The FilmNerds Blog

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.

While it’s still pretty far down the list of the top-grossing movies of 1983, I would say that All the Right Moves is the first relatively iconic film on our list. It seems to have grown in stature over time since its initial release, probably because of the eventual superstardom of its star Tom Cruise.

By the time All the Right Moves hit theaters in October of 1983 (one week before I was born, by the way) Cruise was already one of the hottest young stars in Hollywood thanks to the massively successful hit Risky Business released just two months earlier. In fact, most theaters were probably still showing Risky Business at the time that All the Right Moves premiered. Nearly every review written at the time mentions Risky Business so it was clearly a major cultural phenomenon that probably affected the way a lot of viewers approached All the Right Moves and almost certainly affected the film’s gross.

Cruise plays Stefen Djordjevic, a high school football player from the town of Ampipe, Pennsylvania (the town is named after the fictional American Pipe Company which employs nearly the entire town). The town of Ampipe serves as the villain of the film, essentially. It’s a depressed, stagnant Rust Belt town that represents the opposite of the cinematic American dream, a place where no matter how hard you work, you have no chance of making a better life for yourself. Stefen’s only way out is a college football scholarship, a longshot for him considering his diminutive stature and limited physical talent. But against the odds, Stefen has started to receive a little bit of attention from smaller colleges, though his desire to go to the best engineering school possible leads him to spurn an offer from an unnamed state school at the beginning of the film (the school’s recruiter is played by a very young Terry O’Quinn aka John Locke from Lost).

When Ampipe HIgh School’s season takes a turn for the worse, the road to a college scholarship gets a little bit tougher for Stefen. The film follows the always-reliable dramatic path of tragedy unfolding from a series of misunderstandings, misdirected emotion and unfortunate coincidences. The series of events that leads to Craig T. Nelson’s Coach Nickerson jeopardizing Stefen’s college career never comes off as forced, since each character is given enough screen time for the audience to truly understand all of their actions and the motivations behind them. It’s a classic example of well-written drama, a scenario in which the characters end up hurting each other and themselves despite having the best of intentions at the story’s outset.

Nelson and Cruise both do a great job of adding real sympathy and emotional depth to their roles but it’s two supporting performances that gave the film its most interesting dramatic moments. Chris Penn is absolutely heartbreaking as Stefen’s teammate and best friend Brian, the team’s most talented player who is forced to turn down a scholarship to USC after impregnating his girlfriend. A lot of fans and critics went after All the Right Moves for wrapping up its story too neatly and happily but Penn’s character arc to me balances this out and gives us a taste of the tragedy Stef would face if he never got out of Ampipe. There’s a moment where Penn’s character is trying to enjoy himself at a party with his classmates just before heading off to his honeymoon in Pittsburgh and the look on his face as he tries to convince everyone that he’s happy with his situation is absolutely devastating.

The other real gem in the film is a young Lea Thompson, another bright young talent nabbed that this film caught just before she took off. Thompson’s resume was virtually blank coming into All the Right Moves but in the two years following the film she would star in Red Dawn and Back to the Future, two of the most iconic films of the 1980s, and it’s not surprising to see why her career took off after this film. She exudes girlish charm and while she’s a beautiful girl, she’s comes off as identifiable rather than intimidating. To apply my 2010 perspective, she reminds me a lot of Rachel McAdams, a girl that is certainly attractive enough to be a romantic lead but gets most of her appeal from her friendly, girl-next-door personality rather than raw sex appeal. Thompson’s role as Stefen’s girlfriend mostly reiterates the same themes present throughout the rest of the film (she wants to be a musician but can’t afford college) but the biggest asset she brings to the film is the addition of yet another pressure on Stefen’s life, the pressure of maintaining a relationship. She’s a supportive girlfriend to be sure but she has needs too and Stefen’s lack of emotional maturity creates more problems for him to deal with throughout the film.

Director Michael Chapman hadn’t done much directing before this film, and didn’t much after either, but real film nerds know him as one of the great cinematographers of the late ’70s and early ’80s. His work on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull put him in the pantheon of great DPs and though he didn’t continue to work at that level going forward in his career, it should be noted that when he took on All the Right Moves, he was at the absolute top of his game and I think it shows. Chapman had the foresight to hire a then-unknown Jan de Bont to shoot All the Right Moves and it’s interesting to see de Bont working with such subtle material knowing that he would later go on to become one of the leading names in blow-stuff-up-real-good filmmaking. The bleak, depressed setting of the film is crucial to telling this story and that setting is brilliantly synthesized by de Bont’s blue and gray-toned photography.

Is the ending of All the Right Moves ham-fisted and too convenient? Absolutely it is. It’s a little odd to see a film like this so hesitant to end things in a more logical, if more depressing, way particularly when it takes its inspiration so obviously from one of the most dark, depressing dramas of the 1970s, The Deer Hunter. I suppose in the end the fact that our subject matter is football rather than the Vietnam War probably led the filmmakers to opt for a happier ending. Still despite the rather gutless resolution, the film stands up today as a really effective portrayal of a classic story of teenage angst. It works particularly well set against today’s backdrop of economic depression and seemingly bleak outlooks for the future.

All the Right Moves might be remembered today because of the big names who got their start in the film but it continues to endure as a watchable film because of truthfully it depicts its characters and their hopes, fears and desires.

Next Up: Valley Girl starring Nicholas Cage.

Back from a longer than intended absence (in which time one summer movie was released with minimal fanfare — “Robin Hood” — and if you’ll permit me a one-phrase review, I would say that it wasn’t as bad as you’ve heard but suffers from a crippling lack of purpose or novelty), as work responsibilities piled up over a short amount of time.

“MACGRUBER”

Starring Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Powers Boothe, Maya Rudolph and Val Kilmer

Directed by Jorma Taccone

Probably as much of a followup film to the underrated “Hot Rod” as we’re ever going to get from The Lonely Island, director Jorma Taccone — one-third of the comedy group responsible for the album “Incredibad” and those digital shorts on Saturday Night Live — packs the very silly “MacGruber” full of absurd gags and ’80s action-movie humor. While it’s not as frequently hilarious as “Hot Rod,” “MacGruber” gets the job done more often than not, with some over-the-top silliness courtesy of scenarists Taccone, star Will Forte and SNL writer John Solomon.

As you probably know, “MacGruber” springs from those 30-second sketches on SNL starring Forte, Kristen Wiig and usually whatever guest star is hosting the show that week, in which the MacGyver roman a clef MacGruber (Forte) is faced with the task of defusing a bomb, and, inevitably, fails to do so. So you would be forgiven for questioning how such a skit translates to a 90-odd minute film, but let’s just say that it’s not all explosives humor and leave it at that — “MacGruber” has the ’80s action movie in its crosshairs (so to speak) and skewers it with increasing absurdity.

MacGruber (no first name is ever given) is a former Special Forces guy called back into action by his former C.O., General Faith (Powers Boothe), after the heinous Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer, in “Top Secret” mode) allegedly seizes a nuclear warhead. Cunth is the same person who killed MacGruber’s wife (Maya Rudolph) — during their wedding, on the altar — so this time, it’s personal.

With a crack team of badasses — and then, following an amazing sight gag, with the young, by-the-book Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) and Vicki St. Elmo (Wiig) — MacGruber sets out to “pound some Cunth.” And that’s all you need to know, and hopefully that line from the movie will give you a general idea of the sort of humor contained herein, because the plot is as loose as I described above, and really just exists to hang all sorts of scatalogical, sexual and violent jokes upon.

Your mileage may vary, but the absurd non sequiturs and sudden bursts of violence had me giggling like a maniac in the theater. Will Forte is a comic maelstrom, chewing every bit of scenery in his path, and his costars are wise enough to back off and let him do his thing (particularly the comparatively restrained Wiig, who doesn’t play quite to her manic highs here, but is funny in a more restrained way).

I’m not saying “MacGruber” is a perfect comedy, but considering the lows we’ve been through with Saturday Night Live-based films, you can pretty much rest assured this is among the best of them.

*** (out of four)

Tomorrow: A late review of “Shrek Forever After,” followed soon after by reviews of “Sex and the City 2″ and “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” now that I actually have a bit of free time from my other job.

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 mentioned in our last installment that I felt one of the markers of 1983 filmmaking was the inescapable cheesiness that betrays most of the films of that era immediately and thus takes us as modern audience members out of the story. I’m happy to say that Krull surprised me in just how entertaining it remains today, and I don’t mean entertaining from a camp standpoint. Krull has everything a modern major blockbuster strives to offer the audience: a unique concept (sort of), strong visuals, likable characters played by good actors, a great score and, at times, an involving story.

What sets Krull apart from last week’s film Spacehunter is probably the same factor that takes any film from being bad to being at least decent: commitment. Unlike their paltry budget for Spacehunter, Columbia gave Krull an estimated $27 million to work with and the results are noticeable on-screen. The stop-motion sequences are probably the only visual aspect of the film that simply doesn’t stand as impressive today and they are thankfully limited. The sets are enormous and impressively detailed and the makeup and creature effects are solid, particularly with the cyclops character (how do they blink his eye?).

Director/producer Peter Yates being at the helm probably accounts for the film’s unusually strong story and characters (at least for the fantasy genre). Yates was at the top of his game in 1983, having already earned a Best Director and Best Picture nomination for his cycling film Breaking Away in ‘79. Yates would also receive another Director and Picture nomination in ‘83 for his personal drama The Dresser, which sadly does not make the Top 50 list for 1983 (though I may review it anyway as an honorable mention).

Before I go too much further, here’s a brief summary of Krull: there’s a very vague setup involved but basically there’s a bad guy called The Beast and he and his army want to take over the fantasy world of Krull. A prince and a princess from two warring kingdoms decide to get married to unite their forces against the bad guy and shortly after they are wed, the new queen is kidnapped and taken to the big scary castle of the beast. Oddly, the leads are probably the least famous cast members today, Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony, a British actress whose voice was re-dubbed by an American voice actress. Liam Neeson has a very small role as one of a band of robbers that joins up with the young king on his way to rescue the queen. It was a very early job for Neeson and although the part is laughably small, he really finds a way to shine and he gets every last bit of mileage out of every line he’s given. Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies) also plays one of the robbers but has a significantly smaller role even than Neeson.

As you’d expect, the film is more about the journey to save the princess than about actually saving the princess. Along the way there are a series of monsters and exciting encounters, all of which are actually pretty imaginative and perilous. By the far the best of these episodes involves the character known as “The Old One”, who essentially serves as the Gandalf of the group, sneaking into a giant spiderweb to gain some pertinent information from a creepy old woman called The Widow of the Web. When the old man finally arrives at his destination, we are treated to an extremely well-acted and well-written scene revealing that the two characters have a long personal past together. Their subplot has nothing to do with the rest of the movie but in a way outshines the main plot of the film in its emotional depth, thanks largely to a truly great one-scene performance from Freddie Jones.

Probably the most enduring item from the film, at least according to those I’ve spoken to, is the special weapon given to the prince to slay the beast. It’s called the Glaive and it’s basically a giant throwing star with a mind of its own. It basically works like this: you throw it, it goes around cutting up whatever needs to be cut up, and then it comes back to the thrower’s hand. The Glaive showed up on South Park in the famous “Imaginationland” episode when Jesus used it against some of the evil characters.

What stands out today as the film’s strongest individual element is the score by James Horner. Horner has excelled for years at composing scores that seem to add instant depth and gravitas to a film (his Braveheart score remains one of the best-selling movie scores of all time) and his work here is an early example of the kind of inspiring, soaring music he would come to be known for. It’s a perfect tone-setter for what is really a film about escapist thrills with a backdrop of romance. Check out the clip below which includes probably my favorite score moment of the film.

From a business standpoint, Krull was not as successful a project as Spacehunter, since the latter made a profit at the box office and Krull topped out at $16.5 million, well below its production budget. The difference is that between the two films Krull has a better chance of having a lasting affect on its viewers. I’ve spoken to several of my older friends and colleagues this week who were kids when Krull was released and their impressions 27 years later were all positive. Does the ensuing video and TV sales from the film eventually make up for the loss Columbia took at the box office? Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t but I’m inclined to believe that every once in a while, it’s in the studio’s best interest to lose a little money on a film that connects with an audience and keeps them believing in the magic of movies.

Next Up: All the Right Moves starring Tom Cruise.

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.

Do you like Star Wars? What about Mad Max? What if you took those two movies, combined them, traded out the actors for a bunch of nobodies, made the screenplay laughably bad and cut the special effects budget in half? You still want to see it? Then have I got a movie for you…

I knew it some point in this process, I’d run into my first camp classic and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone is it. Loaded from end to end with bad acting, cheap special effects and one of the laziest, most brazen attempts at cinematic plagiarism I’ve ever seen, Spacehunter is the kind of movie that can really only be enjoyed by the cynical and sarcastic hipsters raised on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Believe me when I say, though, that I am not the kind of person who enjoys the camp factor of a bad movie. I might be amused by how bad it is but make no mistake, friends, this is 90 minutes of my life I will never get back. A sacrifice for the integrity of the blog.

The film opens with a confusingly shot effects sequence involving some cardboard spaceships hitting a meteor and exploding. An escape pod holding three women in spandex and New Wave hairdos ejects and crash lands on a strange planet where we will spend the rest of the movie. The premise here, though it is never fully explained in the film, is that this planet has been overrun by a horrible disease that has turned everyone on it into melty-faced mutants who apparently spend their entire lives making Molotov cocktails in preparation for the events of this movie.

Anyway, the three women, who are never named and never speak a word of dialog in the entire film, are captured by the mutants and taken to an evil warlord named Overdog (we’ll get to him later) for unspecified purposes. That’s when we meet our hero, Wolff.

Here’s where the plagiarism kicks in. Wolff is Han Solo, plain and simple. He dresses like him, he has the same haircut, he’s sarcastic, he’s a loner, on and on. The only difference is that while Harrison Ford oozed charisma in the role, Wolff is played by a TV actor (Peter Strauss) who looks like he was on morphine for the length of the production.

Even the name evokes Han Solo. Here’s how I’m pretty sure they named the character. Han Solo. Solo. Alone. Lone. Lone Wolf. Wolf. Add another f so people don’t suspect what we’ve done.

Anyway, Wolff receives a message about the three women with an offer of a reward if he can rescue them. Wolff and his sexy female assistant Chalmers (I love that name) zoom down to the planet, bury their spacecraft so the aliens can’t find it (Wolff’s best line: “Make it eat dirt, Chalmers!”) and embark on their adventure.

The first bind-blowingly stupid action set piece we encounter (don’t worry I won’t take you through all of them) a group of “land pirates” who ride a train in the shape of a pirate ship. I’m not even going to attempt to apply logic to that idea because I know the writers who came up with it didn’t. Anyway, the pirate scene ends with what has to be the most campy sequence in the entire film, an early death scene for the ill-fated Chalmers that contains a hilarious reveal that I admit I should have seen coming. Think Ian Holm in Alien.

With Chalmers dispatched, we meet the real female lead of the film, the much less sexy Niki, played by a pre-Sixteen Candles Molly Ringwald. I kid you not. At this point in her career, Ringwald was a newcomer, known only for her role on The Facts of Life. In her defense, she’s clearly giving this role her all. The character is meant to be obnoxious and dopey and Ringwald’s delivery is probably the best anybody could hope for with this screenplay, which I should mention is loaded with distractingly idiotic future-slang. Words like ‘brainworking’ (which means thinking) and ’scavvy’ (which means disgusting). Marlon Brando would sound like an idiot with this dialogue. Ringwald had no chance.

As Wolff and Niki search the desert planet for signs of the three captured women, they encounter lame monsters, futuristic biker gangs and on a couple of occasions an old frenemy of Wolff’s named Washington, played by Ernie Hudson. Hudson must have gotten roped into the movie by his Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, who executive produced Spacehunter (weird) and it’s a fortunate turn of events for us as he’s far and away the most entertaining part of the movie. He too is given ridiculous dialogue, mostly focused on his love for his specialized bulldozer vehicle, but Hudson is such a likable actor that he seems to get away with it far more than the rest of the cast.

The film climaxes with a big spark-filled battle with Overdog, who looks strikingly like Darth Vader without a helmet. He’s sufficiently gross looking for an intergalactic villain but it doesn’t appear that anything was done to effect his voice, which basically sounds like a normal dude’s voice coming through a hideously disfigured half-man, half-machine.

So how did this piece of junk get a green-light from a major Hollywood studio (Columbia Pictures)? And better yet, how did this film end up in the Top 50 at the box office for the year? A quick glance at the film’s history answers both questions. Spacehunter was released on May 20, 1983, one week before the opening of what many correctly assumed would be the biggest hit of the year, Return of the Jedi. The first nerdlings were already setting up camp in front of their local theater when Spacehunter opened and Columbia must have figured that a low-budget, thrown together knock-off might be able to capitalize on the excitement preceding Jedi. It wasn’t a bad bet; Spacehunter finished with $16.5 million at the box office with a production budget of $14.4 million. Nothing to sneeze at in 1983 dollars.

Still, it’s films like this, low quality garbage with a clear intent to capitalize on the success of another well-made film from another studio, that give the ’80s a bad name when it comes to movies. I’ve flipped across so much campy trash like Spacehunter that it’s tainted my view of all films from the ’80s. I’m willing to excuse camp when it comes from a filmmaker who was legitimately trying to make a good film but failed. I’m less forgiving with films like this, churned out quickly and cheaply by a major studio with the resources to do better work. This is the first truly bad film I’ve encountered on the list so far. Looking ahead though, this might be a taste of things to come for 1983.

Next Up: Krull starring Liam Neeson.

Hey folks,

I’m back in the realm of FilmNerds, for the first time in a long time. Our mutual friend Matt has kindly asked me to offer my weekly thoughts on the summer movies, since I pretty much see all of them anyway — and I’m more than happy to oblige. Naturally, this first summer weekend was the week of my graduation from college, and Mother’s Day — but somewhere in that time, I got to see the summer’s first blockbuster twice.

So without further ado — let’s kick off the summer…

“IRON MAN 2″

Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Mickey Rourke, Don Cheadle, Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson

Directed by Jon Favreau

“Iron Man 2″ shares basically all the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor, the surprising 2008 hit “Iron Man.” It feels so much like a continuation of the first film that I’m both unsurprised how much I liked it and very surprised at how critics originally with the Jon Favreau-directed first film turned so violently on the second. I would never dare say some of their concerns aren’t valid, but I suppose the novelty of the first film caused them to overlook those flaws, and the hype surrounding this one opened it up to more scrutiny — even with how damn fun this movie is.

“Iron Man 2″ starts mere seconds after the first film ends, as a Russian scientist dies while Tony Stark (Downey) is giving the press conference from the end of “Iron Man.” As his son, Ivan Vanko (Rourke), holds his dead father and watches Stark, he swears revenge — to clear the name of his unjustly punished father from crimes done by Tony’s own father, Howard (played in film strips by John Slattery of “Mad Men”).

Skip forward six months. Stark, as he tells a senator (Garry Shandling) hell-bent on taking the Iron Man suit for the U.S. government, has “privatized world peace.” (It’s a shame that the audience doesn’t get to see any of this — as it stands, Stark as Iron Man doesn’t actually… do very much at all in the film.) Stark is reopening the Stark Expo to showcase scientific advances and, more importantly, to stoke his own ego. But he’s holding a secret — the palladium core that keeps him alive and powers the Iron Man suit is slowly poisoning him. Frightened by his imminent death, Stark begins acting rashly — and Vanko capitalizes with a super-powered suit of his own, culminating in an action sequence at a racetrack at Monaco that ends the first act and draws the attention of Justin Hammer (Rockwell), a Stark competitor with a grudge who likes the idea of putting Tony Stark in his place and sees Vanko as the mechanical genius who can do it.

On top of all that, Pepper Potts (Paltrow) returns as Stark’s beleagured sidekick turned C.E.O. of Stark Industries, Jim Rhodes (now played by Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) sees his allegiances further torn between his friend and the military, and Nick Fury (Jackson) and SHIELD return to monitor Stark for some secret project called the Avengers Initiative.

The new additions to “Iron Man 2″ are welcome and generally effective, though the standout, as I expected going in, is Sam Rockwell as the weasely Stark competitor Justin Hammer. Hammer’s hilarious bravado and insecurity, along with some choice moments and great lines, make it pretty easy for Rockwell to steal every scene he’s in. Rourke, though sadly underused (spending most of the film in Hammer’s secret compound and not really doing much) is menacing and makes the most of his screentime; it’s a villain in need of a more strongly structured screenplay. I didn’t mind Scarlett Johansson, though it’s a shame that her storyline is ultimately a distraction — though she unmistakably awakens the libidoes of countless teenage boys with her catsuit and ass-kicking, and Jon Favreau certainly lingers on the shaplier parts of her body. (Not a complaint, but these might be the shots held longest in the entire film, and that’s the sort of thing you notice on a second viewing.)

“Iron Man 2″ is flawed. You may find its climax rushed (but, unlike the first film, at least it has one). You may find yourself thinking about missed opportunities here and there, or wondering exactly what function SHIELD and its agents have in the film, other than serving as an extended trailer for the upcoming “The Avengers” film. But once again, the sheer charm of the cast and the humor and high energy of the thing make it a lot more enjoyable than it has any right being, given an almost total disregard for structure and scripting. Think about it like this:  the “Iron Man” franchise is basically Marvel’s very own “Ocean’s” franchise, though I do see “Iron Man 2″ being more widely accepted than “Ocean’s Twelve.”

I’ll generously give it a *** 1/2 out of four here, and yes, it holds up. It’s so much fun.

NEXT WEEK: A more timely review of “Robin Hood.” I’ll also be doing a weekly retrospective of the past decade’s summer movie seasons (2000-2009), running through each summer’s moneymakers, artistic successes and failures. So keep an eye out for that — the first entry should be up within the week. Thanks for reading FilmNerds.

Today marks the official beginning of the 2010 summer movie season with the release of the first major studio tentpole of the year in Marvel’s Iron Man 2. To celebrate, the FilmNerds RoundTable assembled for an hour-long discussion of the 2010 summer movie slate, the films we’re excited about and our predictions for which major releases will be hits and which ones will flop. Click the link below to hear the full podcast or head to iTunes and search for FilmNerds to subscribe to our podcast.

FilmNerds RoundTable: 2010 Summer Movie Preview

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’ve been away for quite sometime from this project and I’ll admit that part of the reason that it took so long to post this latest installment has to do with the subject matter. I consider myself a film lover but that doesn’t mean that all formats and genres work for me. If there’s one subcategory of film that just hasn’t ever been able to keep my attention, it’s the concert film. They’re like documentaries but with no point of view and no guidance from a director. They are simply documents of a performance shown from a few different angles and are almost always a forgettable filmgoing experience for me.

Richard Pryor: Here and Now fits into a subcategory of a subcategory, the stand-up comedy concert film. With the exception of a short interview with Pryor at the film’s opening in which the comedian explains that he’s been sober for seven months heading into the show, the film is simply a filmed record of a stand-up performance he gave in New Orleans in August of 1983 (the film was released that November).

We’ve already seen one concert film in this blog, but Cheech & Chong Still Smokin’ at least made an attempt to structure the performance clips around a narrative, albeit a weak one. This film plays more like raw footage, which I admire in principle but am bored by in actuality. I’m a big fan of stand-up comedy. You might even call me a student of stand-up comedy. I spend a lot of time around aspiring stand-ups here in my hometown of Birmingham and I always enjoy hearing them break down their performances and their jokes. It’s a science and an art and something that I have tremendous admiration for. But at the same time, I always recognize that stand-up comedy, more so than any other medium for comedy, relies on capturing the spirit of the moment. For stand-up comedy to work, the comedian has to have a complete understanding of his audience, what makes them tick, what rings true to them.

It’s clear that when this film was made, Richard Pryor was in tune with his audience. This was his third concert film and his first since undergoing a major life transformation following the incident in which he nearly killed himself while free-basing cocaine. He was a man who clearly had taken control of his life and had recommitted himself to his craft. The audience in New Orleans is outrageous to behold today with a nearly non-stop stream of shouts from the audience, not necessarily hecklers just people who desperately want to participate in the show. Pryor is totally unfazed by the noise and distractions and chooses just the right times to respond to a shouted comment.

You can probably tell there’s a big BUT coming. The issue is this: if stand-up comedy is about understanding the mindset of the audience you are performing in front of, where does that leave us as audience members 27 years later? A lot of my stand-up comedian friends would disagree but I feel that stand-up material simply doesn’t age well, precisely because its success is based on it being relevant to a very specific audience in a specific place and time. Some material doesn’t even work if you aren’t in the same room as the comedian – how could it work if you aren’t in the same decade?

What does work particularly well from Pryor’s 90-minute set are the longer character-based bits. One of Pryor’s more well-known bits was playing a character called “Mudbone”, essentially an elderly, uneducated black man rambling on to various members of the audience as if he’d known them since their childhood. Another particularly impressive bit finds Pryor playing a crack addict in the midst of shooting up, a bit that as Roger Ebert puts it “comes closer to tragedy than it does to comedy.” It’s an impressive little piece of performance art that is made even more impressive by the fact that Pryor performed it in front of what can only be described as an unsophisticated audience.

While I can certainly appreciate Pryor’s skills on stage, Here and Now doesn’t do any better job of keeping me interested than any other concert film I’ve ever seen. The Original Kings of Comedy is probably one of the only concert films I’ve ever seen that clearly worked for me and kept me interested but will it have the same affect on some kid who goes back to watch it 27 years later? I’m guessing it won’t.

Next Up: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone starring Molly Ringwald.

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’ is my first experience with the infamous comedy duo Cheech and Chong. Both guys have impressed me as actors in the limited roles I’ve seen them in (Cheech Marin as Hurley’s dad on Lost and Tommy Chong as the drugged-out hippie on That ’70s Show) but I’d never seen them in action together in any form.

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.