1981: The Year that Indy Wasn't Solely Present as a Snappy Pop Culture Reference

That's right ladies and gents, Indiana Jones broke the nerd's glass ceiling. Well that's not really true, it was broken in 1977 in real life but for the purposes of my blog it was Indy. Characters like him never seem to get any attention from the Academy. And yet, without his movies Hollywood would cease to exist because it wouldn't have any money. Who knows what combination of events and planet alignments allowed such a miracle to occur to make the people who hand out the Oscars say: "hey why don't we nominate a movie that's good and that people have seen?" The concept boggles the mind. Ironically I actually like the 3rd Indy movie more than the first one, but we'll discuss that when we get to it. I'd like to make a snide comment about the winner for this year but I haven't watched it yet due to a strange colliding of circumstances involving my movie-OCD and my PS3's own personal OCD. So I figured I'd write the rest of it first so I don't fall too far behind.

And we shall begin for once with the letter "a" and Atlantic City. On this escapade I've been surprised at how many mobster-type movies I actually haven't seen or heard of before. I mean once you've seen the big ones you can pretty much stop there for the sake of film history, but the smaller ones have some good nuances too. I wanted to dislike this movie at first because it began by toting the fact that it won Lichtenstein's "Golden Squirrel" award or another such snobby-sounding thing. First: no one knows or cares what that is except for people who awarded it and already know who won. Second: putting things like that into the movie itself, as opposed to on the DVD cover or something, taints the movie in my opinion. It makes the movie seem like an exhibition and not a piece of art. I ended up liking the movie anyway though. It centers on a low-level gangster in Atlantic City during a time when it was becoming a low-level town. It's not played in a sorrowful manner but the underlying sadness is present through the whole movie. Even the way the city is portrayed feels cold and ancient. The only scenes with warmer visual and audio tones are the scenes with Susan Sarandon. That really helps the film to subtly make you feel the redemptive qualities of her character in relation to Burt Lancaster. Burt is perfectly cast as the washed-up and never-taken-seriously gangster. When I first saw that he was the star I thought to myself, "I can't take him seriously in this part." Then I noticed that no one in the movie takes him seriously either so the casting turned out to be good. Essentially he's playing a character who is running rackets like the old days but who was never a big shot in the old days. It would be like if the last surviving member of the Justice League was the guy who used to fix Batman's car and he was trying to be taken seriously as a superhero. Susan Sarandon plays the young woman with the dark past, looking for a new beginning yadda yadda. Something about her sister and ex (or should be ex) husband coming into town, and she's been impregnated by him and they're druggies. Or hippies. Tough to tell the difference sometimes. The sister is kind of hilarious in how out of place she is within the film with her talk about "vibes" and "inner chi." That's pretty much the whole movie, it's kind of funny, kind of sad, kind of touching. Of course Burt ends up falling in love with Susan, since the opening scene of the movie is her rubbing lemon juice all over herself in plain view of him. So he either has to be in love with her and she says, "ew gross, you're like forty years older than me" or she says "all right then." Since the guy could never catch a break in life, it's good that it worked out the way it did otherwise the movie would have been needlessly depressing. So I can't go all out in recommending the film since it's not overly excellent, but it was well done for what it was.

Another film I moderately enjoyed was On Golden Pond. Ordinarily this would be one of those times where I'd say, "it's not that I don't like this movie, but the fact that it was nominated for Best Picture irks me." Well either I really am losing my curmudgeon-ness or there was such a slew of bad movies in the 80s that I'll take whatever I can get. I wouldn't quite call this a Hallmark movie, but since it contains once-great actors after their prime, a relatively small cast, and a predictable story I'd say it at least qualifies as an above-average HBO film. It's a character study of characters we all recognize from other movies and from real life. My dad tells me that everybody pretty much knew it would be Henry Fonda's last film, and Katharine Hepburn was on her way out of the business too, and Jane Fonda's relationship with her father somewhat mirrored their relationship in the movie. Actually my dad only told me those first two things, the third one was from IMDB. I just didn't feel like starting a new sentence. Anyway, the film centers around some old people at their vacation home reflecting on how much time they've spent there and looking to what little future they have left and trying to come to terms with some family issues. It's totally predictable but it's still enjoyable, and it had a few nice touches that provided more of an emotional hook than I expected. My favorite one of these was during a fishing scene between Henry Fonda and his in-movie grandson wherein they catch a fish and Henry decides to throw it back. It's a small little scene but the way that he says to throw it back and the sorrowful manner in which we see him toss the fish back come together to tell us that he was contemplating his own mortality. Oddly enough, and this is one of my stranger comparisons, it reminded me of a similar scene in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That's a fairly overlooked movie that had the misfortune of coming out opposite the first Pirates of the Caribbean. It's not a terrific film but it's pretty cool and Sean Connery is in it. And Sean's character is the classic "aging adventurer" who compares himself early in the movie to an old tiger. Then later in the movie he is standing guard at a cave entrance while the others are sleeping and a tiger approaches, and he can't bring himself to shoot it for the same reason that drove Henry to throw the fish back. It's the little scenes such as this that are often the highlights of films for me, and it brought me into On Golden Pond enough that I felt a connection to the characters. I realize I spent about as much time talking about LXG as the movie I was supposed to be talking about, but it's tough to think of things to say about a movie that features a cast of about 10 (including extras) and spends most of its time showing old people bickering. For what it was, I enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing more of Henry Fonda, because though this movie was the end for him it is the beginning for me.

That would have been a nice end to this blog entry, but there's plenty more to go. And now is the paragraph I've been waiting to write for months: Raiders of the Lost Ark. This might have been the last time that an awesome summer movie with a nerd following and actually impressive filmmaking was nominated. Which might imply that summer action movies with bad filmmaking get nominated sometimes. They don't. Thankfully. Because they give movies like this a bad name. Speaking of the name, the title doesn't begin with "Indiana Jones and the" and I refuse to write it as such. Because the film itself remains with the original title. This is not the case with another HUGE nerd movie from 1977, but I'll discuss that when I get to it. Now then, as I said before I do like the third movie a bit better but that's largely because I like the trials at the end and Sean Connery is in it. He's gotten two shout-outs this entry, that's pretty good. I wish I could reference him more because that would be an indication of better films in the queue. This first film paved the way though, and in a lot of ways it set the standard for the modern summer film. It has action, a great story, amazing and iconic music, but also an interesting character at the forefront. In this way it was far ahead of its time because only recently have we seen a lot more summer action films that can be similarly described. Most of them are more along the lines of Die Hard (which came out after Raiders but is the best example I can think of) which is a pretty great action movie but not an achievement as a film. But Indiana Jones is a great character with a great director at the helm: Steven Spielberg. The film isn't without its flaws, or perhaps I should say "flaw" because Karen Allen's character is really the only annoying aspect of the movie. When they reunite for their adventure we see Indy's shadow on the wall, larger than life, and with her reaction we are told everything we need to know about the character. He is perceived by others as this monumental and flawless hero and adventurer, but that's really just a projection of the real man. We see this real man in his true colors near the end of the film, in easily my favorite scene in the movie and one of my favorites ever. Before I describe it, here's a little background on the story: (in case you are deprived and haven't seen it) Indiana Jones is an archaeology professor who also hunts down ancient artifacts in exotic and dangerous places. In this particular movie, he's been hired to find the Ark of the Covenant so that the Nazis can't get their hands on it. Right then: onto the scene. Near the end, Indy has a rocket launcher pointed at the Ark and the main villain steps aside to allow him to fire and blow it up. But he can't do it. Because the villain knew that Indy wanted to see what was inside just as much as anybody. See now, your classic action hero would never do that. He would always do what was best for the world or for morality or whatever. But Indy isn't really a hero, he's more like an adventurer. He does what he does for his own personal satisfaction and he'll probably save some people along the way but that's not his primary objective. So even though the day ends up being saved (by none other than God Himself as it turns out) the fact remains that things could very easily have gone the other way because of Indy's own personal gratification. The fact that they made a movie that could be enjoyed by the casual theater-goer while still employing creative filmmaking and writing a conflicted main character is astounding. So I think it fully deserved the nomination it received and though we don't live in a world where it would ever win, I'm glad we live in one where it exists anyway.

Boy what a pleasant blog entry this has been, too bad commies had to ruin it with Reds. Now let's all say this in unison: just because you made a 3-hour plus movie that is coherent doesn't mean you should have. I'm being more harsh on this movie than I should, stylistically speaking, but it's pretty much a movie that wants you to feel for communists. I can recognize with a lot of people, but they're not among them. I wept for Luthor. I wept for Vader. I won't weep for Marx (except Zeppo because he never got any good lines). Facetiousness aside, my main problem with this movie is that its pacing is all off. It intercuts interviews with people who experienced the events of the film in real life with the fictionalized portrayal. While I do like the interviews, I think that format worked a lot better on the miniseries Band of Brothers because they put the interviews at the beginning and then the rest of it was the fictional portrayal. This allows the viewer to become immersed in the story. When I was watching this movie I felt like I was watching a really, really, really well-produced History Channel documentary. I can appreciate the scope of the film and certainly the impressive cast it assembled, including: Diane Keaton, Gene Hackman, and Jack Nicholson (who is in freaking everything except for stuff that he turned down). And of course the main star is Warren Beatty, who also directed, wrote, produced, and likely catered it. It's probably a good thing he made this in 1981 when the fight against communism was in the form of the Cold War and didn't involve any McCarthyism. Otherwise the whole cast and crew would've probably been deported. Then Jack Nicholson never would have played the Joker, so that's why that would have sucked. Diane Keaton never reprising her Godfather role for Part III: would've been mildly disappointing but whatever. Okay, I'll stop ripping on the pinkos (promise). Any time that there's a person like real-life journalist John Reed, Beatty's role, who is passionate enough about something to put himself in harm's way to gather info about it and then put himself in the spotlight by writing about it: that's admirable. So I admire his personal story, and the movie is well-done at times and well-acted but I don't think it earns its running time (not even close) and with the added issue of the pacing it makes the film kind of boring. And I hate to say that because I love long movies and I hate when people are bored by them, but I was quite honestly not interested during a lot of the film. And I'm unemployed and have nothing to do. If I paid money to see this in theaters I'd have been pissed. So I give them credit for pulling together the resources necessary to make the film, but I also give the Academy some rare credit for not tossing the Oscar to the longest film nominated simply for its "epic" scale.

Not to say I exactly think the winner is one of the all-time greats, but it's a good movie: Chariots of Fire. This is one of those films I probably should have seen as a child, instead of an hour ago. Because when you've seen as many movies and TV shows as I have, it's tough not to look at it like a piece of meat. It makes me sad to say that since I used to really get caught up in movies as a true viewer and now I'm flirting with being a film snob. In fact, the only things stopping me from being a film snob are my frequent pop culture references to things film snobs would never watch. Also my obsession with Batman. And the fact that I own Prince of Persia because it's fun and the girl is hot. Okay, you've convinced me. I'm not a snob. Which is good because I'm about to sound pretty snobby, you ready? I think this movie was over-hyped for me because I previously thought it centered on Eric Liddell's refusal to run on a Sunday. Not only is that a small part of the movie (though crucial, to be sure) but I also thought that the film focused more on Eric's quasi-rival Harold Abrahams. I found him a lot more interesting in some ways, because he was running as a result of rampant anti-semitism. Whereas Eric was running for the glory of God, which is cool too but it's also a little cheesy. And even though things worked out, if I read a story in the paper about a guy who refused to run on a Sunday for religious reasons and then was disqualified, I'd be pissed. Not for reasons of religious persecution, but instead because my feeling is: if you've been given a talent and you believe it's from God (not saying I don't believe that, but this is a rant blog not a pamphlet one) then shouldn't you use it to glorify God? The way I see it, as long as you get your worship time in there at some point then you should be good to go. I never understood how me sitting around watching DVDs on Sundays after church would bring more glory than me going and doing something productive like working. But that's just me ranting about non-film stuff. The movie itself kind of reeks of the 80s, but it doesn't bother me too much. I'm glad the famous music isn't overused too, because I've heard it so much in parody that I now can't take it seriously. Some of the audio sounds like it's a badly dubbed foreign film, but maybe that's just representative of Britain's production qualities (zing!). It's an inspiring story, and I'm glad that popular movies that are uplifting get a win sometimes. Depressing movies are good every now and again to admire as movies, but when you watch a bunch at once (like I've been doing) it can get to you. So I must admit that even a quasi-snob like me who looks at films like meat managed to shed a few tears for Eric Liddell and his story.

See how I made it sound like I never cry during movies when I do that all the time? Usually it's during superhero movies though, or every episode of Lost. Well, aside from the commie lovefest (had to get one more shot in there) this was a pretty great year. Will the next one be as good? Probably not. It will be the last year in the 80s that I review though, which is uplifting. All I know now is that it will contain: normal people, the daughter of normal people, and DeNiro in black and white instead of sepia.