I’ve mentioned before that I’m fascinated by the life of Howard Hughes, the billionaire aviator, movie producer, Lothario, and eventual recluse and nutcase. There are many chapters in Howard’s life story that are worth considering, but one of the most interesting to me personally is the epilogue that comes after his death, the tale of Melvin Dummar and the so-called “Mormon Will.”
I watched a movie on DVD last night that I’ve heard about for years but somehow never gotten around to seeing, an odd little flick directed by Walter Hill called Streets of Fire.
Subtitled “A Rock & Roll Fable,” Streets of Fire seems to have been deliberately designed to become a cult classic. The plot is basic and more than a little silly: an evil motorcycle gang kidnaps a beautiful young singer; her former boyfriend and miscellaneous sidekicks venture into hostile territory to rescue her; and then they all fight their way back out and prepare for a big confrontation with the gang’s leader. The dialogue is utilitarian at best and the performances so uniformly stiff that I can only assume everyone was directed to act as woodenly as possible. (I blame the direction because we have plenty of evidence from other films that this cast — which includes a very young Willem Dafoe, Amy Madigan, and the ultra-yummy Diane Lane — really can, you know, act.) What makes Streets of Fire at all noteworthy is the film’s look: it’s set in some weird parallel-universe urban environment where women wear shoulder pads and fingerless gloves like all the girIs I remember seeing from high school, but the men all look like they just stepped out of Rebel Without a Cause. Well, all except for the bad guys, who look less like the hard-ass outlaw bikers they’re supposed to be than leatherboys from San Francisco’s Castro District. The streets of this city-without-a-name are always dark and wet, smeared with reflected colors from the neon overhead, and all the cars are vintage. And of course, as the title promises, there are lots of pretty flames flickering behind the action. In short, the movie represents a total triumph of style over substance.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing; as harsh as all of the above sounds, I really did enjoy the movie. It even helped me put my finger on something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s got to say something for its merits.
Full disclosure: in one of my high-school yearbook photos, I am wearing an aquamarine t-shirt under a white cotton sport coat. I also had a poster of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas on my bedroom wall for about five years. “You Belong to the City” was my personal theme song for a few months. I even eliminated BYU from my prospective colleges list after I learned that the school had a dress code which required young men to be clean-shaven and wear socks at all times. Yes, my friends, I was a fan of the old Miami Vice TV series. Still am, to be honest, and I’m not at all ashamed of it. Hey, I looked damn good in that aqua-colored shirt.
Knowing all that, not to mention my usual distaste for remakes, I’m sure you can imagine that I approached the new Miami Vice feature film with a great deal of trepidation.
I haven’t been hip to the teen-movie genre since about the time Molly Ringwald started sending out college applications. By “teen movie,” I don’t mean the occasional sex farce like American Pie or nostalgic coming-of-age films that are obviously intended for adult viewers, such as Dazed and Confused or Almost Famous. No, when I say “teen movie,” I’m talking about movies that are targeted squarely at the teenage demographic, which feature young actors that kids like but adults don’t recognize, and which focus, by and large, on topics that only teenagers care about. In other words, movies like those the aforementioned Ms. Ringwald was making during her heyday — and my own teenaged years — back in the 1980s.
The Brat Pack and their patron writer/director John Hughes long ago receded into the pop-cultural rear-view, but I have noticed that films similar to theirs still come out every so often, usually on about a four-year cycle to coincide (or so I believe) with each new crop of high-school freshmen. But I haven’t seen any of those more recent teen flicks myself. I’ve missed entire careers because I’m now too damn old to identify with the idealized romantic shenanigans of people young enough to be my own kids.
How, then, did I come to see the film John Tucker Must Die on Sunday afternoon instead of something more appropriate to my age and interests (like, say, Miami Vice)? Blame The Girlfriend, who hosted her thirteen-year-old niece over the weekend and enlisted my help in showing The Kid a good time.
One last thought on Superman Returns, which will no doubt brand me once and for all as a nitpicker on the level of The Simpsons‘ Comic Book Guy:
I hated the new supersuit. The colors were too muted, especially the cape, the textured fabric was weird (reminded me of Aquaman’s outfit, actually) and the big plastic S-shield on the chest just looked, well, like a big plastic shield.
I understand that it’s hard to make something like tights and a cape look cool, or like something that someone would actually wear in the real world (reference the very funny line in X-Men about “yellow spandex”), but is a dingy wetsuit the best they could do?
Yes, I am a dork…
Forgive me for continuing to blather on about the same subject, but I started thinking on the train home from work tonight and I realized that I’ve still got a lot to say about this particular movie. I hope you’ll bear with me…
First things first: Brandon Routh does not look like Christopher Reeve to me. For the past several weeks, I’ve heard all kinds of breathless gushing about how much the new kid looks like the late, great Superman of my youth, but I gotta tell you, I just don’t see it. Yeah, he’s tall and muscular like Chris was in his prime, and they share similar coloring… but aren’t those prerequisites for the role? If anything, Routh reminds me of a young Timothy Dalton.
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…
–Opening theme from Firefly
Writer Joss Whedon reportedly pitched his television series Firefly as “the anti-Star Trek,” so it’s interesting to note that the show has followed a similar path as that classic series: unloved by network executives and cancelled before its time, Firefly, like Star Trek before it, spawned a fanatically loyal cult following that clamored for the show’s return, which it did this weekend in the form of a Whedon-directed feature film, Serenity. The difference between Firefly and Star Trek, however, is that Trek ran three seasons in its original incarnation; it held a sizable presence in the collective pop-cultural memory even before years of syndication made it into a household name. Firefly, by contrast, lasted a mere ten episodes before it was canned, and only 14 episodes were actually filmed.
Think about that. Most series that fail to run a complete season (usually 22 episodes these days) vanish without a trace, quickly forgotten by a fickle viewing public. But this show, which didn’t even make it half a season, somehow garnered enough attention after its death to come back on the Big Screen. Even if you don’t give a womp-rat’s exhaust port about cultish science-fiction media properties, that’s got to impress you because it’s so mind-bogglingly unlikely.
[Ed. note: Sorry it’s taken me so long to post my thoughts on ROTS, but like I said in a comment for an earlier entry, this movie is a big deal for me and it’s taken a while to absorb and process it. Given that it’s been out for a week and the box office returns for last weekend were flat-out astounding, I’m going to assume that half the planet’s population has already seen it. If, however, you are one of the handful of folks who didn’t come down with “Jedi flu” last week, be warned that this entry contains more spoilers than my usual movie reviews. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it can’t be helped in this particular case.]
I finally got to see my long-imagined lava-pit duel as well as the planet of the Wookiees (although the latter amounted to little more than a teasing glimpse). By themselves, these bits of fanboy wish fulfilment would probably be enough to earn Revenge of the Sith my personal thumbs-up. But as it turns out, the sixth and final Star Wars movie gave me a lot of other reasons to like it, too. It was, in fact, everything I was hoping for, a redemptive finish to the generally lackluster prequel trilogy and a successful, plausible bridge into the “next generation story” told in the original trilogy.
That’s not to say that Sith was a perfect movie, or even a perfect Star Wars movie. But I thought it was a surprisingly good movie, and, for me at least, a completely satisfying one.
It’s tough to explain The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to someone who’s doesn’t already know of it, in part because it’s been so many different things over the years. It began as a British radio serial, way back in the late 1970s. The radio show led to a novel, which begat several sequels, and there was also a BBC TV series and an early text-based computer game that I understand is still rather popular in certain circles. (You can probably find a playable version of it out there on the InterWeb Thingie, if you’re curious.) And now, of course, it’s also a big-budget feature film spectacle.
