Jacob's Ladder ** (1990)

A curiosity from 1990, Jacob's Ladder contains some horror elements, but is more of a supernatural thriller.  File it under a "What is reality?" type movie. Starring Tim Robbins as a Vietnam vet who endured awful trauma and subsequent amnesia.  Early on it's clear Jacob's world is way out of joint. Experiencing terrifying visions he's unable to explain to the people around him, Jacob starts to question his sanity. As Jacob's visions intensify it is revealed the army conducted drug experiments on his unit. The dreamlike logic and urban noir make for a haunting atmosphere but an incoherent story.  The script's all over the map and I suspect the studio meddled with the final cut.  Despite its flaws, Jacob's Ladder is worth a look for its strange tone and thoughtful meditation on memory and mortality.

An American Werewolf in London (1981) ***

From a script John Landis had written over a decade before, An American Werewolf in London proved his third box office smash on the heels of Animal House and The Blues Brothers.  With Oscar winning makeup effects from Rick Baker, American Werewolf stands as one of the best horror films of the 1980s.

American Werewolf has a great sense of humor to compensate the often bleak story line.  The movie opens with two American students David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) hiking through the English countryside and are attacked by a werewolf.  Wiseguy Jack perishes, but David survives.  

While recuperating in the hospital David experiences terrifying nightmares and receives visits from an "undead" Jack.  Dunne often gets the best laughs and is menacing as athe ghoul.  David begins a romance with a sympathetic nurse wonderfully played by Jenny Agutter who brings warmth and humanity to the picture.

American Werewolf works for me, because like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, there's a strong sense of reality thanks to the on location shoot. The heightened reality increases the sense of horror and the emotional toll. The wrenching transformation sequence, which took weeks to film, stands alongside John Carpenter's The Thing for most intense use practical effects.

An American in Werewolf in London remains the best of its kind for the jarring shifts in tone from comedy, romance, and horror. Many have tried to copy it without success.

Notice how the trailer plays up the horror elements.

Psycho (1960) ****

After years of watching Psycho on TV, thanks to TCM, I finally got a chance to see it on the big screen.  Over 60 years later Alfred Hitchcock's thriller has lost none of its power to unsettle and implicate the audience.

At a Pop Culture conference I attended a few years ago I stumbled upon a panel discussion on Psycho.  One presenter argued Psycho should be considered a comedy!  While Hitchcock typically injected humor into his films and Psycho does contain moments of levity, no one leaves the theater laughing.

Another speaker did a gender analysis.  In 1960, with the Cold War turning hot and with Vietnam War a few years away, some psychologists viewed moms as a threat to American masculinity.  The logic being that if young boys get too attached to their mothers they might end up like Norman Bates. An intriguing analysis, but I believe Hitchcock offered something more than armchair psychoanalysis.

Cultural interpretations aside, Psycho remains a masterpiece of modern cinema. Saul Bass's opening title sequence and Bernard Herrmann's ominous score set the tone from the outset.  Then the camera pans down to a hotel room where an illicit act has taken place, at least for 1960, a secretary Marion (Janet Leigh) and a divorced man Sam (John Gavin) are having an affair. They want to marry, but financial obstacles stand in their way.

Later that day, Marion runs off with a cash deposit her office entrusted to her in hopes of eloping with Sam.  In another film, we would have the basic plot: Will Marion escape and build a new life with Sam?  Almost immediately her plans go awry: her boss spots her and then she is pursued by an intimidating cop.  She trades in her car and ends up at the Bates Motel.

Then we meet Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) a seemingly decent young man. Intrigued by the attractive woman in his lobby, Norman makes awkward attempts to converse with her. With a grotesque bird of prey looming above him, Norman speaks glowingly of his mother, while also sensing Marion's not the innocent she presents to the world.

Then the course of cinema history changes.  While the shower scene's been copied a million times in every slasher film, the terror of that moment lingers.

For myself, the real horror comes during the quiet aftermath: a zoom out from Marion's lifeless eye resembles the stuffed birds in the lobby. A stark silence fell across the theater, as I'm sure it did in 1960.  At that moment Hitchcock intrudes upon and implicates the viewer; forcing the audience to ponder what just took place.

The second act follows Norman's clumsy attempt to cover up the murder as Marion's sister Lila (Vera Miles) and Sam slowly discover the truth.  It's hard not to sympathize with Norman Bates.  The idea of a sympathetic killer, a victim in their own right, suggests there are no laws to the universe.

Many object to the procedural ending when the psychiatrist provides a rational explanation of Norman's troubled psyche.  The scene reminds me of when something awful happens, say a mass shooting or an act of terrorism, and the media trots out experts to explain the unexplainable.  We just get the illusion of order being restored, but is it really?

Hitchcock's final close up of Tony Perkins negates everything the psychiatrist just said. In reality, no one can definitively explain why people do the things they do.  Despite all our tools and technology the human mind remains a haunting mystery.  Therein lies the power of Psycho.

Stripes *** (1981)

Bill Murray, originally known as the "new guy" who replaced Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live, grew into one of the most dynamic cast members in the show's history.  His early film work included the popular Meatballs, playing Hunter Thompson in the disappointing Where the Buffalo Roam, and another goofball in Caddyshack, but in Stripes he perfected the wiseguy persona to carry him through several movies. 

The film opens with Murray and his bookish sidekick Harold Ramis as a couple of underachievers who decide to take their chances with Uncle Sam. And why not? Reagan made the army cool again, the decade of "Be All You Can Be."

Stripes painted a mostly positive portrait of the army, one of the first films in the post-Vietnam era to do so. Apocalypse Now, released two years before, took the Vietnam film as far as it could possibly go.  Stripes offered a kinder, gentler army that helps young people find their place in life, a theme it shared with Private Benjamin and An Officer and a Gentleman.

But unlike the Tony Scott/Tom Cruise vehicle Top Gun, an extremely nationalistic film, Stripes expressed a patriotism I could get behind:

Great stuff -  Beetle Bailey meets Henry V.

It's hard not to believe Stripes is thirty years old.  Three iconic actors from the era have passed on: John Candy, Harold Ramis, and Warren Oates are all at the top of their game in Stripes.  Oates especially as the tough Drill Sergeant, funny but never the buffoon and always the match for Murray.

Director Ivan Reitman duplicated his success in big budget comedy a few years later with Ghostbusters.  Stripes holds up for many reasons, mainly because it remains pretty damn funny.

Talk Radio (1987) ***

Oliver Stone was on a roll in late 80s, at the peak of his powers with Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July. Talk Radio rarely comes up. Based on the play written by Eric Bogosian which follows a controversial radio host who likes to push the envelope, tapping the raw nerves of the American psyche.

Barry Champlain takes calls from the fringe: the angry, the dispossessed, the jilted, the vigilantes, and the bile spewing haters.  The issues discussed are very much 80s: AIDS, the war on drugs, racism, distrust of government - the midway point between Post-Watergate cynicism and Tea Party paranoia. Like so many shock jocks, Barry browbeats his callers, it's an Est seminar on the radio.

The film takes a few unfortunate detours when exploring the backstory of Barry and how he got into radio.  Those scenes slow down the momentum, but I suppose they were meant to humanize Barry - a lost soul himself.

On the verge of going national, Barry's under pressure to take the craziest, most outrageous callers.  He talks to a zoned out metal head, Neo-Nazis, and extremely creepy callers detailing the crimes they have allegedly committed.  All edgy high drama that TV cannot capture, the kind of content to make audiences salivate.

By the late 80s, the loudest and crudest voices took over the airwaves. Barry would never command such a large audience today, but he would find a niche audience of malcontents. One could read Talk Radio as the death of liberalism, predicting the new politics to come. It's all sound bytes with no context - the loudest voices always win.  And Barry's the garbage man, processing all the trash that people do and say with violence as an ever present possibility. 

Bogasion delivers the performance of his life, portraying media star pushed to the brink of madness and ego, reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in Lenny.  Talk Radio remains a potent film for its uncompromising portrait of 1980s America.

The End of the Tour ***1/2

Based on the book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, The End of the Tour recounts David Lipsky's five day interview with David Foster Wallace shortly after the publication of his epochal 1996 novel, Infinite Jest.  Lipsky, on assignment for Rolling Stone, taped his conversations with Wallace. All the dialogue in the film derives directly from those tapes.  As a film, The End of the Tour is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles meets My Dinner With Andre.  Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky are compelling and do a fantastic job in their respective roles.

At its heart, the film is about the friendship between Wallace and Lipsky.  An aspiring novelist himself, Lipsky's intimidated by Infinite Jest and all the critical praise heaped upon it. His writing seemed conventional by comparison, a fact made all the more annoying when his girlfriend cannot stop praising Wallace.  Meanwhile, Wallace envies Lipsky's ability to charm his ex-girlfriend. Meanwhile Rolling Stone pressured Lipsky to prod Wallace on his struggle with addiction, creating a dramatic tension throughout.

Snarky reviewers have compared the Wallace/Lipsky relationship to Mozart and Saliari in Amadeus, the genius toying with the mediocrity.  I would disagree, the proper analogy would be James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, for when the biographer illuminates their subject they provide a great gift to future generations.

I watched the film in a packed theater.  While the audience laughed at the banter on Alanis Morissette and junk food, I sensed an uneasiness when Wallace pontificated on the dangers of technology. His words do seem prophetic as you can sense people itching to check their phones as the movie's playing. Their looks seemed to say, How could this brilliant guy with the brightest future before him feel so unhappy and lonely?  I'll credit Segel's performance for refusing to turn Wallace into a tortured artist cliche, provoking the conflicted reaction from the audience I sensed in the theater.

In addition to his fiction, Wallace shined in his non-fiction writing, most famously "A Supposedly Fun Thing, I'll Never Do Again," an uproarious chronicle of his week on a luxury cruise ship.  His journalism is a great place to start.

As a drama, The End of the Tour hits all the right notes: the bleak beauty of winter in the Midwest, the cold comfort of chain restaurants, and the millennial unease of the 90s. When they share an awkward goodbye at the end (should we hug or shake hands?) we feel a sense of loss as Lipsky drives away. The ending echoes My Dinner With Andre because we're sad to leave our friend, especially when you know they're never coming back.

The Limey ***1/2 (1999)

A neo-noir from 1999, Steven Soderbergh's The Limey is a revenge tale told with verve and poignancy.  It gets better with each viewing.

The Limey begins with cockney ex-con Wilson (Terence Stamp) arriving in Los Angeles to investigate the death of his daughter. He's a stranger in a strange land. Eventually Wilson learns aging record producer Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) could be responsible for her death.

The passage of time figures prominently in The Limey, a theme reinforced by an editing style that evokes a spinning wheel narrative.  A circular story, instead of a linear one.

The Limey also plays upon the cultural memory of the 60s, specifically the lost hopes and ideals of the decade. Many conversations in the movie reflect on the passing of time and the need to make sense of the past. Soderbergh went as far to include clips from the 1967 film Poor Cow, which starred a younger Terence Stamp.

A combination of razor sharp editing, top notch acting, and stunning daylight cinematography mark The Limey as a modern classic.

Also, don't miss the DVD commentary track with Steven Soderbergh and veteran screenwriter Lem Dobbs. They openly discuss their creative differences and the challenge of adapting the written word to the screen.