A Year in Film: 1983
Let’s just get right into it. Scarface is a violent, bloody symphony of letting Al Pacino loose on a script written by a guy who was actually on cocaine. It’s since become a cult classic, but reception at the time was deeply negative, with criticism especially lumped on the excessive violence and swearing in the film.
But… it’s about crime, so what were you really expecting?
In many ways, Scarface is a parable. A tale paralleling that of Icarus, where a rise into the light, however briefly it may shine on you, is immediately followed by an even more meteoric descent.
Kurt Vonnegut left the theater halfway through, as it happens. It probably wasn’t his kind of movie. Scarface isn’t really anyone’s kind of movie. It’s a movie you watch to see the worst of humanity charm you for an instant before they inevitably collapse in a grandiose, foundation-shattering display of raw anger.
Scarface is a movie about crime. Crime pays. Until it doesn’t. It takes two hours and 50 minutes to get there, but eventually, the movie settles on a message. A message written on a statue in the middle of a fountain whose water is slowly being tainted by the blood of a man who knew he was going to die that day.
Anyway, on to lighter stuff with David Lightman.
WarGames! My dad forced me to watch this movie when I was eight and I remember being bored out of my mind. It’s just some guy playing video games and running around Seattle doing computer stuff.
Boring. Didn’t like it.
Then I realized, years later, that it’s a movie about Cold War anxiety. And that the last scene is really well done in regards to concept. It seems like, from across the world, Lasker, Parkes, and Badham (the director and writers), were trying to reach the USSR and tell them that this wouldn’t end well if it ever started.
“The only winning move is not to play.” That’s the quote that sticks out. When the supercomputer (WOPR) created to launch nukes finally realizes that the purpose it’s been created for is futile. That its whole program has been shaped by the assumption of victory, by American propaganda and by American hands that believed that they would win if war broke out.
But in nuclear war, no one wins. There’s only the last man standing. And he’s standing weird. Like one of his legs has been broken. He’s looking past you, his skin grey and pallid, as he bleeds.
That’s what WOPR realizes. That there isn’t a winning side.
Wow did I say lighter stuff? I apologize for misleading you. This is remembered as a quintessential eighties movie, which means it was supremely effective on the culture of that era. Some people only remember it for Matthew Broderick’s character, and how cool that made them feel, because he was just a kid, and he was doing all this cool stuff for the government. His character introduction is him playing Galaga, for crying out loud.
There are two real opening scenes. Broderick’s character introduction, which is where the movie becomes interesting for snot-nosed children like myself, and the opening scene. The opening scene is an exercise in giving PTSD to people who grew up in the era where American propaganda films were made depicting total nuclear annihilation. The films that told you hiding under a desk would save you from the most destructive tool of violence ever conceived.
The opening scene is a depiction of a nuclear alert, an alarm that tells the officers that the Russians have launched a nuclear missile. One of them refuses to turn the key that will launch a counterattack against the enemy they are sure is coming. It turns out to be a test. To see if they would. And that’s where WOPR comes in. An impartial, metal gavel, one that won’t back down from launching a warhead.
It’s chilling, if you look in the right places.
Ok. Now for something that’s actually lighter. Risky Business. Otherwise known as “Tom Cruise In His Underwear.”
YEAH! Excuse me, I need a second.
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All right. Risky Business is a MacGuffin hunt. The opening third consists of setting up Tom Cruise’s character, Joel, as a straight laced business baby. A guy who’s going to go into the business his father wants him to. To the college his father wants him to.
Then his parents leave on vacation, and things go south very fast. Firstly, the scene pictured occurs. He jams out to a song without pants. It’s great. Then some shenanigans happen, and he ends up losing a very expensive piece of art that his mom owns to a criminal named Guido.
The entire rest of the movie is him trying to get it back. Along the way, he almost gets shot, gets in a car chase, his dad’s Porsche rolls into Lake Michigan, he interviews for college during a huge house party, that house gets robbed, and he has to put it all back before his parents get back from their trip. He also gets that piece of art back, as well.
Happy Ending!
Except in the original ending, the one that is included on certain DVD releases, the lady he’s been falling in love with tells him she was working for Guido the whole time, and she can’t leave her awful life.
It sucks. But that’s not what canonically happens! YAY!
Okay, moving on.
Duh duh duh-duh duh dUUUUH duh duh-duh duh dUUUUH duh duh-duh duh duhhhh
That was obviously the Star Wars theme.
Return of the Jedi. Easily the weakest of the original three movies, but I don’t care, it’s an amazing conclusion to a landscape-shifting cinematic touchstone. Everything feels a little more awkward, but it starts to pick up towards the end, and the Luke-Vader fight is fantastic.
The effects are your standard impressive Star Wars practicals, and the characters are the same as the last three. What really picks this movie up, however, is Mark Hamill as Luke. In a movie that depends on his abilities to carry it through the mist into the light of day, he more than steps up to the challenge.
The first three Star Wars movies were all about Luke, but this is the first movie that is about Luke. Does that make sense? And giving Luke all that emotional payoff, set it up in bits and pieces throughout the previous two movies, in the last third of this one? Peak Star Wars melodrama. And it works really well.
Also Palpatine, for all his wrinkly old man energy, is properly intimidating. His voice reeks of the kind of manipulative evil that was normally reserved for Iago and similar Shakespeare villains.
He also shoots lightning from his fingertips, so, you know, bonus!
All in all, even including the cash-grab man-eating teddy bears and the suspect performances from everyone except Hamill and Billy Dee, Return of the Jedi is a good movie. A worthy conclusion.
DMN Writer,
Cameron