1980s – Page 28 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Times of Harvey Milk

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
Directed by Rob Epstein

Intersectionality is a word you might hear going around these days. This is the concept of recognizing how people represent multiple identities or how a political issue intersects with various communities and identities. In the United States right now, it’s become time to look at how issues like climate change and a lack of health care have become intersectional issues. The people first affected and most dramatically traumatized by climate change are and will continue to be low income and non-white people. Climate change becomes an intersectional issue, not just merely about cleaning up pollution but acknowledging that our society has allowed groups to become more vulnerable than others.

Movie Review – Sophie’s Choice

Sophie’s Choice (1982)
Written & Directed by Alan J. Pakula

It’s been 38 years, but Streep is still associated with this film. It makes sense because it was the first film to win Streep the Best Actress Academy Award. It wasn’t her first award, that as Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer. But this was different, Streep was the first name in the opening credits the dramatic weight of the picture rests on her shoulders. She’s not the entire pool of talent in the movie, but the key moments often hinge on her ability to convey the depth of emotion and torment Sophie is feeling.

My Favorite Films About Love

It’s Valentine’s Weekend, so that means people are buying cheap chocolate and flowers en masse to profess their love for one another. Love is an emotion that’s been present in cinema since its inception. In 1896, William Heise released the short film The Kiss, one of the first publicly viewable movies. Since then, many stories have been told about people falling in and out of love, both comedic and tragic. Even some horrific. Here are my favorite movies about Love.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974, directed by John Cassavettes)
John Cassavettes paved the way for independent film in America and made a name for himself as an iconoclastic director. His muse & wife was Gena Rowlands, who he cast as Mabel, the titular woman. Nick (Peter Falk) is her devoted husband, who notices Mabel’s behavior becoming erratic. While the film never labels Mabel’s condition, it’s clear she’s somewhere in the realm of bipolar disorder. Mabel ends up in an institution after attempting self-harm, and Nick thinks life can just go back to normal when she returns home. Cassavettes understood that true love could endure the most trying of circumstances, that people who really love each other can do so even when the one they care about doesn’t appear to love them back.

Movie Review – Bashu, The Little Stranger

Bashu, The Little Stranger (1986)
Written & Directed by Bahram Beyzai

There is an emphasis on homogenizing foreign cultures into a monolith. This does a disservice to the broad diversity that exists inside these borders. We sometimes forget that national borders are artificial things, and people are often corraled inside sovereignties they have no direct connection with. Bashu, the Little Stranger, chooses to displace a Southern Iranian from the Khuzestan province due to the Iraq-Iran War. By moving this person into the Caspian north, we see how prejudices and cultural dissonance affect how we treat our fellow citizens.

Movie Review – 8 Million Ways To Die

8 Million Ways to Die (1986)
Written by Oliver Stone, Robert Towne, and R. Lance Hill
Directed by Hal Ashby

It’s pretty clear by this point that Hal Ashby’s career as a successful filmmaker was over. His glory had been in the 1970s, and now the 1980s were eating him alive. 8 Million Ways to Die is nothing like the way an old Ashby film felt. There’s no thoughtful contemplation or a focus on character. This is noir storytelling full of all the tropes and cliches you might expect. The treatment of women is disappointing when you look at more liberating pictures like Coming Home or Harold and Maude. This is the final journey of Hal Ashby, one into mediocrity.

Movie Review – The Slugger’s Wife

The Slugger’s Wife (1985)
Written by Neil Simon
Directed by Hal Ashby

I truly despise this movie. It makes it hard not to dislike Hal Ashby entirely because it is so against everything he made at his peak in the 1980s. The characters are vapid and unlikeable. The story is terrible. I am still trying to make sense of how we ended up here. It’s honestly even more flabbergasting than anything we’ve seen before from Ashby. It is at complete odds with the moral sense the director brought to his early films and is absolute dreck.

Movie Review – Lookin’ to Get Out

Lookin’ To Get Out (1982)
Written by Jon Voight
Directed by Hal Ashby

For some reason, in the 1980s, Hal Ashby made three crime films and a pilot for a failed crime series. I have no idea why he was given this material or why he would be attracted to it. Throughout his 1970s work Ashby reflected a deeply anti-authoritarian theme, particularly toward law enforcement. That’s not to say these movies a pro-police, they traffic in annoying criminal cliches and don’t necessarily give their roguish protagonists anything interesting or unique to do.

Movie Review – Neighbors

Neighbors (1981)
Written by Larry Gelbart
Directed by John G. Avildsen

Animal House and The Blues Brothers are probably the only films John Belushi was in that a large number of people agree were good pictures. Neighbors is a movie that held a consensus as a complete disaster. This was the final film Belushi would star in, dying from a drug overdose, a combination of heroin and cocaine. When you look at the final product and Belushi in it, there’s a lot to like, but so many elements fail hard. Part of the film’s inability to find success in the box office lies in the fact that it’s an art-house picture, not a mainstream comedy. But when your two big names are Belushi and Dan Akroyd, and it’s 1981, you are going to try and sell this as a comedy for the crowds.

Comic Book Review – Miracleman Volume 3

Miracleman Volume 3: Olympus
Reprints Miracleman #11-16, Annual 1
Written by Alan Moore
Art by John Totleben

After the first six issues of Miracleman published in the United States by Eclipse, they got Alan Moore to return to continue the story. This was happening right as Moore was breaking out as the writer on the critically beloved Swamp Thing and Watchmen. Because so much time had passed between the events of the original UK Marvelman short comics and these reprints, the writer decided to use a framing device, jumping a few years ahead. Now Miracleman is reflecting on what happened while flying through a palatial tower. The reader would immediately wonder where he is and what led to this place, creating an evocative narrative hook.

Movie Review – Second-Hand Hearts

Second-Hand Hearts (1981)
Written by Charles Eastman
Directed by Hal Ashby

Second-Hand Hearts represents what might be the most baffling decline in a director’s output that I have ever seen. The blame for this disaster of the film is spread out based on online conjecture, ranging from Ashby’s developing cocaine habit to studio interference in the final project to the two lead actors refusing to take any direction. Second-Hand Hearts is a second attempt to capture the quirky love story of Harold & Maude that fails spectacularly and embarrassingly. In fact, the film was so bad it disappeared from circulation, never receiving a home video release and only becoming available in 2013 as produce on-demand DVD from Warner Brothers’ archive program.