The Couch Trip (1988, directed by Michael Ritchie)

Posted on July 16, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

When renowned radio psychiatrist George Matlin (Charles Grodin) has a nervous breakdown, he takes a trip to Europe with his wife (Mary Gross) to both recover and also work on his marriage. (Matlin’s breakdown was the result of an extramarital affair.) Needing someone to host Dr. Matlin’s radio show, his producers call Dr. Lawrence Baird (David Clennon), who oversees a mental facility in Chicago. They assume that Dr. Baird is just dumb enough that they won’t have to worry about him overshadowing Dr. Matlin while he’s guest-hosting. However, when they call, Dr. Baird is out of his office and the phone is answered by John Burns (Dan Aykroyd), a con artist who has been pretending to be insane so that he can avoid serving time in prison. Pretending to be Baird, Burns accepts their offer and then escapes from the asylum and heads to Beverly Hills. The real Dr. Baird, not knowing about the offer, goes on vacation in Europe. Though Burns had originally only been planning on doing the radio job long enough to get paid enough money to head to Mexico, he soon becomes a celebrity with his non-nonsense, blunt advice.

There’s a lot of talented people in The Couch Trip, including Walter Matthau as a former priest-turned-kleptomaniac and Aykryod’s wife, Donna Dixon, as Matlin’s colleague and Burns’s eventual love interest. Director Michael Ritchie was responsible for some of the best films of the 70s and radio psychiatry is certainly a ripe subject for satire. Why, then does, The Couch Trip fall flat? Some of it is because the movie never seems to know if it wants to be wacky farce or a dramedy about a criminal who finds a new life helping people. The other big problem is that the talented Dan Aykroyd is miscast as the type of unapologetic smartass that Bill Murray could play in his sleep. (In a version where Murray played John Burns, Aykroyd would have been perfect casting as George Matlin.)

Aykroyd was one of the most talented members of the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players. (His impersonations of Nixon and Jimmy Carter were second-to-none.) Sadly, Hollywood has never figured out what to do with his off-center talent. The Couch Trip is a prime example of that.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Right Stuff (dir by Philip Kaufman)

Posted on January 20, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s a brilliant scene that occurs towards the end of 1983’s The Right Stuff.

It takes place in 1963. The original Mercury astronauts, who have become a symbol of American ingenuity and optimism, are being cheered at a rally in Houston. Vice President Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) stands on a stage and brags about having brought the astronauts to his supporters. One-by-one, the astronauts and their wives wave to the cheering crowd. They’re all there: John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), Alan Shephard (Scott Glenn), Wally Schirra (Lance Henrisken), Deke Slayton (Scott Paulin), Scott Carpenter (Charles Frank), and the always-smiling Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid). The astronauts all look good and they know how to play to the crowd. They were chosen to be and sold as heroes and all of them have delivered.

While the astronauts are celebrated, Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) is at Edwards Air Force Base. Yeager is the pilot who broke the sound barrier and proved that the mythical “demon in the sky,” which was whispered about by pilots as a warning about taking unnecessary risks, was not waiting to destroy every pilot who tried to go too fast or too high. Yeager is considered by many, including Gordon Cooper, to be the best pilot in America. But, because Yeager didn’t have the right image and he had an independent streak, he was not ever considered to become a part of America’s young space program. Yeager, who usually holds his emotions in check, gets in a jet and flies it straight up into the sky, taking the jet to the edge of space. For a few briefs seconds, the blue sky becomes transparent and we can see the stars and the darkness behind the Earth’s atmosphere. At that very moment, Yeager is at the barrier between reality and imagination, the past and the future, the planet and the universe. And watching the film, the viewer is tempted to think that Yeager might actually make it into space finally. It doesn’t happen, of course. Yeager pushes the jet too far. He manages to eject before his plane crashes. He walks away from the cash with the stubborn strut of a western hero. His expression remains stoic but we know he’s proven something to himself. At that moment, the Mercury Astronauts might be the face of America but Yeager is the soul. Both the astronauts and Yeager play an important role in taking America into space. While the astronauts have learned how to take care of each other, even the face of government bureaucracy and a media that, initially, was eager to mock them and the idea of a man ever escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, Chuck Yeager reminds us that America’s greatest strength has always been its independence.

Philip Kaufman’s film about the early days of the space program is full of moments like that. The Right Stuff is a big film. It’s a long film. It’s a chaotic film, one that frequently switches tone from being a modern western to a media satire to reverent recreation of history. Moments of high drama are mixed with often broad humor. Much like Tom Wolfe’s book, on which Kaufman’s film is based, the sprawling story is often critical of the government and the press but it celebrates the people who set speed records and who first went into space. The film opens with Yeager, proving that a man can break the sound barrier. It goes on to the early days of NASA, ending with the final member of the Mercury Seven going into space. In between, the film offers a portrait of America on the verge of the space age. We watch as John Glenn goes from being a clean-cut and eager to please to standing up to both the press and LBJ. Even later, Glenn sees fireflies in space while an aborigines in Australia performs a ceremony for his safety. We watch as Gus Grissom barely survives a serious accident and is only rescued from drowning after this capsule has been secured. The astronauts go from being ridiculed to celebrated and eventually respected, even by Chuck Yeager.

It’s a big film with a huge cast. Along with Sam Shepherd and the actors who play the Mercury Seven, Barbara Hershey, Pamela Reed, Jeff Goldblum, Harry Shearer, Royal Dano, Kim Stanley, Scott Wilson, and William Russ show up in roles both small and large. It can sometimes be a bit of an overwhelming film but it’s one that leaves you feeling proud of the pioneering pilots and the brave astronauts and it leaves you thinking about the wonder of the universe that surrounds our Earth. It’s a strong tribute to the American spirit, the so-called right stuff of the title.

The Right Stuff was nominated for Best Picture but, in the end, it lost to a far more lowkey film, 1983’s Terms of Endearment. Sam Shepard was nominated for Best Supporting Actor but lost to Jack Nicholson. Nicolson played an astronaut.

Film Review: And The Band Played On (dir by Roger Spottiswoode)

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I live in a very cynical time.

That was one of my main thoughts as I watched 1993’s And The Band Played On.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode and featuring an all-star cast, And The Band Played On deals with the early days of the AIDS epidemic. It’s a film that features many different characters and storylines but holding it all together is the character of Dr. Don Francis (Matthew Modine), an epidemiologist who is haunted by what he witnessed during the Ebola epidemic in Africa and who fears that the same thing is going to happen in America unless the government gets serious about the mysterious ailment that is initially called “gay cancer” before then being known as “GRID” before finally being named AIDS. Dr. Francis is outspoken and passionate about fighting disease. He’s the type who has no fear of yelling if he feels that people aren’t taking his words seriously enough. In his office, he keeps a track of the number of HIV infections on a whiteboard. “Butchers’ Bill” is written across the top of the board.

Throughout the film, quite a few people are dismissive of Dr. Francis and his warnings. But we, the audience, know that he’s right. We know this because we know about AIDS and but the film also expects us to trust Dr. Francis because it’s specifically stated that he worked for the World Health Organization before joining the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. As far as the film is concerned, that’s enough to establish his credentials. Of course, today, after living through the excesses of the COVID pandemic and the attempts to censor anyone who suggested that it may have begun due to a lab leak as opposed to some random guy eating a bat, many people tend to view both the WHO and the CDC with a lot more distrust than they did when this film was made. As I said, we live in a cynical time and people are now a lot less inclined to “trust” the experts. To a large extent, the experts have only themselves to blame for that. I consider myself to be a fairly pragmatic person but even I now find myself rolling my eyes whenever a new health advisory is issued.

This new sense of automatic distrust is, in many ways, unfortunate. Because, as And The Band Played On demonstrates, the experts occasionally know what they’re talking about. Throughout the film, people refuse to listen to the warnings coming from the experts and, as a result, many lives are lost. The government refuses to take action while the search for a possible cure is hindered by a rivalry between international researchers. Alan Alda gives one of the best performances in the film, playing a biomedical researcher who throws a fit when he discovers that Dr. Francis has been sharing information with French scientists.

It’s a big, sprawling film. While Dr. Francis and his fellow researchers (played by Saul Rubinek, Glenne Headly, Richard Masur, Charles Martin Smith, Lily Tomlin, and Christian Clemenson) try to determine how exactly the disease is spread, gay activists like Bobbi Campbell (Donal Logue) and Bill Kraus (Ian McKellen) struggle to get the government and the media to take AIDS seriously. Famous faces pop up in small rolls, occasionally to the film’s detriment. Richard Gere, Steve Martin, Anjelica Huston, and even Phil Collins all give good performances but their fame also distracts the viewer from the film’s story. There’s a sense of noblesse oblige to the celebrity cameos that detracts from their effectiveness. All of them are out-acted by actor Lawrence Monoson, who may not have been a huge star (his two best-known films are The Last American Virgin and Friday the 13 — The Final Chapter) but who is still heart-breakingly effective as a young man who is dying of AIDS.

Based on a 600-page, non-fiction book by Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On is a flawed film but still undeniably effective and a valuable piece of history. Director Roger Spottiswoode does a good job of bringing and holding the many different elements of the narrative together and Carter Burwell’s haunting score is appropriately mournful. The film ends on a somber but touching note. At its best, it’s a moving portrait of the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 (1987, directed by Jeremy Kagan)

Posted on March 25, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1969 and, in an Illinois courtroom, 8 political radicals stand accused of conspiring to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention. The prosecution is putting the entire anti-war movement on trial while the defendants are determined to disrupt the system, even if it means being convicted. The eight defendants come from all different sides of the anti-war movement. Jerry Rubin (Barry Miller) and Abbie Hoffman (Michael Lembeck) represent the intentionally absurd Yippies. Tom Hayden (Brian Benben) and Rennie Davis (Robert Carradine) are associated with the Students for a Democratic Society. Bobby Seale (Carl Lumbly) is one of the founders of the Black Panthers while David Dellinger (Peter Boyle) is a longtime peace activist. John Friones (David Kagan) and Lee Weiner (Robert Fieldsteel) represent the common activists, the people who traveled to Chicago to protest despite not being a leader of any of the various organizations. Prosecuting the Chicago 8 are Richard Schulz (David Clennon) and Tom Foran (Harris Yulin). Defending the 8 are two radical lawyers, Leonard Wienglass (Elliott Gould) and William Kunstler (Robert Loggia). Presiding over the trial is the fearsome and clearly biased Judge Julius Hoffman (David Opatoshu).

Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 is a dramatization of the same story that inspired Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 but, of the two films, it’s Jeremy Kagan’s The Trial of the Chicago 8 that provides a more valuable history lesson. By setting all of the action in the courtroom and recreating only what was said during the trial, director Jeremy Kagan and his cast avoid the contrived drama that marred so much of Sorkin’s film. Kagan trusts that the true story is interesting enough to stand on its own. Kagan includes documentary footage from the convention protest itself and also interviews with the people who were actually there. While Kagan may not have had the budget that Sorkin did, his film has the authenticity that Sorkin’s lacked. Kagan also has the better cast, with Michael Lembeck and Barry Miller both making Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin into something more than the mere caricatures that they are often portrayed as being.

The Trial of the Chicago 8 was a film that Jeremy Kagan spent a decade trying to make. When he first tried to sell the idea behind the film to CBS in 1976, Kagan had Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, George C. Scott, and Dustin Hoffman all willing to work for scale and take part in the production. CBS still passed on the project, saying that no one was interested in reliving the 60s. It wasn’t until 1987 that Jeremy Kagan was finally able to revive the film, this time with HBO. It actually worked out for the best because, with HBO, there was no need to try to come up with a “clean” version for the language that was used in the courtroom or in the interviews with the actual participants. The defendants could be themselves.

Though it has been overshadowed by Sorkin’s subsequent film, The Trial of the Chicago 8 is the definitive film about what happened in the aftermath of the the 1968 Democratic Convention.

The Unnominated: Star 80 (dir by Bob Fosse)

Posted on October 27, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were,for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.

First released in 1983, Star 80 is an examination of fame, obsession, misogyny, and finally madness. All four of those qualities are exemplified in the character of Paul Snider (Eric Roberts), a man with a charming smile, a ludicrous wardrobe, and the personality of a pimp. When we first see Paul Snider, he’s naked and he’s covered in blood and he’s ranting about how the world is trying to destroy him. Even if he wasn’t holding a rifle, he would be terrifying. Suddenly, we flash back to a few years earlier. Snider is being dangled out a window by two men. Snider pathetically begs to be pulled back into the room. The men laugh at him before pulling him up. Snider, looking fairly ridiculous in a cheap suit that he probably thinks makes him look like a celebrity, fights off tears as he says he deserves to be treated with dignity.

Star 80 is based on a true story. Mariel Hemingway plays Dorothy Stratten, the actress and Playboy playmate who was murdered by Paul Snider. Snider, who often claimed credit for having “made” Dorothy, was married to her at the time, though Dorothy had filed for divorce and was dating director Peter Bogdanovich. Unwilling to let her go and return to being a small-time hustler, Snider shot Dorothy and then himself. Director Bob Fosse, who was best known for directing musicals like Cabaret and All That Jazz, was attracted to the story because he understood that type of world that produces sleazes like Paul Snider. According to Eric Robets, Fosse even said that he probably would have ended up like Paul Snider if not for his talent.

Snider, the film quickly establishes, really doesn’t have any talent beyond the ability to manipulate people who are too naïve to see through his bullshit. Snider wants to be a star. He wants to be rich. He wants people to kiss his ass. When he meets Dorothy, he sees her as his ticket. Dorothy’s mother (a poignant performance from Carroll Baker) sees straight through him from the start. Tragically, Dorothy doesn’t realize the truth abut who he is until they’re already in Hollywood. As Dorothy tries to break away from him, Paul desperately tries to find some sort of success, all the while complaining that the world is conspiring to keep him from being a man.

Eric Roberts dominates the film and it’s one of the scariest performances that I’ve ever seen. Roberts is convincing when he’s ranting and raving against the world that he feels is against him but what’s even more disturbing is that he’s convincing when he’s turning on the charm. Paul Snider may not be smart. Paul Snider may not be talented. But he know how to gaslight. He knows how to destroy someone’s fragile confidence, largely because his own confidence has been shattered so many times that he’s become an expert in exploiting insecurity. Snider is a tacky dresser and nowhere near as smooth as he thinks but, intentionally or not, he uses that to his advantage. He tries so hard to impress that it’s easy to see how someone could feel sorry for him and want to help him. However, because Fosse lets us know from the start what Snider is really going on inside of Sinder’s head, we never make the mistake of trusting him. We know who Paul Snider is because we’ve all known a Paul Snider.

Eric Roberts’s performance is so intense that it’s unfortunate but not surprising that it was overlooked at the 1983 Oscars. He was playing a truly repellent character and he did it so convincingly that I imagine many viewers had a hard time realizing that Eric Roberts was not Paul Snider but was instead an actor playing a terrible character. Some probably said, “Why should we honor such a loathsome character?” and again, the answer is because there are many Paul Sniders out there. Roberts captured much more than just one man’s breakdown. He captured a sickness at the heart of a fame-driven culture.

Of course, Paul Snider was not the only symptom of that sickness to be depicted in Star 80. Every man that Dorothy either uses her in some way or just views her as being a commodity. Hugh Hefner (Cliff Robertson) presents himself as being a fatherly mentor but Robertson plays him as being just as manipulative and ultimately narcissistic as Paul Snider. Director Aram Nicholas (Roger Rees, playing a character based on Peter Bogdanovich) seems to love Dorothy but their relationship still feels out-of-balance. Aram, afterall, is the director while Dorothy is the actress. The private detective (Josh Mosel) that Paul hires to spy on Dorothy seems to have no lingering guilty over the role he played. Even Snider’s roommate (David Clennon) is more interested in talking about his dog and his car then about the murder/suicide of two people with whom he lived.

It’s a dark film and not one to be watched when depressed. At the same time, it’s a portrait of obsessiveness, misogyny, and an overwhelming need to be “someone” that still feels relevant today. Along with Sweet Charity, it was the only Bob Fosse film not to be nominated for Best Picture. (This was back when there were only five best picture nominees. Three of the nominated films — Terms of Endearment, Tender Mercies, and The Right Stuff — hold up well. Two of the nominees — The Dresser and The Big Chill — are a bit more iffy.) Eric Roberts was not nominated for the best performance of his career. Again, it’s a shame but not a surprise. This was a dark and disturbing film, a true Hollywood horror story. One imagines that most members of the Academy wanted to escape it far more than they wanted to honor and be reminded of it.

Previous entries in The Unnominated:

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18 Days of Paranoia #11: Betrayed (dir by Costa-Gavras)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1988 film, Betrayed, starts out on a strong note but then quickly becomes annoying as Hell.

It opens with shots of a radio talk show host, an outspoken liberal named Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini). Kraus berates his callers. Kraus ridicules anyone who is to the left of Bernie Sanders. When a man with a rural-accent calls in and attacks Karus for being Jewish, Kraus calls the man an idiot. After he gets off the air, Kraus walks through a parking garage and stops in front of his car. Another car pulls up beside Kraus and suddenly, a masked man with a gun opens fire on Kraus, killing him. The gunman gets out of the car and spray paints, “ZOG” on Kraus’s car before then fleeing the garage.

(ZOG stands for Zionist Occupational Government. It’s a term used by the type of anti-Semitic dipshits who thinks that the Protocols of Elder Zion are real.)

From this shockingly brutal opening, we cut to panoramic shots of beautiful farmland and crops being harvested in the American midwest, the heartland. Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger) owns a farm. He’s a Vietnam vet who nearly received the medal of honor. He lives with his mother and he has two children. (He’s divorced and his ex-wife died as the result of a mysterious hit-and-run in California.) Almost everyone in his small hometown seems to worship Gary. They’re certainly curious about his new girlfriend, Katie Phillips (Debra Winger).

And really, they probably should be. Katie Phillips isn’t Katie Phillips at all. She’s actually an FBI agent named Cathy Weaver and she’s been sent undercover to investigate whether or not Gary was involved in the murder of Kraus. Cathy, who comes from a broken family and who we’re told has always been seeking some sort of deeper meaning in her life, is charmed by both Gary and his family. In fact, she falls in love with Gary. She tells her superior, Mike Carnes (John Heard), that there’s no way Gary is dangerous. Mike doesn’t believe her but, of course, Mike has a personal stake in this because he and Cathy used to be romantically involved.

(That’s right, everyone. Betrayed is so narratively lazy that it resorts to making Mike a scorned lover, even though the film’s plot would have worked just as well if he wasn’t.)

As I said, the first part of the movie works. Debra Wingers gives a strong performance and Tom Berenger is a charming roughneck. For the first half-hour or so, the film does a good job of showing why men like Gary and his friends are susceptible to conspiracy theories and why they feel that the entire world is stacked against them. You can understand why Cathy is so troubled by her assignment because Gary’s friends are hardly master criminals. For the most part, they’re farmers who feel like their entire way of life has been taken away from them.

Unfortunately, almost immediately after Mike refuses to allow her to end her investigation, Cathy returns to the farm and sleeps with Gary. Not only is this a plot development a disservice to everything that has previously been established about Cathy as a character but it also marks the point where the movie entirely falls apart. Immediately after sleeping with Cathy, Gary suddenly goes from being a complex but troubled character to being a cartoonish super villain. And listen — we’ve all been there. You meet a guy. He’s handsome. He says all the right things. He seems like he’s sensitive. He makes you feel safe. You let down your defenses for one night and the next morning, he’s yelling at you for wearing a short skirt in public. It happens. Of course, in Gary’s case, it means that he’s not only criticizing the way that Cathy dresses but he’s also taking her on a hunt where the prey is terrified person of color who Gary and his friends have kidnapped. It also means that Gary drags Cathy along on a bank robbery and then expects her to join him when he wants to assassinate a presidential candidate. Even after all that, Cathy remains conflicted about what to do with Gary. The problem is that it’s not like Gary’s a guy who needs sensitivity training or who spends too much time watching ESPN. Gary is a guy who is carting around weapons and talking about how he wants to kill “mud people.” That Cathy still has mixed emotions after all of that goes against everything that the film previously asked us to believe about her. Gary becomes too cartoonish to be plausible and, as a result, he drags down Cathy’s character as well.

Unfortunately, as the film’s narrative falls apart, so do the majority of the performances. While Debra Winger struggles to make her character’s motivations plausible, Tom Berenger is reduced to doing a lot of glaring. (Poor John Heard spends most of the movie shouting and bugging his eyes.) About the only actor who comes out Betrayed unscathed is John Mahoney, who plays Shorty. Shorty is one of Gary’s friends. He’s a friendly and personable guy who seems to sincerely care about everyone and who has a charmingly gentle smile. He’s also a total racist and the contrast between Shorty’s amiable nature and his hateful thoughts provide the latter half of Betrayed with its only powerful moments. Mahoney gets one big scene, where he talks to Cathy about how much he hates violence but, at the same time, he feels that the world has left him no other choice. Mahoney does a great job with his small role. It’s unfortunate that the rest of Betrayed couldn’t live up to his performance.

Other Entries In The 18 Days Of Paranoia:

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Nominee: Coming Home (dir by Hal Ashby)

Posted on January 1, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, here we are! It’s January 1st. In just a few days, the Oscar nominations will be announced and then, on February 9th, the winners will be revealed! From now until the day of the ceremony, I will be taking a look at some of the films that were nominated for and won Oscars in the past. As of this writing, 556 films have been nominated for best picture. I hope that, some day, I will be able to say that I have seen and reviewed every single one of them.

Let’s start things off with the 1978 Best Picture nominee, Coming Home!

Coming Home takes place in California in 1968. While hippies stand on street corners and flash peace signs, teenagers are being drafted and career military men are leaving for Vietnam and people continue to tell themselves that America is doing the right thing in Indochina, even though no one’s really sure just what exactly it is that’s going on over there. At the local VA hospital, the wounded and the bitter try to recover from their wartime experiences while struggling with an often heartless bureaucracy and feelings of having been abandoned by their country.

When Marine Corps. Capt. Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern) is deployed to Vietnam, he leaves behind his wife, Sally (Jane Fonda). Told that she can no longer live on the base while her husband is overseas, Sally gets an apartment, a new car, and eventually a new hairdo. She also gets a new friend, Vi Munson (Penelope Milford). Vi smokes weed and is critical of the war in Vietnam. It doesn’t take long for Sally to start to enjoy the idea of being free and not having to cater to Bob’s every whim. Sally even ends up volunteering at the local VA hospital.

That’s where she meets Luke (Jon Voight, looking youngish and incredibly sexy), a bitter but sensitive vet who, having gone to Vietnam and returned to the U.S. as a paraplegic, is now outspoken in his opposition to the war. Luke is also friends with Billy (Robert Carradine), who is Vi’s shell-shocked brother. When Luke and Sally first meet, they collide in a hallway and Sally gets a bag full of urine spilled on her. It’s only later that Luke and Sally realize that they knew each other in high school and soon, they’re having an affair. Luke, who is as gentle a lover as Bob is brutish, brings Sally to her first orgasm in a sensitively-directed scene that should be studied by any and all aspiring filmmakers.

Unfortunately, the problem with having an affair while your husband is away is that, eventually, your husband’s going to come back. Bob returns from Vietnam and he’s no longer the confident and gung ho officer that he was at the start of the film. He now walks with a pronounced limp and, like Luke, he’s angry. However, whereas Luke has channeled his anger in to activism, Bob tries to keep his emotions bottled up. (He does take the time to give the finger to a few protesters and, considering how obnoxious most of the protesters in this film are, you can’t help but feel that Bob may have had a point.) When Bob discovers that Luke and Sally have been having an affair, he snaps….

Meanwhile, Billy is having a hard time readjusting to life, Vi is getting picked up by sleazy men in bars, and there’s a ventriloquist who shows up a few times. There’s a lot going on in Coming Home and, at times, it feels like the film’s trying to cram in too much. The film often seems a bit disjointed, with semi-documentary footage of Voight hanging out with real paraplegic vets awkwardly mixed in with didactic scenes of Sally turning against the war.

That the love story between Sally and Luke is so effective has far more to do with the performances of Jane Fonda and especially Jon Voight, than it does with anything in the film’s script. Indeed, the script itself doesn’t seem to be too concerned with who Luke and Sally were before they collided in that hallway and it also doesn’t seem to be all that interested in who they’ll be after the end credits role. As written, they’re just plot devices, specifically created and manipulated to express the film’s antiwar message. But then you see Jon Voight’s haunted eyes while he’s listening to a group of vets discuss their experience or you hear the pain in his voice while he talks to a bunch of high school students and it’s those little moments and details that tell you who Luke is. By that same token, Jane Fonda does a good job of showing each stage in Sally’s liberation, even if you can’t help but feel that the main reason Sally becomes an anti-war feminist is because she’s played by Jane Fonda.

Of course, in the end, the entire film is stolen by Bruce Dern. You actually end up feeling very sorry for Bob Hyde (and, to the film’s credit, you’re meant to). It would have been very easy to just portray Bob as being a close-minded pig but the film respects his pain just as much as it respects Luke’s anti-war activism and Sally’s need to be free. In the end, you actually feel worse for Bob than you do for either Luke or Sally. Bob is as much a victim of the war as anyone else in the film.

Coming Home was one of the first films about Vietnam to ever be nominated for best picture. Jane Fonda and Jon Voight both won Oscars but the film itself lost to a far different look at the war in Vietnam, The Deer Hunter.

Cannes Film Review: Missing (dir by Costa-Gavras)

Posted on May 19, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1982 film Missing takes place in Chile, shortly after the American-backed military coup that took out that country’s democratically elected President, Salvador Allende.

Of course, the film itself never specifically states this. Instead, it opens with a narrator informing us that the story we’re about to see is true but that some names have been changed “to protect the innocent and the film.” The film takes place in an unnamed in South America, where the military has just taken over the government. Curfew is enforced by soldiers and the sound of gunfire is continually heard in the distance. Throughout the film, dead bodies pile up in the streets. Prisoners are held in the National Stadium, where they are tortured and eventually executed. Women wearing pants are pulled out of crowds and told that, from now on, women will wear skirts. The sky is full of helicopters and, when an earthquake hits, guests in a posh hotel are fired upon when they try to leave. About the only people who seem to be happy about the coup is the collection of brash CIA agents and military men who randomly pop up throughout the film.

Again, the location is never specifically identified as Chile. In fact, except for the picture of Richard Nixon hanging in the American embassy, the film never goes out of its way to point out that the film itself is taking place in the early 70s. If you know history, of course, it’s obviously meant to be Chile after Allende but the film itself is set up to suggest that the story its telling is not limited to one specific place or time.

Charlie Horman (John Shea) is an American who lives in the country with his wife, Beth (Sissy Spacek). Charlie is a writer who occasionally publishes articles in a local left-wing newspaper. In the aftermath of the coup, Charlie is one of the many people who go missing. All that’s known is that he was apparently arrested and then he vanished into the system. The authorities and the American ambassador insist that Charlie probably just got lost in the confusion of the coup and that he’ll turn up any day. Even though thousands have been executed, everyone assumes that Charlie’s status as an American would have kept him safe. As brutal as the new government may be, they surely wouldn’t execute an American….

Or, at least, that’s what Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) believes. Ed is Charlie’s father, a businessman from New York who simply cannot understand what’s going on. He can’t understand why his son and his daughter-in-law went to South America in the first place. He can’t understand why his government is not doing more to find his son. And, when he eventually arrives in South America himself, Ed cannot understand the violence that he sees all around him.

Working with Beth, Ed investigates what happened to his son. At first, Ed blames Beth for Charlie’s disappearance and Beth can barely hide her annoyance with her conservative father-in-law. But, as their search progresses, Beth and Ed come to understand each other. Beth starts to see that, in his way, Ed is just as determined an idealist as Charlie. And Ed learns that Charlie and Beth had good reason to distrust the American government…

Costa-Gavras is not exactly a subtle director and it would be an understatement to say that Missing is a heavy-handed film. The Embassy staff is so villainous that you’re shocked they don’t all have mustaches to twirl while considering their evil plans. When, in a flashback, Charlie meets a shady American, it’s not enough for the man to be a CIA agent. Instead, he has to be a CIA agent from Texas who heartily laughs after everything he says and who brags on himself in the thickest accent imaginable. When Charlie talks to an American military officer, it’s not enough that the officer is happy about the coup. Instead, he has to start talking about how JFK sold everyone out during the Bay of Pigs.

As the same time, the film’s lack of subtlety also leads to its best moments. When Beth finds herself out after curfew, the city turns into a Hellish landscape of burning books and dead bodies. As Beth huddles in a corner, she watches as a magnificent white horse runs down a dark street, followed by a group of gun-toting soldiers in a jeep. When Ed and Beth explore a morgue, they walk through several rooms of the “identified” dead before they find themselves in a room containing the thousands of unidentified dead. It’s overwhelming and heavy-handed but it’s also crudely effective. While the film itself is a bit too heavy-handed to really be successful, those scenes do capture the horror of living under an authoritarian regime.

(Interestingly, Missing was a part of a mini-genre of films about Americans trapped in right-wing South American dictatorships. While you can’t deny the good intentions of these films, it’s hard not to notice the lack of films about life in Chavez’s Venezuela or the political dissidents who were lobotomized in Castro’s Cuba.)

Missing won the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival (an award that it shared, that year, with the Turkish film Yol) and it also received an Oscar nomination for best picture of the year. (It lost to Gandhi.)

A Movie A Day #305: Go Tell The Spartans (1978, directed by Ted Post)

Posted on November 10, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

One of the best films ever made about Vietnam is also one of the least known.

Go Tell The Spartans takes place in 1964, during the early days of the Vietnam War. Though the Americans at home may not know just how hopeless the situation is in South Vietnam, Major Barker (Burt Lancaster, in one of his best performances) does. Barker is a career military man. He served in World War II and Korea and now he’s ending his career in Vietnam, taking orders from younger superiors who have no idea what they are talking about. Barker has been ordered to occupy a deserted village, Muc Wa. Barker knows that occupying Muc Wa will not make any difference but he is in the army and he follows orders.

Barker sends a small group to Muc Wa. Led by the incompetent Lt. Hamilton (Joe Unger), the group also includes a drug-addicted medic (Dennis Howard), a sadistic South Vietnamese interrogator (Evan C. Kim) who claims that every civilian that the men meet is actually VC, a sergeant (Jonathan Goldsmith) who is so burned out that he would rather commit suicide than take command, and Cpl. Courcey (Craig Wasson). Courcey is a college-educated idealist, who joined the army to do the right thing and is now about to discover how complicated that can be in South Vietnam. At Muc Wa, the soldiers find a cemetery containing the graves of French soldiers who died defending the hamlet during the First Indochina War. The inscription as the cemetery reads, “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

Because the film strives for realism over easy drama, Go Tell The Spartans has never gotten the same attention as some other Vietnam films. Unlike The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Coming Home, and Born on the 4th of July, Go Tell The Spartans received no Oscar nominations. It is still a brilliantly acted and powerful anti-war (but never anti-soldier) film. It starts out as deceptively low-key but the tension quickly builds as the soldier arrive at Muc Wa and discover that their orders are both futile and impossible to carry out. Vastly outnumbered, the Americans also find themselves dealing with a land and a culture that is so unlike their own that they are often not even sure who they are fighting. Military discipline, as represented by Lt. Hamilton, is no match for the guerilla tactics of the VC. By the film’s end, Vietnam is revealed to be a war that not even Burt Lancaster can win.

A Movie A Day #262: Downtown (1990, directed by Richard Benjamin)

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Alex (Anthony Edwards) is a patrolman assigned to the nicest neighborhood in Philadelphia but, after he gets in trouble for pulling over a wealthy businessman (David Clennon), he is told that he can either be suspended or he can take a transfer downtown, to the Diamond Street precinct. Alex takes the transfer, even though everyone on the force says that “not even the Terminator would go to Diamond Street.” Alex gets assigned to work with seasoned Sgt. Dennis Curren (Forest Whitaker), who is still emotionally scarred by the death of his former partner and does not want to have to babysit a naive white cop from the suburbs, especially one who is obsessed with the Beach Boys. At first, Alex struggles with his new assignment and his new partner but, when an old friend is murdered by a notorious hitman (Joe Pantoliano), Alex is determined to crack the case and bring the killer to justice.

Downtown is a combination of other, better cop films: Alex’s situation is Beverly Hills Cop in reverse and his partnership with Dennis is lifted straight from Lethal Weapon. Art Evans is the captain who is always yelling at Alex and Dennis and telling them to drop the case and the character is so familiar that I had to check to make sure that Evans had not played the same role in Lethal Weapon. As the bad guys, Clennon and Pantoliano could just have easily been replaced by Beverly Hills Cop‘s Steven Berkoff and Jonathan Banks and no one would have noticed. The only real difference is that Downtown is neither as exciting nor as funny as those two films. Downtown was directed by Richard Benjamin, who will never be known as a particularly versatile filmmaker and who struggles to balance the fish-out-of-water comedy with some surprisingly brutal violence. Beverly Hills Cops had Eddie Murphy and Lethal Weapon had Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Downtown has Anthony Edwards and Forest Whitaker, who are both good actors but who both seem to be woefully miscast here. (If Downtown were made today, Whitaker could play Dennis but, in 1990, he was too young to be the cop who was “too old for this shit.”) Of the many Lethal Weapon ripoffs that came out in late 80s and early 90s, Downtown is one of the most forgettable.