"Those Were The Days of High Adventure!" 80's Adventure Films Poster Gallery

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Title: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^thDimension (1984)

Director: W.D. Richter

Cast: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, Christopher Lloyd, Lewis Smith, Robert Ito, Clancy Brown, Vincent Schiavelli

Review:

Sometimes, a films premise can be so outlandish and weird, so unpredictable, that movie studios just don’t know how to sell it to the masses. As a result, these “weird films” usually die a quick death at the box office. An example is John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China (1986) which 20^th Century Fox simply didn’t know what to do with. How the hell do you sell a movie about a truck driver who ends up fighting Chinese ghosts in an underground Chinese temple? Exactly! So Big Trouble in Little China went the way of the dinosaur and disappeared from theaters. These films aren’t necessarily bad films, sometimes they are just not what audiences are accustomed to, they can’t be explained in a simple way to the masses. And trust me, this is what studios prefer: films that can be explained in a sentence, a caption, a tagline. For Hollywood, when it comes to selling a film, simplicity is of the essence. If your movie is too complicated a sell, it will either get a limited release, or go straight to dvd, either way, your film isn’t going to get much exposure. Often time, the films tagline will let you know that you’re in for a weird movie, for example the tagline for Big Trouble in Little China was “A Mystical, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Kung Fu, Monster, Ghost Story!” The tagline for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^thDimension was “Expect the Unexpected. He does.” which I have to admit is pretty accurate description of the film, and it’s exactly what makes it so damn watchable. It is extremely unpredictable.

Buckaroo Banzai is a fascinating character in my book. He is that kind of character that is a genius and therefore knows how to do practically everything, which became a funny gag to me. Let’s see Buckaroo Banzai is an excellent brain surgeon, lead singer and lead guitar player of a rock and roll band called ‘Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers', in which he also plays the trumpet! Buckaroo is also a scientist who experiments with interdimensional travel, and ends up being the first human being to travel  through solid matter! If you can believe it, he is also a Samurai. He part times as a super hero, and is also one of the founding fathers of the ‘Banzai Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Strategic Information’ amongst other things that I’m sure are not mentioned in the film. With the help of one Dr. Hikita, Buckaroo invents the ‘Oscillation Overthruster’ a device that allows humans to travel through solid matter and into other dimensions! Unfortunately, it also opens a door for aliens from Planet 10 (called ‘Red Lectroids’) to escape from the 8^th Dimension! Now, these Red Lectroids want to go back to their home planet so they can rule it with an iron fist and they want to use Buckaroo’s Oscillation Overthruster to do it! Will Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers find a way to stop them before it’s too late?

So yeah, this movie is fascinating to me in many ways. I like it because you feel like your falling right smack in the middle of a movie already in progress; this my friends, is not a film that will stop and explain every single little thing for you. This movie might have an outlandish plotline and a comic book premise, but it’s a film that expects you to be quick, to pay attention, this is not the kind of film where your brain can just wonder off, you have to pay attention to every single bit of dialog, or you’ll be lost on your way. Which is what I like about it, it’s a strange thing: a silly movie written by intelligent people. Yeah, it’s complicated in some ways, but not impossible to decipher as some might have you believe. Actually, if you stick with it, the inside jokes can be very rewarding!

Part of what makes this one so enjoyable is the amazing ensemble cast! We get Peter Weller playing Buckaroo, the main character in the film. He comes off as totally likable, like he’s this guy who knows everything about everything, the kind of guy you wish you could be, if you had the brain of a genius. I wish we could have seen more of his Samurai side. Then we have his gang of sidekicks, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, all geniuses themselves. One of them is played by Jeff Goldblum, who for some reason dresses up as a cowboy for the whole freaking film! Then we get the beautiful Ellen Arkin playing the role of Penny Priddy, boy does she look hot on this one! She pops up in the film as this depressed girl who wants to commit suicide, but is saved by Buckaroo, who detects her sadness in the middle of one of his rock and roll shows. Then we get a trio of Red Lectroids played by Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya and Vincent Schiavelli. I mean, what’s not to like about this awesome cast? Everybody seems to be having a blast here; everybody got the spirit and tone of the film just right.  

There are political symbolisms to be found in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and I think that in order to completely understand it, we have to be conscious of the political climate of the 80’s, the fear of nuclear meltdown and the cold war.  This is yet another film that reflects society’s fears and concerns of the time. Like many of the films of the 80’s (War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1985) for example) the fear of nuclear meltdown at the hands of the Russians is felt. The “Red Lectroids from Planet 10” are a clear allusion to the Russians, who were enemies to the Americans at the time. Russians have always been described as “Reds” by the Americans, same as the villains in the film are the “Red Lectroids”. The fear of nuclear meltdown is felt in one scene in which an alien race threatens to destroy Russia, and Perfect Tommy, one of Buckaroo’s right hand men says “The Russians might misinterpret the attack as an American strike; they’re already a little trigger happy!” and yet another allusion to how conscious people where of this nuclear tension can be seen in a moment in which an alien being tells Buckaroo and his team:  “If you fail, we will be forced to help you destroy yourselves” In this way, the filmmakers point at humanities tendency to threaten our own existence with nuclear weapons. 

The villain of the film is played by the great John Lithgow, who is running on all cylinders on this one, playing the over the top villain ‘Lord John Whorfin’ a.k.a. Dr. Lizardo. He is the leader of the Red Lectroids that are scattered on earth. Lord John Whorfin is portrayed as a crazy fascist dictator “not unlike your Hitler”. He runs a company called ‘Yoyodine Propulsion Systems’; which is really a front for the Red Lectroids headquarters. The Red Lectroid’s headquarters has speakers blaring systematic brain washing messages like “The only joy is the joy of duty! Work, work, work!”  So this is a film that though funny and totally zany, is also heavy on political themes.  The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai might seem like a crazy movie to some, but at heart, it plays with a lot of important issues; the filmmakers where just having fun (and lots of it) as they said their piece with this film.

But I don’t want to make it sound like this is a film with a boring political agenda or what have you, nope; this movie is tons of zany fun. It is a completely offbeat film, right down to it's closing credits. It has so many ideas going for it that you feel like it is a set up for future films, as if a whole universe had been created and we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg. In actuality, more Buckaroo Banzai films were planned, proof of this is the promised sequel mentioned during the closing credits: Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League. They even hint at this planned  sequel when they talk about a villain called ‘Hanoi Xan’, the leader of the World Crime League. Sadly, this sequel never came to be because the first and only film failed horribly at the box office. Its failure can be attributed to its convoluted nature, but it also faced tough completion at the box office! Buckaroo Banzai went up against such smash hits as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Ghostbusters (1984), so it didn’t exactly get it easy at the box office; plus it was released in only a limited amount of theaters. But as it often happens with good films, Buckaroo Banzai has found its audience in home video, and its cult following grows. There’s been various Buckaroo Banzai novels and comic books released throughout the years, so you might want to look into those of if you can’t get enough of Buckaroo Banzai. Here’s hoping some day it gets the reboot treatment, because if you ask me, this things got potential!

Rating:  4 out of 5

Beat Street (1984) and Krush Groove (1985) an Awesome Amalgamation of B-Boys, Hip-Hop and Grafitti!

When we talk about movies that capture an era, we’re talking about those movies that instantly catapult you back to that time and place they take place in. Some movies of this nature recreate an era, while others capture it as it unfolds.  For example, Grease (1978) is a film that was made in the 70’s but was trying to re-capture the rock and roll era of the 50’s while films like Beat Street for example, they capture a moment in time as it was happening, in its purest form, no fakeness involved. The problem with films that try and recreate an era is that sometimes they end up exaggerating everything to the point where the representation becomes nothing more than a cartoon version of the real thing.  Beat Street and Krush Groove where two films that captured that time and place in which hip-hop and rap where just getting started, and breakin’ was the newest dance in town.

I was lucky enough to have lived in The Bronx during the mid 80’s, a cool time to be living there if there ever was any. This was the birthplace of hip-hop and breakin’. I got to see firsthand b-boys and b-girls dancing on the streets of the Bronx, breakin’ their days away. This was the time when hip hoppers carried their boom boxes on their shoulders, and wore nothing but Adidas or Pumas. I’d walk up to the corner store to buy some candy (I was just a kid) and sure enough, there would be a b-boy breakin’ on a cardboard box right there on the side walk. As a kid, I was amazed by all of it, because these dance moves were really difficult to pull off! If you didn’t do them just right, chances are you could break your neck! Still, I loved seeing those dance battles happening in the school yard! I remember as a kid trying to spin like a b-boy in my living room floor, hoping to maybe one day become as good as them, I never did, but hey, I had my day in the sun!  I remember Breakin’ was all about the attitude, yet, it was all friendly. Dance teams defied each other, but it was always in good fun. As one of the characters in Beat Street says “There are far worse things these boys could be doing then dancing!”

Now, because of this Breakin’ craze that took over New York and the world, well, of course, Hollywood had to take a bite out of it. Suddenly there was this race to make a movie, to cash in on the whole thing. The thing about fad movies is that sometimes in order to come out before the fad fades away, they are made in a hurry and sadly they end up not being very good. I can mention many examples, Lambada (1990) and The Forbidden Dance (1990) both of which were made to cash in on the whole Lambada craze of the late 80’s and 90’s. That’s another thing about fad movies, they always come in two’s and sometimes in three’s, because there’s always more than one studio looking to cash in on the craze. This is why we have Breakin’ (1984), Beat Street (1984), Krush Groove (1985) and Rappin’ (1985). A prime example of a bad fad movie is Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), which while fun to watch (because it is so bad) the film is a joke of the era that it’s trying to represent, a Hollywood rendition of what they thought Breakin’ and b-boying was all about. Hell, this rush job of a sequel was filmed, edited and put in theaters in less then seven months after the first one hit theaters! Boy did this movie get it wrong! It lacked that street cred that Beat Street had in spades.

That’s what I enjoy about Beat Street, it just feels so genuine. We follow a group of kids who are all struggling to survive in the streets of The Bronx. One of them is ‘Double K’ a D.J. who’s looking to become a ‘superstar’ with his rhymes and his music. He is big brother to ‘Lee’ the youngest of the group, who also happens to be an extremely talented b-boy. Mind you, Lee is not a ‘break dancer’, because the term break dancer or break dancing is an offense to b-boys and girls of the world, it is a term that Hollywood and the media came up with to commercialize the whole thing. To those who like to Break, you are a b-boy or a b-girl, never a break dancer, you don’t break dance, you break. Then we have ‘Ramon’ a.k.a. ‘Ramo’, a Puerto Rican graffiti artist who likes to plaster his art on the trains of New York City, he was a continuing battle with his father, who tells Ramo to get a real job and stop being a delinquent. Ramo thinks otherwise, to him his train graffiti is art, and art is not a crime. Ramo is also struggling with finding a place for his girl and his baby, problem is he doesn’t have a job! Beat Street effectively mixes the world of Breakin’ and Graffiti art with the struggles of the less fortunate. Some of the characters in the film are squatters, living in abandoned buildings, some dance on the streets for money. But they all dream big. As Lee and Double K’s mother says to them at one point “you can keep your dreams gentlemen, but you gotta have something to fall back on”.   

Highly recommend you guys watch a documentary called Style Wars (1983), which follows a group of graffiti artists through New York City as they paint their graffiti on the walls and trains of New York. The documentary shows the emotion these kids felt when they saw a train passing by and their art was traveling down the rails with it. It’s an awesome documentary; highly recommend it because it truly captured the essence of what it meant to be a graffiti artist in New York, during the late 70’s early 80’s. In some ways, Beat Street is a film version of that documentary; the influence of Style Wars on Beat Street is strongly felt.  Graffiti had to be a part of a film like Beat Street because at the time, Graffiti, Breakin’, Hip Hop and New York were all laced together. Breakin’ and graffiti went hand in hand with each other, they were part of the same world. If you were a b-boy, chances are you also did some graffiti.

The film showcases some truly talented b-boys doing their thing, there’s this whole scene that takes place inside of a New York dance club called ‘The Roxy’ that’s simply amazing, the dance moves these kids pulled off! You gotta see it to believe it, made me wish I was right there at that moment in time. You can tell this is the real deal here, these are true b-boys doing their thing, and the filmmakers were lucky enough that they got these street kids to do the real thing for them.  Then there’s the music, which was awesome. Many of these films (especially Krush Groove) had entire scenes devoted to a musical act. Basically, the film stops and the band that’s playing on stage takes over the movie. In this case we get Kool Moe Dee, Afrika Bambataa, boy, Afrika Bambataa really stirs up a party when they get up on stage! Awesome scene!

A theme that runs through both of these movies is the theme of “making it”, following your dream and becoming a super star by doing what you love. While Beat Street was all about graffiti and breakin’, Krush Groovewas more about the music world itself, the side of the performer, the producer and the distributors. Krush Groove is unique in that way, because this film takes place in a time before I-Tunes and digital downloads. This was a time when if you wanted to hear an album, you had to actually physically buy it. I’ve never stopped buying albums myself, I have to admit, I enjoy actually owning a cd as opposed to simply downloading a song onto my computer. There’s some up and downs to that, for example, you can download a song, but if you don’t make a physical copy of it and your computer breaks down, then you lose that album, or you whole record collection. This is something that doesn’t happen if you physically own your albums. Then of course, there’s the coolness of album art and lyrics which usually come with a sleeve. Maybe I’m a dinasour here and I haven’t adapted well to technical advancements, but I guess I’m old fashioned that way. I like to own my albums and my books.

Krush Groove is a fictionalized account of the early days of ‘Def Jam Records’, and what’s cool for me about Krush Groove is how many of the musical groups of the 80’s hip-hop scene made it into the film. Of course, the main stars of the show are Run DMC. This is basically their story but also featured prominently are Sheila E., Kurtis Blow and The Fat Boys. I love Run DMC and all they did for hip-hop and rap, but I’ll be honest, me and my brothers where huge fans of The Fat Boys, we loved those guys, their songs were fun, and the trio themselves were also funny. They even ended up making one more film, a comedy called Disorderlies (1987). Re-watching Krush Grooveand seeing The Fat Boys again was like going back in time to when I was about ten years old! In retrospect, I think it was not such a good idea for The Fat Boys to take pride in being overweight. There is this scene in the movie where The Fat Boys are depressed because they lose in a singing contest, so to cheer themselves up, they go to a Pizzeria and basically eat their hearts out. They stuff their mouths with pizza and pasta as they sing their song “All you can eat”. Gotta be honest, that scene comes off as gross now, it portrays an unhealthy fixation on food, the word “gluttony” came to mind. It felt wrong for these guys to promote the idea of pigging out on food like there’s no tomorrow. I enjoy food as much as the next guy, but there’s an unhealthy danger in over indulging the way these guys did. I know they are called ‘The Fat Boys’ but the whole scene, and the message they transmitted with it, just felt wrong. I did a search on The Fat Boys for this article, I was sad to discover that one of them, Darren Robinson, a.k.a. “The Human Beat Box” died of a heart attack in 1995. Also, Mark Morales, the Puerto Rican Fat Boy, well, he’s lost some weight and aint all that fat anymore!

Beasty Boys in the house 

Aside from these groups that I mentioned, LL COOL J also makes his feature film debut in Krush Groove. Apparently he wasn't all that big yet, but they gave him a five minute spotlight where they let him do his thing; which made me think that this film is filled with lots of groups who were hungry to get into the spotlight and everybody wanted to get on board! In that way, this film also reminded me of films like Purple Rain (1984) and Fame (1980), films about talented people who know they got what it takes and want the world to know it! Even The Beasty Boys also make a brief appearance! It was funny to hear some people “booing” them when they went on stage, I guess the idea of white rappers wasn’t all that popular yet. The thing about Krush Groove is that it might not be the best acted film, but it has a lot of heart, a lot of talented people involved and it also captures that time, the mid 80’s when musical acts took pride in being eccentric, loud and bombastic. This is something I miss in today’s music and films for that matter. Highly recommend checking out both of these movies, they captured the 80’s in a spray can!

Rating Beat Street: 4 out of 5

Rating Krush Groove: 3 ½ out of 5   

80’s Techno Thriller Double Feature: The Manhattan Project (1986) and WarGames (1983)

The 80’s were a fun decade for me; I lived through the whole Breakdance craze of the 80’s, with b-boys and girls breakin’ on the streets, I witnessed many a dance battle during my lunch break in school, I lived for collecting comic books (still do actually), I played street football, I watched ‘V’ and ‘Knight Rider’ religiously on television, and though I was having a blast, I wasn’t fully aware that the 80’s was also a decade were people lived “under the shadow of a mushroom cloud” meaning that nuclear holocaust loomed heavy on everyone’s mind. Dying in a nuclear attack was a very real possibility on peoples’ minds back in those days. Those were the days of the Cold War, when the Americans and the Russians had the whole world frightened with their nuclear possibilities. Though neither of the countries ever engaged in actual war, they had the nuclear capabilities to erase themselves from the planet, all they had to was press a button and we’d vanished in a matter of seconds, turned to cinders by political madmen.

During the 50’s, people were very afraid of the Atomic Bomb, this fear seeped into  popular culture and movies (as fears commonly do) and as a result we got a lot of movies about giant animals who mutated due to radiation exposure. Films like Godzilla (1954), Tarantula (1955) and Them!  (1954) appeared as a direct result of this Atomic Fear.  The Cold War, which supposedly ended in 1991 spawned its own nuclear themed series of films: The China Syndrome (1979), The Atomic Café (1982), Silkwood (1983), Testament (1983) and the two films I’ll be talking about today: WarGames (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986), among other films made for television. I decided to talk about both of these films together because they are both about whiz kids who figure out a way to mess with nuclear weapons and the governments defense systems.  

In John Badham’s  WarGames we meet David (played by a very young Matthew Broderick) a computer whiz kid whose figured out a way to use computers and the internet in his favor. He hacks into airlines and reserves flights to Paris for him and his friends. With a few keystrokes, he both changes his grades and breaks into a video game manufacturers’ data banks to steal their latest video games. Funny thing is how out dated all the technology in this film is! I mean floppy disks where the size of vinyl records for crying out loud! To use the internet they had to hook up a real phone to a machine…it was funny to see all this old technology that at the time must have seemed like cutting edge stuff. Yet it’s still cool to see David hack his way through anything, even if he is using ancient technology, it’s the principal that counts. The guy can get away with bloody murder with a few keystrokes!  How cool! 

  

For David, problems arrive one day when he accidentally hacks into a government computer that simulates nuclear war scenarios. David innocently decides to play with the computer, thinking it’s just a game, but suddenly, the game turns real as the computer decides to really activate the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Things get pretty intense, because the fate of the human race rests in the hands of this kid and ‘Joshua’ the governments computer. This film reminded me a lot of all of those movies where computers go bad and want to destroy everything. Films like Stanly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which HAL, the computer that flies a spaceship goes rogue and decides to turn against its creators. It also reminded me of Eagle Eye (2008) starring Shia LaBeouf, yet another film that presents us with the idea of a computer that starts thinking on its own and decides to kill everyone in government because according to it, they are not doing a good job of running the country. This also happens in John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974), where an astronaut has to actually reason with a computer (by philosophizing with it) in order to make it understand that earth doesn’t have to be blown up with a nuclear device. In WarGames we have a computer named ‘Joshua’.  Will Joshua learn that with nuclear war nobody wins?

WarGames is all about how no one really wants to blow each other up to smithereens, not even the guys who are supposed to press the button want to do it. I liked how WarGames explored that idea; if the time came to push a button that would result in the death of 20 million people, would you do it? Would you press that button? Would you want to be the one responsible for that much death? The film helps us see that no one wants to have that in their conscience; that everybody is that much happier when the bombs don’t go off. It’s the idea that nuclear power is simply too much power in the hands of us bumbling, idiotic, mistake making humans. In the words of one of the characters in the film: “Your defense system sucks!”

There’s lots of tension in those scenes when the computer is just about to blow us all to hell, and I have to hand it to director John Badham for playing with the visuals during those last scenes in the war room. During those scenes, Badham expertly plays with sound, music and editing as if he was directing a philharmonic orchestra, great stuff. WarGames wasn’t the only technology gone bad movie Badham did, he also directed Blue Thunder (1983) where an ultra modern helicopter built for surveillance is taken by its pilot, who has a crisis of conscience as to the helicopters real purpose. He also directed Short Circuit (1986), a film in which a robot designed for military purposes becomes conscious of itself and decides that he doesn’t want to kill, he’d rather dance with Ally Sheedy and chase grass hoppers. So I’d say that this anti-military, anti-war message has been a constant in many of Badham’s films.

In WarGames, David accidentally hacks into the governments computer and thinks he is playing a game called “Global Thermonuclear War” with the governments computer, but when he realizes what he’s done, he does his best to stop the computer from starting World War III, which makes him the hero of the film. This is not the case with The Manhattan Project (1986), which portrays the whiz kid as more of a threat because it puts the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of a high school whiz kid named Paul, who thinks it would be a good idea to steal plutonium from a government laboratory that’s in his neighborhood; in order to make his own home made atomic bomb and expose the militaries secret nuclear experiments.  Apparently, nobody knows that in this facility the military experimenting with plutonium and nuclear power. Paul thinks the people of his town have a right to know this, so he plans on building a bomb and submitting it as a project for his high school science project.

The whole thing starts when one of the scientists working in the military facility wants to date Paul’s mom. In order to get the kid to like him, the scientist (played by John Lithgow) decides to give Paul a tour of the lab. Paul is thrilled to get a tour of the place, because he is a geeky genius and he loves all that techno stuff. But he soon realizes that these scientists are playing with plutonium. He then decides to steal some of it to create his own bomb.

After that, it’s a game of “let’s chase the whiz kid before he blows us all up” type of deal. Again, same as in WarGames, there are some very tense moments when everyone is afraid to be blow to bits. That whole scene where they are attempting to disarm the bomb, was all played very well, the film ends up being entertaining; the difference between WarGames and The Manhattan Project is that The Manhattan Project gets a little more philosophical with its ideas; it has scenes of the scientist and the kid reasoning out things about the nature of nuclear weapons and the reason for their existence, I guess in a way it has more of an edge to it.

Another difference between these two films is the way their main characters are handled. While David in WarGames comes off as a hero, the same cannot be said for Paul in The Manhattan Project. Some people find the character of Paul controversial because he contradicts himself. He wants to expose the “evil government lab” but creating a nuclear bomb himself, and puts everyone around him in peril. Doesn’t Paul think he’s exposing himself, his family and friends, not to mention his town and hell, a couple of states to the dangers of nuclear holocaust? These questions are definitely worth considering, because when we get down to it, he is actually a terrorist. I guess one could argue that he’s trying to make a point in a very extreme way, or that the kid is simply a confused, messed up product of the times. He is scared of dying in a nuclear attack, but then again, Paul is never portrayed that way. Had they portrayed him as a kid who is up to date with world news, and worried about nuclear attacks, maybe it would have made more sense. Still, I get what they were trying to say with the film, and it’s an interesting premise, also, at one point Paul finds a four leaf clover and he thinks this is a mutation that comes as a result of the secret experiments, so that motivates him to do something, I guess he just went about it the wrong way. My only gripe with the film is that Paul’s actions defy logic and reason, and him being a whiz kid and all, he could have come up with something better. His actions come off as arrogant, he might want to expose the military, but it also seems he simply wants to have the glory of being the first kid to create a nuclear bomb in his own house, I just think they could have developed the character a bit further.

I personally liked WarGames a bit more because it’s more exciting, more cinematic. The Manhattan Project has a television movie feel to it. It does have the excellent John Lithgow to liven things up though; and I’ve always enjoyed his performances, in my book he is a solid actor that should have had a bigger career. In the end, I don’t think The Manhattan Project is a bad film, it does take its anti-war message across, it just does so in a strange way. The main character doesn’t come off as likable at all. In the end, he comes off as a crazy kid who could have killed a hell of a lot of people. He certainly could have found different ways to expose the military base, like maybe a protest? But I guess then we wouldn’t have a movie. In the end, what I like about both of these films is the message they want to give us: blowing people up with nuclear weapons is just not cool, pass it on.

Rating WarGames (1983): 4 out of 5

 Rating The Manhattan Project (1986): 3 ½ out of 5

American Pop (1981)

Title: American Pop (1981)

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Review:

I’ve reviewed a couple of Ralph Bakshi’s animated films here on The Film Connoisseur and I’ve noticed how they all have a couple of things in common, first, they are very street, always about the struggles of the working class against the system. They are about the hustlers, trying to survive in this big bad world. The counter culture always works itself into his plots somehow. The nature of the animation is always sketchy, but very much alive. His cartoon characters, though animated caricatures, are always laced with reality, a reflection of society. Music also plays a big part in Bakshi’s films, it almost seems to be symbiotically entwined with his animated images. So does dancing, and the Jewish people. American Pop has all these things and one added element that is seldom found in a Bakshi film: coherence!

American Pop is an epic animated film that spans various decades and four generations of a Jewish family. From the very beginning, the family we follow always leans towards the entertainment world, towards the music, towards the performing arts. “It’s the music I love” says one of the main characters at one point. We always follow the male of the family,  from generation to generation, each generation confronting a stumbling block that doesn’t allow them to reach maximum potential, that doesn’t allow them to be who they really want to be. These are all talented characters in their own way, but be it drugs, or marriage or war…something always seems to get in the way of art, of getting that big break in life, of making it big. Will someone in the lineage ever truly make it?

Gotta give kudos to Bakshi here, this is, I’m pretty sure, one of his best films, if not his best one. I’ve yet to see more of his films because some are difficult to get a hold of. But if I’m to judge his body of work by what I have seen, I’d say that American Pop is Bakshi’s masterpiece. It’s his best structured film, it seems focused and with a purpose, something I never got with Fritz the Cat (1972) which is kind of scattershot and surreal. American Pop has a feel of someone who wants to tell a clear story, to make a point and I loved that about it. Out of all of Bakshi’s films, I’d say this one has the most control over storytelling and the best written one. I loved how the film is structured, how we go from generation to generation seeing how each confronts the society of their time, be it gangsters or the Second World War, or drug addiction and the counter culture. We go from family member to family member until we finally meet the most driven one, the one that’s destined to make it no matter what, “the chosen one” so to speak; the one for whom all the stars aligned. The film made me think about generations of my family and what we have collectively achieved.

Bakshi’s characters all have these realistic movements and gestures because almost the entire film is ‘rotoscoped’, which is an animation technique where they film the live action performances and animate over these performances; not unlike today’s motion captured performances, in fact, rotoscoping is the grand daddy of the motion capture technique. The result is that the animated characters have very realistic gestures and movements. But still, if the performances and the movements that are rotoscoped aren’t any good, then your movie won’t be any good either, just look at the mess that is Cool World (1992) to see what I mean.  What amazed me about American Pop is how good the performances where, you almost get a feeling like American Pop could have been made live action and it would have been just fine. These characters are alive! They got attitude, they got things on their minds and they are going to say them! There are some tragic moments that will pull your heart strings and there are very sweet tender moments of love and human connection that will get to you. There’s this scene where one of the characters falls in love with a dancer, and without saying a word they both know they want each other; what amazed me about the scene was how we get all this not from dialog, but from animated images that transmit these ideas and emotions without  a single word.  

At the same time, American Pop is also about the evolution of American music, hence, the title of the film. We see American Music go from big band, to jazz,  to hippy rock, to punk, to the birth of rock and roll, to every kind of music you can think of. We go from Ira Gershwin to Bob Dylan, to the Doors, to the Mamas and the Papas,  I tell ya, this soundtrack is truly amazing. So many awesome bands and songs, this is a soundtrack you will want to have. There are many things that make American Pop the pinnacle of Bakshi’s abilities as a storyteller and a director. It is an ambitious decades spanning story that will get to you in the end, and for this and many other reasons you can discover when you see the film for yourself,  I wholeheartedly recommend it to lovers of animation, but also to those who love their films entwined with emotions and real characters that suffer and feel; characters that never give up and in the end, triumph. This is truly a criminally underrated piece of animation that should be viewed and spoken about a hell of a lot more.

Rating:  5 out of 5

Warm Bodies (2013)

Title: Warm Bodies (2013)

Director: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich, Rob Corddry 

Review:

The thing with Warm Bodies is that I initially thought I’d hate it, I went in with my bag of rotting vegetables, ready to throw them at the screen. To me it looked like it was going to be the Twilight of zombie movies and in some ways it is and in some ways it isn’t. What Twilightdid with vampire movies is it softened them up; it turned the monsters into the heroes. It turned blood sucking creatures into beings who sparkle in the moonlight; it made vampires for lack of a better word, ‘cute’.  And Warm Bodies does soften up the zombie film, it’s main character is a walking corpse, but you wouldn’t notice if you saw him from afar, except for the pale skin and a couple of scars. And yes my friends, let’s not forget this is a film about a zombie who falls in love with a human girl! So yeah, zombie movies are getting the Twilight treatment in a way, just compare Warm Bodies main zombie with the Edward Cullen character from Twilight, and you'll see they don't look all that different. Going into the theater I thought, “That’s it for zombie movies!” I don’t want my zombies falling in love; I want them mindless and brain hungry! But whatever, this being a zombie movie and me being a zombie movie nut, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Strange thing is I ended up enjoying Warm Bodies!

Warm Bodies tells the story of ‘R’ a zombie who wants to be something more than just a zombie. He wants’ to improve himself, better himself, and maybe even be human someday. Everything starts one day when R is on one of his food runs (i.e. looking for humans to eat) when he stumbles upon a group of rebellious humans who are fighting against the zombie hoards. In the middle of the battle, R notices a young human girl named Julie and its love at first site, and well, R starts to feel, his heart starts beating! Should R follow through with his feelings for Julie? Or are their worlds too different for them to fall in love?

One of the things I dug about Warm Bodies is that it actually delivers a couple of original ideas, number one, the idea that a zombie can go back to being human is one that hadn’t been done before in zombie films, and least not in any that I can remember. And number two that a zombie could fall in love with a human and vice versa. Now in a worn genre like the zombie movie, well, originality is a welcomed thing! The film presented us with one or two original concepts, which proves at least the filmmakers where aiming for something different.

The idea that we can hear a zombie’s interior monologue is a good one, again, I don’t believe I’d ever seen that done before. The idea is that R is conscious of his zombie state, but can do nothing about it. He sees himself act as a zombie, but thinks like a normal human being. Of course, to zombie purists this makes no sense whatsoever because zombies are walking corpses. Rationality, logic or thought normally don’t fit into the equation. But this isn’t your typical zombie movie and in the world of Warm Bodies zombies that think do exist. The idea is that R hasn’t been dead for long and isn’t as far off dead as the ‘Bonies’, which are zombies that are so dead that they literally look like walking skeletons. So I guess the filmmakers behind Warm Bodies bent zombie rules just a bit, as does every movie. All movies create their own universe and rules, in the universe Warm Bodies, zombies can think just fine.

Another good thing that Warm Bodies has going for it is that it’s a socially conscious zombie film, you kind of get the feeling that something like this is what George Romero would be doing nowadays, but of course, less cute. Recently I saw a Quentin Tarantino interview, in which he states that every director has his day, makes great films then their time passes and they get old and no longer make great films; though I still haven’t lost my faith in him, I feel this is exactly what happened to George Romero. To me old age got to him and he lost it. His last one, Survival of the Dead (2009) was a huge disappointment for me. Though not all that bad, it failed to live up to Romero’s post-apocalyptic glory gory days. Warm Bodies reminded me a bit of Romero’s socially conscious zombie films. Warm Bodies portrays modern society as robots, automatons who are growing increasingly disconnected from one another thanks to I-Pads and cell phones.  I really dug how Warm Bodies explores class differences by infusing the film with a bit of Romeo and Juliet into the story. Same as Romero and Juliet, R and Julie come from completely different backgrounds. Julie is one of the human survivors; she lives inside of a walled city that still manages to have some comforts while R lives inside of an abandoned plane, in a zombie filled neighborhood. Yet they come together, because together, they will change everything. There’s even a balcony scene, so if anyone had any doubts about it, yeah this is a zombie version of Romeo and Juliet. By the way, the actress who plays Julie -Teresa Palmer- is a true beauty, I really hope we see more of her on the silver screen, and soon! 

So that’s it for me ladies and gent’s, I say Warm Bodies is a good zombie film. It might get a little too cutesy at times, especially when it comes down to zombies thinking, talking, feeling, and falling in love, but it’s still entertaining and has something to say. A word of warning to zombie fans, there’s not much in the way of blood and guts, though brains are eaten the gory details are left in shadows or out of camera. I also thought that the ‘Bonies’ looked too CGI, they could have pulled those off a little better, I didn’t buy into those things being real at all. But the idea of the film, the concept that a corpse can come back to life through the power of love, is a splendid one. So is the concept that in a world that is constantly trying to dehumanize us, it’s important that we remember how to feel and emote, to communicate and help each other out. I enjoyed how the film emphasizes the importance of every day good deeds, simple things that make this world a more pleasant one to live in. That if we only put more of an effort into actually feeling emotions and interacting with other human beings, then maybe we can change things and make things in this world better, and though these are not the usual concepts we’d expect in a zombie movie, well, I still had a blast with Warm Bodies. Recommended!

Rating: 4 out of 5