when I've seen anything along these lines that was more forced and depressing.
He's often gruff in his movies, but in a way that lets you know he's just kidding. This time, he doesn't seem to be kidding ... When he shouts at people, he doesn't add a little spin of self-mocking exaggeration, so that we know to laugh. He seems to be really shouting. And the other actors look as if they really feel shouted at.I'm not exactly sure which film Mr. Ebert saw, but it doesn't seem to be the same Scrooged I just watched, in which Frank Cross is such an inveterate wiseacre that we never for a second take him seriously as a soulless corporate villain. If anything, Murray doesn't play the part cruelly enough in the early stages. He doesn't approach Scrooged much differently than he did Stripes or Ghostbusters. We are constantly told that Frank Cross became a network president by working relentlessly and shutting off friends, lovers, and relatives in pursuit of wealth and status, but somehow I never bought it. Frank comes off like such a typical Murray knucklehead, completely ruled by his impulses, smirking at the world, that he hardly seems to have the attention span and laser focus you would need to become a successful television executive. Note how much different Murray's demeanor is from both the old guard (represented by Robert Mitchum and John Forsythe) and the young turks (represented by John Glover). As we'd expect from a Bill Murray movie, Frank is the lone wisecracking kook in a world of suck-ups, stiffs, and stuffed shirts. From my vantage point, Murray behaves pretty much the same way before and after his supposed metamorphosis. The film labors mightily to tug on our heartstrings, what with the traumatized boy who won't speak and the kindly old bum who freezes to death in a sewer (shades of a Groundhog Day subplot?), but Murray seems much more invested in being the consummate class clown. "So much for pathos," as they say on Monty Python. But, again, this isn't a huge problem because we don't watch Scrooged to see a heartless miser learn a lesson; we watch to see Bill Murray do that Bill Murray thing. By the film's very end, Murray seems to have given up on the plot entirely and is quoting Little Shop of Horrors (another film we totally covered) and leading the audience -- the movie audience! -- in a singalong. Murray's film-ending monologue/rant/breakdown may not function as a plausible conclusion to the story -- it far exceeds the limits of plausibility -- but it's a pretty neat performance showcase for the film's star and may actually work better out of context.
"They finally even made a movie about it... Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes." - STEPHEN KING, Carrie
Ironically, though, that's part of the reason that Purple Rain pretty much fails completely as a narrative. The film is supposed to tell the story of "The Kid," a very Prince-like aspiring musician on the Minneapolis club scene. Structurally, this means that Purple Rain closely resembles 8 Mile with Eminem. Both films supposedly give us the gritty, unglamorous stories (tastefully fictionalized, of course) behind the careers of controversial pop stars. We see their early professional ups and downs in their respective local music scenes, plus plenty of ugly, unpleasant family and relationship drama on the side, too. And through all their tribulations and setbacks, these young men are guided by singular desire: to succeed. They know that music is their ticket to a better life, and they're not going to give up on their dreams. Okay, that's great. But somehow this seems a better fit for Eminem than it does for Prince. For one thing, Eminem's turbulent personal history has always been a key component to his music and has been very widely reported in the media. On the other hand, Prince has been extremely media shy throughout his career, and his lyrics don't function terribly well as an autobiography. So, really, who even knows or cares what Prince's backstory is? Secondly, Eminem has never been shy about presenting himself in a negative light on his albums, and in 8 Mile we get to see his character, Rabbit, crash and burn as a rapper before finally succeeding. But Prince is too cool a customer for that. He is fully formed when he meet him, both in terms of his music and his fashion sense. He enters this movie on a motorcycle which matches his outfit, for God's sake! He seems more like a costumed superhero who fell to Earth from Planet Sexy than a mere mortal rock star. It's hard to take any of his problems too seriously. Prince is never anything other than Prince for even a second. Even when he's talking to policemen after his abusive father's suicide attempt (by gun) or when he's fantasizing his own suicide (by rope), he always seems like he's two seconds away from posing for an album cover. He's posing all the time. Throughout this movie, people occasionally tell "The Kid" that his music isn't going to catch on, but it's impossible to believe the naysayers because we know the truth. The soundtrack album was #1 for almost half a year, after all. These very songs were burned into America's brain. And we're supposed to believe this guy is struggling to make it? Come on! Who do you think you're fooling?
Can Prince act? Frankly, I don't know. I've seen a whole movie in which he's the unquestioned star, and I still have no idea whether the man can act or not. What I can honestly say is that he doesn't act in this movie. It seems like a personal choice. He refuses to act. One of Prince's very rare television interviews was a famously stilted appearance he made on American Bandstand in the early 1980s. If you don't have time in your life to watch Purple Rain in its entirety, watch that American Bandstand clip instead because it basically gives you the whole "Prince acting" experience in a nutshell. At one point, Clark asked Prince how many instruments he played, and the young musician wordlessly held up four fingers as an answer. In this very movie, the members of his backing band, The Revolution, confront him at one point about being such a paranoid control freak and he responds to their complaints via a puppet. I'm not kidding.... a puppet! Where'd he get that puppet anyway? I'm surprised he didn't use it in all his other scenes, like the tacked-on, perfunctory romantic subplot. Yeah, "The Kid" has a supposed "romance" with fellow up-and-comer Apollonia, but their conversations largely consist of Prince barking terse, two-or-three-word orders at her. "Get on!" "Give me that!" "Let's go!" That's Prince the Silver Screen Lover. I guess there's some kind of point being made here, because we're supposed to see that The Kid has learned all the wrong lessons about how to treat a lady from his slap-happy musician pappy, but I found these scenes neither convincing nor terribly interesting or compelling.
I realize I've spent the last few paragraphs complaining about Purple Rain, but the truth is that I more or less liked the darned thing. The concert sequences are -- and I'm not ashamed to use this adjective when it's warranted -- electrifying. I have thus far neglected to mention the movie's flamboyant villain, Morris Day, who I guess is playing some fictionalized version of himself in this film. A rival funk bandleader who would have both the Minneapolis club scene and the heart of the fair Appolonia for his very own, Morris is a shameless schemer straight out of Saturday morning cartoons. In fact, he and his sidekick Jerome Benton (also apparently playing himself) reminded me quite a bit of Dick Dastardly and Muttley from Wacky Races. They're among the few characters in this film who seem to notice that Purple Rain is utterly ludicrous and don't even pretend to take it seriously. In retrospect, that was really the wisest approach all along.
In this series, Joe and I have touched on 20 films that were big in the '80s, either in our personal lives or in the culture at large -- and frequently both. (This entry, our 19th, covers film #21.) Along the way I've managed to introduce Joe to some films that he otherwise might not have seen, but the same cannot be said for me until now. This is not to say that I had a burning need to fill the Purple Rain-sized whole in my film education, but I have long been curious about the abbreviated acting career of the Artist Who Used To Formerly Be Known As Prince But Now Is Known As Prince Again. After all, Purple Rain was a big enough hit that it begat Under the Cherry Moon (which rather improbably provided Kirstin Scott Thomas with her big-screen debut), Sign o' the Times (his one true concert film) and Graffiti Bridge. Tellingly, all three of those follow-ups were directed by Prince (who also wrote Sign and Graffiti for good measure), but only the last one was an actual sequel to the film that, a quarter century later, remains his one true box-office success.
Even if I didn't see Purple Rain when it first came out (I turned 11 in 1984, so R-rated movies were still strictly off-limits to me), I was able to get the gist of it thanks to MTV's airing of the video for "When Doves Cry" in heavy rotation that summer. (I would provide a link to said video -- which perfectly encapsulates the themes and much of the imagery of the film -- but as Joe said Prince's people have been on a tireless crusade of late when it comes to expunging his material from the Internet. Unless, of course, it's the man himself trolling YouTube and other sites for fans/flagrant copyright violators to report. Based on his control-freak reputation, I actually wouldn't put that past him.) Coupled with my enthusiasm for the videos for "1999" and "Little Red Corvette," I was quite the budding Prince fan but somehow never got around to picking up any of his albums. Perhaps I knew instinctively that if I did there was a chance my mother would ask to listen to one and be scandalized by the likes of "Darling Nikki" (one of the songs that got Tipper Gore's dander up back in the day). Choosing the path of Hall & Oates and Huey Lewis and the News seemed much safer in comparison.
Then again, even with as many hits as they had, nobody to my knowledge ever asked Daryl, John or Huey (or anyone in the News for that matter) to star in a semi-fictionalized musical biography charting their trials and tribulations on the way to fame and fortune. (To see how such a thing can go horribly, horribly wrong, check out Mariah Carey's Glitter some time... or don't. Only you know how much your own time is worth to you.) More than likely the mere existence of MTV -- which gave bands the chance to make any of a number of three-minute films, biographical or otherwise -- obviated the need for the film industry to craft as many vehicles around the nascent personalities of up-and-coming rock-and-rollers as it had during the '60s boom. (Did you know Herman's Hermits starred in three motion pictures? Three!) Of course, by the time he starred in Purple Rain, Prince was well past the up-and-coming stage of his career, which is why the inevitable comparison with A Hard Day's Night is both apt and misleading at the same time.
Much has been written about the way A Hard Day's Night helped to define John, Paul, George and Ringo as individuals in the eyes of their fans (much as many aspects of Prince's public persona were cemented by his turn in Purple Rain), but the most important thing about their feature film debut was that it was most emphatically about the present, where Beatlemania already existed, and not the path that led to it. That story would be told on film many times in the decades to come, but it wouldn't star the Beatles. And while it's true that Prince is playing a character called "The Kid," which is how co-writer/director Alfred Magnoli tries to get away with the fiction that he's an unknown, struggling artist, it's hard to believe scenes like the one where he slays the crowd with the title song and then angrily stalks off the stage, somehow thinking that he's bombed, only to return triumphant moments later to sing the two closing numbers, "I Would Die 4 U" (which, as producer Robert Cavallo says on the commentary, feels somewhat perfunctory coming after the cathartic "Purple Rain") and "Baby I'm a Star" (which, in all honesty, was never really in question).
Since the live performances are the most electric scenes in the whole film, one wonders why Prince didn't simply go the concert film route -- à la Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same, Frank Zappa's Baby Snakes or the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together -- for his maiden cinematic voyage. Not only was his back catalog deep enough, but he could have easily filled out the evening with unreleased tracks from his vaults and still not broken a sweat. If he wanted to, he could have even kept The Time and Apollonia 6 as support acts, letting them come out and perform "Jungle Love" and "Sex Shooter" the way Talking Heads morph into Tom Tom Club for "Genius of Love" in the middle of Stop Making Sense. As it is, the film opens with The Revolution's blistering performance of "Let's Go Crazy," during which we're introduced to aspiring singer/dancer Apollonia skipping out on a taxi fare and taking a room at a sleazy hotel and Morris Day preening as he prepares for his grand entrance to the club. Then, after the briefest of pauses, The Time jumps straight into "Jungle Love," which unfortunately isn't allowed to play out completely because the film needs to follow Prince home on his motorcycle to look in on his abusive father and wayward mother. (It's almost surreal that his father's biggest complaint about his mother is that she doesn't clean often enough.)
What follows is a semi-coherent narrative made up of half-scenes and barely functional dialogue full of bald-faced exposition recited by musicians with little to no acting experience who are essentially playing thinly conceived variations on themselves. I'm not sure why Prince would want people to associate him with the character of The Kid, though, since he's kind of a dick. Take, for instance, the scene where he tricks Apollonia into removing all of her clothing and jumping into a freezing cold lake, then keeps scooting his motorcycle away from her whenever she tries to climb on. The Kid is also perpetually late for business meetings and band rehearsals and keeps putting off Wendy and Lisa, two members of his band with songwriting aspirations. (It's after Wendy calls him out on his paranoia, telling him, "You can really hurt people," that he performs his bizarre ventriloquist act.) Overall, though, he saves his worst behavior for Apollonia.
Apparently determined to top the incident at the lake, Magnoli and his co-writer William Blinn (a TV veteran who wrote Brian's Song and created the series Starsky and Hutch, among other things) draft a scenario where Apollonia -- who, remember, is an unknown who has to stay at a seedy dive because it's the only place she can afford -- pawns her anklet so she can buy The Kid a guitar (which he seems genuinely surprised to get, like it's Christmas morning or something). Then, when she casually announces that she's joining Morris Day's girl group, he belts her one (a real "I learned it by watching you" PSA moment) and then immediately switches gears, inexplicably asking her, "Don't I make you happy? Don't you like the way we are?" Yeah, Kid, I'm sure she's thrilled about getting slapped around by you simply because she wants to have a career of her own. He won't even leave her alone when he's onstage, causing her to burst into tears with the masturbation anthem "Darling Nikki" (which doesn't seem too far removed from her own group's "Sex Shooter" when you get right down to it). Odd, then, that that's the song that inspires the none-too-imposing club owner to tell The Kid, "Your music makes sense to no one but yourself."
The crux of the matter, psychologically speaking, is The Kid's contentious relationship with his father, a brilliant pianist/composer with anger management issues. I don't know how much of that correlates to Prince's actual family history, and frankly I don't want to know, but I doubt he ever confronted his own father by saying, "I saw Mom up the street. She looked pretty bad. Any idea how she got that way?" That's the sort of line that only rings true to a screenwriter with a tin ear for dialogue. Purple Rain is much better off when it lets Prince's music speak for him.
Up Next: Our series concludes with an unexpectedly quasi-sentimental dose of holiday cheer -- unless my library manages to Scrooge me out of it.
"Is this a romance we're having? Is that what it is?" - SETH BRUNDLE, a brilliant but socially awkward scientist who's working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it
You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you? I'll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don't you? But you only know society's straight line about the flesh. You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, gray fear of the flesh. Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring! See what I'm saying? I'm not just talking about sex and penetration. I'm talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh -- a deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool.With an invitation like that, who wouldn't want to take a dip?
"Jeff Goldblum is so intense that when he first shakes your hand, he holds it just a beat too long, peering at you unblinking with those giant orbs, cocking his head as if trying to sniff you or lock into you through some astral frequency. His ears move sometimes when he talks, adding to the impression that Goldblum is possessed of psychic antennae, and although he can appear gangly on-screen, he is well built and powerfully kept."I include that paragraph because one could fairly easily take out Jeff Goldblum's name and substitute Seth Brundle's and it would still manifestly apply. Could it be that the doomed scientist of The Fly is the role which gets closest to the "real" Jeff Goldlbum? At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychologist, I'll say yes. Let's face it: even before he starts transforming into an increasingly yucky human-fly hybrid (flybrid?), Seth Brundle already seems like an extra-terrestrial, perhaps an amped-up first cousin to David Bowie's slumming alien Thomas Jerome Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth. Notice that both Brundle and Newton are uncomfortable in cars and insist that whoever's driving go slowly. (Incidentally, I've heard the same thing about Stanley Kubrick. Makes you wonder, huh?) Furthermore, Brundle chooses as his pet a baboon, i.e. a dangerous creature which can definitely not be domesticated, takes his fashion cues from Albert Einstein, makes his home in a warehouse in a really crappy-looking neighborhood, and seems like a possible Asperger case when it comes to social interaction. Brundle seems to regard humanity and life itself with a kind of eerily distant fascination, the way we actually regard the insect world. We can study the insect world and ask all the relevant questions, but we'll never be able to "think" like an ant or a grasshopper. Or a fly.
"Take a breath and look around. A lot of folks deserve to die." - AUDREY II, a carnivorous talking plant
"Mum! Dad! Don't touch it! It's evil!" - KEVIN, the soon-to-be-orphaned 11-year-old boy, at the end of Time Bandits
"We praised the Almighty far beyond what any reasonable entity would have felt comfortable with, and blessed many, many things." - ETHAN COEN in his short story "I Killed Phil Shapiro"
Most unusual is that the Python characters are rarely sympathetic. The actors themselves don't have audience-endearing physical quirks (a big nose, a big belly, a weakling's body, bad eyesight) but are imposing men (even when dressed as women), physically and intellectually, who are always on the attack.
