1980s – Page 9 – PopCult Reviews

Movie Review – The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone (1983)
Written by Jeffrey Boam
Directed by David Cronenberg

By 1983, Stephen King already had much of his work adapted for film and television. This year alone, there were three Hollywood movies: The Dead Zone, Cujo, and Christine, with more coming as the decade progressed. The Dead Zone is typical of King in that our protagonist is experiencing extrasensory perception, as many King main characters do. This ability to perceive things beyond average human senses opens him up to horrors, but now how you might expect. Where other King stories allow this breach of the barrier between life & death to create ghoulish supernatural monsters, the evil in The Dead Zone are the privileged. No zombies or ghosts here, just powerful, wealthy white men who don’t care what happens to everyone else.

Movie Review – Walker

Walker (1987)
Written by Rudy Wurlitzer
Directed by Alex Cox

When I see or hear gringos complaining about Central & South American immigrants showing up in large numbers in the States, I can’t help but think in response, “This wouldn’t be a problem if the States and other colonizers just stayed the fuck home and minded their own business rather than imposing themselves and intentionally destablizing already established cultures.” Colonization means disrupting indigenous people’s development and almost always ends with them becoming an exploited class by foreign business interests that make up our extraction economy. Alex Cox is clearly furious, and we can see that broiling on screen in his savage, intentionally historically inaccurate depiction of one American madman’s crusade into Nicaragua. Something that happened long ago and was happening as Cox made this film.

PopCult Podcast – Blue Jean/You Hurt My Feelings

Two new 2023 releases are spotlighted in this episode. One is a period piece about a lesbian teacher in 1980s England dealing with the pressure of staying closeted to keep her job. The other is a contemporary comedy about an author who overhears her husband saying he doesn’t like her work.

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)
Written by Jeffrey Boam, George Lucas, and Menno Meyjes
Directed by Steven Spielberg

The idea had been to make three movies from the start. After Temple of Doom was less successful than Raiders of the Lost Ark critically, there was some hesitancy about continuing. Steven Spielberg hadn’t felt as committed as he would have liked on Temple, the subject matter didn’t interest him, and the material was far darker than he would have liked. However, the director believed they could correct the course and make something better. Eschewing directorial gigs on Big and Rain Man, Spielberg focused on developing the third Indy film into something special.

Movie Review – Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)
Written by George Lucas, Willard Huyck, and Gloria Katz
Directed by Steven Spielberg

I did a lot of imaginative play as a kid, as do most kids. I’m about to sound like an old man, but this was a time when television was the biggest distractor in the house, and without cable, it wasn’t much of one. The movies and shows I would watch would inspire the play I did, often by myself or maybe with a younger sibling, if I could convince them to play along. I became a Ghostbuster using a backpack, yarn, a paper towel tube, and a shoebox. I was a Ninja turtle using the same backpack for a shell, a wrapping paper tube, and a piece of cloth with eye holes cut out. Indiana Jones was as simple as a cowboy hat and a jump rope.

PopCult Podcast – Last Action Hero/Trading Places

It’s birthday time for two movie releases from the past. One signaled the weak spots in a mega movie star’s career. The other was the first steps of a comedy star who would dominate the 1980s.

Movie Review – Maurice

Maurice (1987)
Written by Kit Hesketh-Harvey and James Ivory
Directed by James Ivory

The English boys’ boarding school culture has long been an environment where homosexuality has been experimented with. It makes sense adolescent young men feel a surge of hormones and spend lots of time building intense friendships with each other. While not as prominent in the United States, we can look at the arena of high school sports as a similar venue. I’m never surprised when I learn a player on a football team develops feelings for a teammate. However, as much as these conditions are fertile for young men to come out as homosexual, they are more often than not met with toxic masculine brutality if they do. It’s one of the frustrating contradictions at the heart of male bonding in the West. Male camaraderie is supposed to be one of the most important things, yet it must never be romantic.

Movie Review – The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie (1987)
Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Paul Newman

“Write what you know” is some advice often given to writers struggling to know where to start. Tennessee Williams was an artist who often practiced this, sometimes literally but also metaphorically. In the case of The Glass Menagerie, it was a very personal play that touched on his relationship with his mother and sister. He kept coming back to it in different forms until he found the way that worked, even writing a screenplay (The Gentleman Caller) that would be repurposed for the play. The result is a moving story of a family displaced from the American South struggling to find their way in an increasingly cold, cruel world.

Movie Review – Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman (1985)
Written by Arthur Miller
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff

Some pieces of art are monolithic in that you know some things about them even if you don’t actively seek them out. They just made such an impact on the culture and became interwoven into our language and our contemporary understanding. I can’t point to exactly when I first knew of Death of a Salesman, but one of my earlier memories was it being referenced in Seinfeld. In an episode, Jerry says George reminds him of Biff Loman from the play. I was a teenager and had never read the play, so I can’t say I ever fully comprehended that one. It made the play stick out to me, though, as it must be important, at a minimum, to understand some aspect of the “discourse.” But time flowed on, and I never sat down to experience Death of a Salesman until now.

Movie Review – True West

True West (1984)
Written by Sam Shepard
Directed by Allan A. Goldstein

Sam Shepard was a playwright that seemed to know what to say about the time he was living in perfectly. He was particularly interested in the transformation of the American West from a mythic landscape used to feed the imaginations of Americans to its incorporation as just another part of the urban & suburban sprawl that took over the country. In his screenplay for Paris, Texas, his protagonist emerges from the desert only to disappear back into it at the story’s conclusion, in a parallel to John Ford’s The Searchers. People who cannot change their perspectives and, at minimum, understand the times they live in will be left on the sidelines, drifting away until forgotten.