Tuesday, June 21, 2022

45 Movies For 45 Years: 1990

1990 was a big year for me since it was the year that I officially became a teenager. I have some pretty vivid memories from that time. I was beginning my journey into nerdom. I was falling in love with movies. I went to the theater often, which was not as often as I would have liked since I still depended on my parents for transportation. Our closest theater was a 30-minute drive away. Oh, and I didn’t have a job. I was a frequent customer of the local video store. Perusing the shelves of films was one of my favorite ways to pass the time.

But I have some specific memories of films I saw that year. I know I went with my mom and cousin to see Dick Tracy on my birthday that year. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was also a huge deal for me. I saw it twice and spent my meager allowance on the novelization and the comic book adaptation.

When I look back on that year, there is one movie that has embedded many images into my mind. It has steered the course of my taste in films since and stands out above all the others.

Total Recall.

It was a Schwarzenegger vehicle and probably the first movie of his that I ever actually sat down to watch. I remember Terminator being on in the background a few times as I grew up. As a kid, it didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t see Total Recall in the theater. Of course, my parents weren’t taking a 13-year-old kid to see an R-rated film. But a few months after its release, it started airing on one of the premium movie channels that we had.

I remember that it was a perfect storm one evening. My mom was at work. She worked in a hospital, and she had the 3 pm-11-pm shift. My dad was getting ready to leave for his job as a firefighter. My brother and I were getting ready to spend the evening at home all alone. We’d been fed, and I was popping some popcorn and flipping through the TV Guide to figure out what I was going to watch. I saw that Total Recall was about to come on. I had seen the commercials, and I knew I wanted to see it. Being the honest kid that I was, I went to my dad as he was leaving and asked if it was okay if I watched it. He thought about it for a minute and said, “Yeah, but don’t tell your mom.”

YES!!!

Now a little about the movie itself. Total Recall is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Of course, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox, and Michael Ironside. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, the same guy that had brought us Robocop a few years before and would make Starship Troopers a little while later. The concept grabbed me immediately. Arnold plays a regular guy who works as a construction worker. He has all these dreams of being something bigger than he is. He sees an advertisement for a company called “Recall” that specializes in putting manufactured memories in your brain. The idea is that if you don’t have time to take a vacation, you can have the memories of a vacation put in your brain. It's the same thing. He goes through with the procedure and things go a little sideways. He discovers that he is a spy and he has a mission to complete on Mars.

I went back and watched this movie again a little more recently, about the time the remake with Collin Farrell came out a few years ago. The special effects don’t hold up, and the story gets clunky toward the end. It suffers from a classic problem where a movie has a great story but it needs to wrap up so quickly for no other reason than it’s time to wrap it up. But, even today, I can watch it and get lost in that world. Some of that is Verhoeven’s vision. He had a way of world-building that gave us futuristic satire of our society that made you think. He did it in Robocop as well. You see the things happening around the character and you think to yourself…”Yeah, I can see that happening”. But it is also a product of Philip K. Dick’s mind. He could tell such big stories in just a few pages. And when it is handled by the right filmmaker, it can deliver something truly amazing.

Total Recall may be considered to be a middle–of–the–road sci-fi flick in most critics’ eyes…but it is the one film from 1990 that left the biggest impression on me.

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

45 Movies For 45 Years: 1989

1989 was the year that I turned 12 years old. I was getting to be the age where I was all in on films. I drove my mom crazy when I begged her to buy me some magazine at the grocery store that cost $4 just because the cover briefly mentioned a movie that I was excited about. We didn’t have 50 websites giving us up-to-the-minute details behind the scenes as we do now. We got our news in spurts. So, if there was a tiny mention of something we were into, we had to be on it.

It wasn’t plausible to get my mom to buy every magazine on the rack at Food World. So, many Saturday afternoons saw me at the local convenience store, sitting on the floor next to the magazines and comics, reading what I could until old Mr. Smith told me to go home.

This is probably the hardest installment I’ve had to write since I started this project. There are so many movies from 1989 that I love. And unlike a lot of the ones that I’ve written so far, where my favorite movie from a given year wasn’t discovered until years later…1989 was the first year that I can remember falling in love with many of these films from the word “go”. Some had to wait until the following year to see on video because movie-going in my rural town was a pretty big outing and not something did every weekend.

Why is it so hard to pick a winner for 1989? Because I love so many of the titles that came out that year…especially in the summer. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future Part II, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Ghostbusters II, and even Look Who’s Talking.

See? See how hard that is to choose? No? Well, you’re not a dude that’s about to turn 45. Because if you were my age…that’s some Sophie’s Choice level stuff right there.

So…I asked myself which movie from that year has meant the most to me over the years? Did any of them shape the way that I watch movies? Did any of them affect the movies that I love now?

Yes, one of them did. Batman.

Batman starred Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Jack Palance, and directed by Tim Burton.

It wasn’t the first comic book movie ever made. Several of the Superman films had already beaten it to the punch. But it was the first one that came out when I was of an age to care about it. I became a regular viewer of Entertainment Tonight, hoping to get a glimpse of a costume or any breath about the production. When the Batmobile was unveiled, it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t a huge consumer of comic books. I wasn’t the kid that went to the comic book store every weekend and bought an armload of the newest titles. I got an allowance of $3.50 a week. With that money, I went to the local convenience store and bought four things. A Snicker’s bar, a Sunkist soda, a copy of the latest Superman title…and Batman.

The only exposure that I’d had to an on-screen version of Batman up to that point had been the campy version from the 60s that starred Adam West and Burt Ward. It was entertaining as I watched it in reruns. But even as a kid I knew that Batman was supposed to be a darker character.

If you want to make a dark movie, Burton is the man for the job. Although, at that point in his career, that might not have been as widely known as it is now. His claim to fame was directing Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. You don’t remember the genius that movie was, but you need to revisit it. It was well done. But what he could do with the visuals of this film given what he had to work with at the time was incredible. There aren’t a lot of special effects here. We didn’t have CGI, so most of what you saw was practical. They used real cars. They used models. They built actual sets. And what we got was a very dark rendition of Gotham City that looked like a comic book page had sprung to life on the screen.

The film was out of time. It was assumed that it was set in the present day (of the time) since Batman had a lot of advanced tech to work with. But the cars and the clothes looked like sometime in the 30s. In this way, Burton created a universe that became synonymous with the Batman franchise and utilized in most of the later films. It inspired the animated series, which I argue is one of the best cartoons that has ever been on TV.

One thing that I love about this film is that it is not an origin story. So many times we’ve seen film versions of comic book heroes come along and we get a long, drawn-out story about how the hero came to be. Sometimes we get that story over and over again in various films. But, Burton didn’t want to make a movie about how Bruce Wayne became Batman. He wanted to make a movie about Batman fighting the Joker. So, he took the origin that could have been a whole movie of its own and broke it down into a short flashback scene. It’s all that we needed. We got the whole story of Batman’s birth in that scene that took less than three minutes. It was brilliant, and it’s something that I wish we could see more of today.

When Michael Keaton was announced as Batman, it went over my head. My 12-year-old self didn’t know enough about Hollywood to care who was playing the characters. I know now that it was a decision that hated by many fans. He was a comedic actor. But he was an excellent Bruce Wayne. He was a little less excellent as Batman. But that black rubber suit that they built restricted his movement, so I think he gave the same performance as Batman as anyone else would have.

Jack Nicholson played the Joker. His performance is legendary. He took the character that we knew from the comics and told us to forget all that. He played Joker as a 30s-style gangster that lost his mind. He still wore the colorful costumes, and had a maniacal laugh, but he wasn’t jumping all over the place and acting cartoonishly the way we’ve seen before. This version was much more along what we saw in The Killing Joke.

What we have today is a Hollywood that churns out comic book movies like it’s all they know how to make. And I’m not complaining about that. We get a lot of good movies that way. The MCU hasn’t put out a bad film yet. But something they all have in common is that they depend greatly on CGI to tell their stories. Batman didn’t have that problem. Burton proved that all you need is a good concept, a decent script, and a great cast to make a film that will be the template for others for decades.

And, it’s my favorite film from 1989.