Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

As I round out the first five movies of my series, we come to what is without question the first absolute disaster I’ve seen in the 1983 Top 50 and though it cracked the Top 50 in its day, D.C. Cab was most definitely considered a mishandled flop.

Apparently Mr. T, fresh off his breakout appearance in Rocky III, was becoming a bit of an icon among kids and though D.C. Cab is Rated-R (and a hard R at that with ample swearing and one lengthy T&A scene ), Universal decided to market the film with a heavy emphasis on T. His character is most definitely not a major presence in the film – he basically is one of about a dozen minor characters who are all cab drivers with their own subplots that receive probably three scenes each in the movie. Mr. T’s subplot involves Mr. T wanted to make his cab nicer so that kids will see him as the neighborhood hero rather than the local drug dealer who has a much nicer car. This is gritty reality, folks.

The screenplay is so absolutely carelessly thrown together and the film slapped together with such a lack of effort, you’d think it was the first movie any of these people worked on. That’s because it pretty much is. Director Joel Schumacher (yeah, that Joel Schumacher) had only worked on one film prior to this (1981’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman) and co-writer Topper Carew had no previous experience and has only one credit after this on his resume – writing for the show Martin.

The end result of this collaboration of rookies is a nearly unwatchable mess of a film that pulls out just about every trick in the book to try and save itself, including a musical montage, a side plot about two children being kidnapped, an awkward cameo appearance by Irene Cara (”Hey, aren’t you Irene Cara?”) and, I kid you not, a speech about doing the right thing delivered by Mr. T on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s literally only one redeeming quality to the entire film: Gary Busey. This guy is just as out of his mind, bat sh** crazy in 1983 as he is today, and keep in mind that he didn’t have his skull injured in a motorcycle accident until 1988. This is just natural born crazy that we see in D.C. Cab, and in all honesty it is really fun to watch. Busey was clearly a pure ball of chaos from the beginning and what makes his comedic performance legitimately fun in this movie is that it feels real. I highly doubt any of Busey’s lines came from the screenplay or were even rehearsed before they were shot. It’s purely random, unpredictable, absurd nonsense and it does take a special brain to be able to come out with that kind of stuff.

Busey’s performance really only gave me something to hold onto while enduring this atrocious film. It’s fun, but it’s not enough to give you reason to watch this movie. This is the first true stinker of my 1983 journey.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

One thing I love about the bottom half of this list I’m slowly working my way through (sorry about that) is the movies that were clearly at least minor hits in their day but that no one remembers today. In a man-on-the-street poll, I’d be willing to bet very few people could tell you anything about Michael Apted’s Gorky Park, a police procedural thriller with a Soviet twist. As a murder mystery, it’s nothing out of the ordinary from what you’d see on any of the fifty primetime crime procedurals on network TV today. Three bodies are found in Moscow’s Gorky Park with any and all forms of identification removed – that includes faces, fingertips and teeth. Soviet police detective Arkady Renko, played by William Hurt, draws the assignment and as you might expect, the more he learns the more complex the case appears to be with connections being drawn to the KGB, a shady NYPD cop (Brian Dennehy in a really fun, broad bit of character acting), and a highly suspicious American business tycoon played by a wonderfully aged Lee Marvin.

26 years removed from 1983, I’m sure a lot of the oomph of certain details and scenes are a little lost on me. For instance, a major plot point involves Lee Marvin’s character attempting to break the Russian monopoly on sable fur. This would, apparently, have struck a tremendous blow to the Soviet economy but I’m not sure today’s audience would appreciate something of this subtlety without an explanation.

One thing that is clear in the film, even to a post-Cold War audience, is that this is most definitely an American-made film about life in Russia in 1983…the KGB is unequivocally evil and obstructive, life is brutal and cold and harsh for everyone other than a small class of government leaders, and most importantly – everyone wants to get out. Now I’m sure there were a lot of people that wanted to get out of the Soviet Union and I’m sure it was a dangerous proposition but I’m not sure it was quite the universal hope of all Russians, as is portrayed in Gorky Park. The film’s closing shot involves caged sables being set free into the woods…subtle.

Regardless of the political undertones, Gorky Park works really well as a taught crime thriller with plenty of fascinating characters popping up in unexpected places. My personal favorite minor performance comes from Ian McDiarmid, whom true FilmNerds will know as the evil and ever-disappointed Emperor Palpatine. In Gorky Park, McDiarmid is wonderful as a super-creepy scientist who has developed a method of recreating a dead person’s face based solely on the shape of their skull (which I’m pretty sure is impossible even today, by the way). He treats the decapitated heads of the murder victim’s as if they were his house pets…in fact, it would even be creepy if they were his house pets. Really nice little treat of a performance.

If this movie is remembered by anyone for anything today, it seems to be for the performance of Joanna Pacula, the tragic and tortured friend of the murder victims who of course becomes Hurt’s love interest. Premiere called her performance one of the 100 Greatest Performances of All Time as recently as 2006, a fact I was aware of going into my screening of the film. Frankly, I never saw a scene that I felt really warranted that honor but it’s certainly on par with the rest of the very solid work by the entire cast. Her thick Russian accent was a bit distracting at first, particularly since the filmmakers made a choice to make all the Russian characters in the film speak with a British accent, which helps us distinguish them from the American characters that show up later. Pacula’s face and accent do seem to highlight her desperation as an oppressed Soviet citizen but it seems odd at times, particularly in scenes where she and Hurt are meant to be identifying with one another as fellow oppressed Russians.

This one is definitely worth renting if you’re a fan of William Hurt, human taxidermy, WAY better than average crime procedurals or Cold War propaganda. Or, once again, synthesizer-heavy scores.

Still Smokin’

Still Smokin’ obviously isn’t their first film. Cheech and Chong had already created a formidable comedy franchise with their first four films, helping establish a new genre (stoner comedy) along the way. The guys were already running out of steam a little bit by the time Still Smokin’ was released, which is probably why they decided to shake up their formula a bit.

Unlike the four films before it, Still Smokin’ is less about creating its own story and wacky situations and more about finding a thing framework for what is essentially a concert film.

That thin premise is that Cheech and Chong are invited to Amsterdam for a Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton film festival. Outside of Cheech being mistaken by all the Dutch as Burt Reynolds because of his mustache, there aren’t many laughs early in the movie. It plays like a bad B-movie with a few subpar filmed sketches thrown in disguised as dream sequences.

What strikes me about some of the sketches is how far these prominent comedians were allowed to go in 1983…frankly, they touch on some areas that would get 99% of comedians in major trouble today. In one scene, Tommy Chong appears in full blackface as a blues character named Blind Melon Chitlin. Another scene called “Queer Wars” features both men playing outrageously gay drag queens. Both scenes feel incredibly dated today, probably only because no paid entertainer would even attempt them.

I was beginning to get exasperated right around the time the two men take the stage in an effort to save the film festival or something like that. What follows is actual footage of a Cheech and Chong standup show in Amsterdam. I say this without having seen any of their earlier, more successful movies but I find these guys to be really brilliant live sketch performers. Their energy and their commitment to a character or a premise is infectious to watch.

The perfect example would be a sketch called “Ralph and Herbie” in which both men enter the stage on all fours portraying two dogs who are best friends. I’ve got a little bit of a bias against most stoner comedy because I think a lot of it is based on trying to make the stoner look cool. It’s typically all about how the stoners are really the ones who have it all figured out and the straight tightwads just need to chill out. Cheech and Chong might be stoner comedians by reputation but their stage presence is anything but laid back. They aren’t afraid to give every sketch their all and they aren’t afraid to be physical and tense.

I don’t know that I can completely recommend this movie to anyone back in 2009 because the fact remains that as a movie, it stinks. The non-standup material in the film is almost unbearably dumb and hard to sit through. But if you’re into watching great standup comedians in action, this is worth devoting some time to. The final half-hour is an opportunity to see two of the best of their time at work.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

Like most nerdy kids, I discovered Monty Python and the Holy Grail just before high school and wrote its punchlines upon my dorky heart. Silly French accents, random violent rabbit attacks, musical numbers…it was all a weird prepubescent boy could hope for. Then in college, I discovered the Python troupe’s less famous but perhaps more respected film effort, The Life of Brian, a stunningly irreverent but achingly brilliant religious satire.

I had certainly heard mention of the other Python movie, The Meaning of Life, but not being a particularly rapid fan of the group beyond their film work, I never bothered to check it out…until I decided to embark on this little project.

There appear to be conflicting accounts about the origin of the film but at least one member of the group, John Cleese, seems to have suggested in interviews that after the smashing critical success of Life of Brian, the group was offered a much larger budget from Universal than they’d ever seen before. Basically, they did it for a paycheck.

Watching the film, that production history would explain a lot, not because it’s a film that feels lazy but a film that is without real inspiration. The boys were out to prove themselves and their style of humor in Holy Grail. They were out to make a brilliant and inflammatory comedic statement in Brian. In The Meaning of Life, they gave it their all and never cease to push the envelope in nearly every sketch, but there’s no aspirations beyond that.

As a part of this project, I’ve been reviewing film writing and criticism from 1983 as well to try and get a gauge of what critics thought of these films at the time and compare it to how these films are thought of today. Roger Ebert, who in 1983 seemed a great deal harsher than than he is today, said of The Meaning of Life, “This movie is so far beyond good taste, and so cheerfully beyond, that we almost feel we’re being one-upped if we allow ourselves to be offended.” Ebert’s suggestion that the Pythons were simply playing an old fashioned game of British one-upmanship seems to be right on. With nothing left to prove and money in their pockets, these masters of English comedy were simply trying to defy the expectations of even their own fans.

Even those who aren’t offended are likely going to be surprised at the lengths to which the Pythons take their jokes. In one segment (the film is divided into different, unrelated episodes meant to represent the different stages of life), an enormous fat man vomits all over a restaurant and all the people in it. Another scene shows a man having his internal organs being forcibly removed as he screams. Neither of these scenes offended me but neither of them worked for me as jokes either. A lot of this may have to do with the time that has passed since 1983 and the redefining of what is shocking in those 26 years. What we see in the film could easily make it onto network television today, possibly in primetime. At the time, it was enough to get the film banned in several countries.

Shock comedy appears to come in waves, losing its effectiveness after audiences become immune and numb to its power. I think today, audiences seem to be gravitating toward a gentler, more subtle form of comedy, brought on by the influence of comedians like Ricky Gervais and Larry David. This season’s biggest family sitcom hit Modern Family has a lot more in common with Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run than it does with I Love Lucy (which itself was a bit of shock comedy).

The film does contain at least one real gem, a short film that precedes the feature titled The Crimson Permanent Assurance. The short was originally intended to be yet another segment of the film, specifically a five minute segment to be directed by Terry Gilliam with his own cast and crew. Left unsupervised by the production company, Gilliam finished with a film that was three times as long with twice the budget than was originally intended.

The result is a magnificent live-action fantasy trip in which a group of elderly insurance clerks stage a mutiny in their corporate headquarters and then unfurl a set of sails that take their skyscraper sailing away out of the city. The film plays like an Errol Flynn swashbuckler set in modern corporate London, with file cabinets being fired through the window like cannons. It’s a truly entertaining piece of whimsical filmmaking by an ambitious, young Gilliam who was still trying to establish himself as a separate voice from the Pythons.

This is certainly not a light comedy to pop in on a Sunday afternoon (particularly right after you’ve been to church) and to be honest, it was pretty disappointing to me as a Monty Python fan. While there are some individual moments in the film that work, like the extremely irreverent musical number “Every Sperm is Sacred” or the rugby match between a team of 12-year-olds and a team of full-grown adults teachers, most of the scenes are very difficult to watch and fall flat as comedic premises. This is probably rightfully the least-known of the three Monty Python films and will likely remain so simply because there aren’t enough memorable laughs for the audience to hold onto.

Note: Back to the Movies is a special feature on the FilmNerds blog in which Matt Scalici will be watching the Top 50 highest-grossing movies of 1983 in order from 50 to 1.

I begin my odyssey into 1983 with what must have been a surprise box office hit at the time, Lewis Gilbert’s big screen adaptation of Willy Russell’s play Educating Rita. Despite being heavy on dialogue and featuring just one big name star (Michael Caine), this little character drama managed a very respectable $14.6 million at the box office in September of ‘83 and landed three Oscar nominations (Caine for Best Actor, Julie Walters for Best Actress and Russell for Screenplay).

Before I get into the specifics of the film, I want to talk about a few things that jumped out at me early on that I expect will be regular features of my 1983 movie-watching experience. First, there’s the score, which is performed entirely on the synthesizer. I imagine that the emergence of the synthesizer and the ease with which a film could be scored using the machine made it an extremely popular option for filmmakers in 1983, but when we look at the history of film music, nothing sounds as dated and non-timeless today as the synthesizer scores of the ’80s.

Second, and some of you cinephiles may be able to shed some light on this, but there is certainly a definable quality to the look and quality of film itself from this era. Even films from previous decades seem to look more lush today. I’m not sure if it was new lighting techniques or perhaps the material used to make 35mm film at the time, but early ’80s films often seem to have a bit of a dirty tinge to them.

While Educating Rita suffers from all of these early ’80s trademarks, the content of the film holds up rather well in 2009. The premise of the film is anything but original, yet another spin on the classic myth Pygmalion. But unlike adaptations like My Fair Lady and Pretty Woman, playwright Willy Russell took this story to an interesting new territory by using it to explore the British class system as well as making the two main characters far more intriguing and complexly motivated.

The film begins with Rita, played by a very young Julie Walters who shows every bit of the working class British sass she would later show in Billy Elliot and the Harry Potter films, entering the office of Dr. Frank Bryant, player by Michael Caine. Rita is a straight-talking, uneducated young married woman looking to take college night classes from Dr. Bryant because she’s tired of having her life options limited to having babies or going down to the pub.

It’s starting to look predictable already – Dr. Bryant is going to try to teach Rita to be a civilized woman but along the way it will be Rita that teaches Dr. Bryant, right? Thankfully, the film doesn’t go that route and Dr. Bryant begins to realize that making Rita into the intellectual she desperately wants to be may actually kill a beautiful and pure intellect. Rita’s completely fresh approach to the material they are studying occasionally leads her to make humorously brilliant observations that could never be made by the finely tuned brains of Dr. Bryant’s other students.

Bryant’s internal conflict brings up a darker portion of his past, the fact that he has become an alcoholic after failing as a poet. There are a number of clever scenes involving Bryant’s girlfriend and the colleague she is cheating on him with but the movie is almost always at a standstill when Bryant and Rita aren’t in the same room.

Meanwhile, we also follow Rita’s struggle to decide whether or not she’ll truly be happier once she’s educated or whether it’s simply “a different song to sing”, as Bryant puts it.

The film never goes the places you expect it to go and gives us truly heart-wrenching emotional moments with both main characters as they desperately try to escape their painful paths through each other. It’s a typically powerful and vulnerable performance from Caine and a surprisingly interesting performance from Walters.

This is definitely a nice gem I wouldn’t have seen or probably even heard of without going through with this project. Every year at the movies there are hidden gems that bring us rich and interesting characters and performances and those are sadly the most likely films to be forgotten as time passes. I highly recommend checking this one out on Netflix if you’re a fan of British character dramas or of Michael Caine, who delivers some of the best work of his career here.

One of my favorite things about movies is the way they can capture a moment in time in a way that no other art form can. It’s not just the sights, not just the sounds that make a memory. There’s an intangible quality to a human memory and nothing captures that intangible quality like a film.

It’s in that spirit that I embark on a new project here at the FilmNerds Blog, something I’m calling Back to the Movies. It’s a horribly unoriginal and cheesy title but in a way that’s what I’m going for. Much like Doc Brown’s DeLorean transported Marty McFly to another time, what I’m going to attempt with this project is to truly give myself the experience of living in another era, at least for a few hours at a time.

Here’s the deal: I’ve chosen 1983 as my destination. Each week I’ll be watching one of the Top 50 highest grossing films from 1983, counting down from 50 to 1. My hope is that after fully experiencing all of the year’s most significant box office releases, my hope is that I’ll have a better understanding of what life was like back in ‘83.

Why 1983? Well, for one it’s the year I was born. I also found in looking through the history of the Academy Awards and the American box office, the early ’80s is really an area of weakness in my film knowledge base. For whatever reason, the films of that era have never attracted my attention and I hope that through this project I’ll start to get a greater appreciation of the overall evolution of American film.

A couple of notes: there are, as of now, three films from 1983’s Top 50 that are not available as rental options on Netflix, either because they are long out of print or because they have not yet been released on DVD. I will continue to search for these three films but the plan for now is to instead review another significant 1983 release outside the Top 50 in its place. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

The project will begin next week with No. 50 on the list (the Michael Caine comedy Educating Rita) but before I leave you, I wanted to mention a few of the notable films from 1983 that won’t be appearing on this project (except as possible replacements) since they did not finish in the box office Top 50 for the year.

Lone Wolf McQuade – The film that would ultimately inspire the television masterpiece that is Walker, Texas Ranger.

Deal of the Century – Chevy Chase and Sigourney Weaver in a comedy about South American arms dealers. Can’t believe that wasn’t a slam dunk at the box office.

Bill Cosby: Himself - Classic standup routine released theatrically. The film’s success was a huge factor in Cosby landing his own television series a year later.

The Dresser – Nominated for Best Picture and dual Best Actor nominations for Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. Nominating two lead actors from the same film was a trend from the early ’80s I wouldn’t mind seeing again for a deserving film.

Eddie and the Cruisers - Box office flop that later gained a cult following thanks to a hit soundtrack.

The House on Sorority Row – People didn’t like it back then either.

The Hunger – Tony Scott’s directorial debut. It’s about a love triangle between a vampire couple (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) and a scientist (Susan Sarandon).

The Keep – An early directorial effort from Michael Mann, this critically and commercial failure was a World War II-themed horror film.

Losin’ It – Despite being eclipsed in ‘83 by several other similar films, this Tom Cruise vehicle has prevailed over time as one of the best known sex comedies of the ’80s.

The Man with Two Brains – More than solid Steve Martin comedy directed by Carl Reiner.

Rumble Fish – Francis Ford Coppola wrote this gang drama while he was making his more successful 1983 hit, The Outsiders.

Sahara – Regarded as one of the biggest bombs of all time, this Brook Shields hit would later inspire the 2005 film by the same name that is now considered an even bigger box office bomb. No more movies named Sahara, people.

Strange Brew – Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas took their SCTV characters to the big screen in what has since become a cult comedy classic.

Tender Mercies – Robert Duvall won Best Actor in 1983 for his role as an alcoholic country singer. The film was also nominated for Best Picture.

Videodrome – David Cronenberg’s horrific commentary on…the media? Science? I have no idea…there’s a lot of blood.

Zelig – Woody Allen and Gordon Willis’ most impressive technical feat. Allen stars as a historical icon famous for his chameleon-like ability to change his appearance depending on who he’s around.