Review: FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA

At an Eden-like forest sanctuary in the heart of the Australian desert, young Furiosa reaches for a peach as her sister looks on. Suddenly the pair are alerted to the group of motorbike raiders who have happened on this place. Furiosa starts sabotaging their machines but she's caught and dragged away but not before she sounds the alarm. Her mother hears this and goes in hard pursuit of the raiders, all the way back to their camp. Very, very bad things happen, ending with Furiosa, being taken in by the raiders, seething with a patient vengeance.

This motive, shared with stories ancient and modern, forms the tightening thread that ties this massive action spectacular together. As the cranking, screeching and exploding machinery of internal combustion and post-apocalyptic politics grinds and batters around her, the girl, at first kept in a cage like an exotic purity, watches and learns from the surrounding violence, the way the world works when it isn't like paradise. She thinks of her mother's heroism and how, through changes of ownership of her and what change she can effect through her own force, she can honour her mother.

George Miller's Mad Max trajectory took a sharp turn from the Mel Gibson led original trilogy when he made Fury Road. While the resources wars McGuffins remained in place from Road Warrior and Thunderdome, Fury Road added some more human elements that allowed the likes of Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy and showed not only that the franchise could accommodate them but could also expand on them. Enter Furiosa's backstory: snatched from Eden and raised in Hell.

Furiosa is a split role. At first, for a lot of the screen time, she is played by Alyla Jones who presents a girl who must emote with great economy having reduced herself to muteness in protest against everything she sees. There is some trickery involved with a kind of face swap tech in play but she does move from a placid child's demeanour to an intense figure of self-restraint. A lot of this is in the eyes. As we wait for Anya Taylor Joy's full screen entrance we might well be wondering when her bludgeoning eyes will be turning up. As it is, this is not done in a simple cut but on a gradient. Once she is all Taylor Joy we know it (but are at a loss to point to when we knew it). Taylor Joy looks like she wondered about where Charlize Theron's muscular world weariness came from and set out to let audiences see it forming. Hers is the sole American accent in the cast. I'll give her a pass on this as she was brought up with two languages and a number of accents and probably chose a mix of what she felt comfortable with and how Theron spoke (Theron herself adapted her accent from her native South African to American). Considering she only has about twenty lines in the entire film, I'm not inclined to nitpick. (Kudos to the Brit Tom Burke for his flawless and effortless Australian turn.)

On that, Miller has often described his films as silent with sound added. This is an approach as old at least as Hitchcock (yes, apart from anyone who started in silents and changed with sound's advent) and it applies to moments in cinema that are primarily physical to begin with. Comedy is obvious. We can all name at least one silent comedy star. Supremely, though, it is in the realm of the action movie when we can celebrate this. Then again, action movies have since the sound era almost exclusively been deafening. This is no different with a gigantic scaled orchestral score and a sound design that uses the Dolby Atmos dynamics expertly.

Miller is also old school about CGI, though he has happily used it throughout his career, as long as it was on offer. The best I can say here is that the line between a CGI moment and a stunt, or between a stunt and an enhanced one is a blur. The action is so intense and relentless that the question tends to get lost in the cacophony. The sheer inventiveness and audacity in the design of the vehicles (which might also be termed wrecks in waiting). Since Road Warrior, the polished junkyard aesthetic of the Mad Max universe has been an active feature of the films from helicopters made out of old farm windmills to flamethrower guitars that spew fire with power chords or motorbike pulled sand skis that take to the air like hang gliders. The list of these in Furiosa is no less dazzling.

The other end of the human boosting in this outing comes in the form of Chris Hemsworth's Dementus. As the bad guy, and one who has Hemsworth's much drooled over looks and presence (and this time a prosthetic schnoz: why? don't know), he brings to Dementus' savage violence a persistent charm. Along with some of the best drawn villains of cinema, he must show why people of comparable strength and intensity would follow rather than challenge him. Hemsworth's worldly charisma and situational humour are as believable as that guy everyone knows who gets by on his cheek but, on examination of his words and deeds, might also inspire repugnance but for that. That needs to work. Reliance on the star's professional image and media smarts alone would have sunk him. I recently found out that this is the first Australian movie he's been in.

George Miller has formed a feat in his Mad Max films. What began as hardlined ozploitation vehicles for ... vehicles began, from the second instalment, to move from this plain and effective and income earning basis to something more substantial. Whether this was to hang the action on a fable about resources, heroism, pride or whatever might have arisen on a series of eye popping action sequences, or just to make entertaining cinema, it works. And, from Road Warrior on, each new venture calls to mind the kind of place we could leave for our descendants. And it's completely and utterly riveting. 

Viewing notes: I saw this on Hoyts Xtreme Screen which is nice 'n' big (but I was still in the front row) with a stunning audio experience to boot. One point that's almost a spoiler: if you've seen the trailer for this film it probably featured a strident orchestral arrangement of the riff from David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World. I kept expecting this to turn up but, as impressive as the original score for this movie is, it does not, not even in the end credits, feature the Bowie music. I wonder how often this happens. I wonder if it was a limited rights issue.

HEAVENLY CREATURES @ 30

An antique travelogue short about Christchurch ends with a woman screaming. Two teenage girls run screaming out of the woods. Suddenly, they are running and screaming along the deck of a ship but now the screams are joyful. The two subjects of the fugue established, we are then treated to their development and interweaving as Peter Jackson presents his first feature that didn't have skull crushing zombies or vomiting aliens and looked like it was made for more than forty dollars New Zealand. But that's deceptive.

The true crime story of the Parker-Hume murder of 1953. This is not your average based-on-true-events sensationalism, though. It's a deep plunge into a dizzying folie a deux that will take us to distant realms while remaining always on the soil of the South Island. Movie idols mix with scone baking mums in a decidedly non-shire-like dry season New Zealand landscape. When it threatens to get too whimsical or cute, it's pelted with earthiness. When the mundanity might drag the story, we fly back into The Fourth World of Borovnia peopled by fairytale monarchs and peasants made of plasticine. It doesn't look like Brain Dead but this is exactly where Jackson's creative force had been leading him (along with life and creative partner Fran Walsh, should be said).

By this force we can easily accommodate the two threads entwining without contradiction. When the girls emerge from a screening of The Third Man they are chased through the alleys by Orson Welles (who is still in black and white). I recall thrilling to the moment the pair join in each other's vision as it blends while the scenery behind them blurs and twists like its in a paint mixer. When the scenes on board the cruise ship shock to sepia it is without clumsy noting. There is so little self-congratulation in this film's cinematic virtuosity from the time of Tarantino's barnstorming hits that revelled in their cool movieness. Everything we see here is crammed into the timeline and the story of the girls' love for each other, and all of it, for all the dazzling art of it, presents a lean and solid narrative; there's just no time for self congratulation. When Pauline and Juliet consummate and each assumes the appearance of one of their male idols, it's both thrilling and unsurprising. 

Melanie Lynskey as the dowdy Pauline delivers a highly nuanced teenager filled with rage against a world of bland winners and vapid losers. When Kate Winslet's Juliet makes her hell of an entrance into the French class, all poise, diction and self satisfaction, Pauline is switched into the new girl's current, from then it's when, not if. These roles were the screen debuts of both leads and without their clear chemistry the film would have been a long show reel with quirky wit. The performances are so committed that there are no creases in the transitions from adolescent rage to their shared ecstasy to the practical and ugly murder they commit.

Kate Winslet soared into the same kind of wide-ranging stratosphere that allows her her pick of roles and earns awards. She is considered a leader of her profession. Before you say well, what about Melanie Lynskey? go and look at her rap sheet on IMDB. It's not glittering prizes but it's serious and as cool as hell. Well, all that began here with a film whose decade radius includes The Quiet Earth, The Navigator, and The Ugly, all of which dazzle in their respective genres and none of which are alike. This is important for while Peter Jackson continued to own the gigantic end of the cinema screen, the power of his artistry lies in the individuality with which he and those other filmmakers began, each to each their own vision which has managed to endure. Heavenly Creatures calls to us as freshly now as it did in the '90s (which is more than I can say for Reservoir Dogs which just looks like the '90s pretending to be the '70s). This one's a keeper.

Viewing notes: I originally went to see this alone at a time when I got irritated at having to opine on a movie straight after I'd seen it. That's no longer an issue for me but it must have been then as I didn't start going to the movies with friends again until the end of the decade. Anyway, when I went to this at the late lamented Russell, there was an old couple behind me. The man was murmuring to the woman about the action on the screen and it got on my nerves. When the Humming Chorus swells up during a crucial scene and he began to hum along I very conspicuously put my fingers in my ears until he noticed and shut up. Now, I can understand that his partner was probably sight impaired and he was really just being loving. God, I was a prick.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find Heavenly Creatures on any of the local streamers, nor on disc. If you want to see it and don't already have a copy (like me) then you might have to buy it o'erseas. And Titanic never goes out of print!

PHASE IV @ 50

A vaguely described cosmic event has caused a rapid advance in the cognition of the ants on Earth. Two scientists travel to the site of a particular outbreak of aggression from the social insects and find themselves increasingly out of their depth with bigger questions than they expected.

From the late '60s to this film's production in  the early '70s, science fiction cinema had grown complex. Some strands amped the action like the Planet of the Apes series, others like 2001: a Space Odyssey pushed philosophical themes. By the time Saul Bass got to making his own feature, having ground away at short films and some of his era's most striking design in film, he was ready to take the higher road. The trouble is that he was making this for people who were expecting a monster movie like Them.

If you go and look up stills of this film you will find plenty to marvel at. From the nature documentary perfect footage of ants in their own scale, the structures their on screen versions create, the effects of the yellow insecticide making a monochromatic yellow of the area, to the ominous towers with mouth-like openings that the colonies have fashioned. There are sequences in Phase IV that never fail to take breath.

So why was it almost impossible to see for decades? To dismiss it as a flop is a little pointless when you consider what made it to home video at the dawn of that medium. What then made it to digital is another story. The fact that I watched it for this on a eye popping 4K presentation is due to the power of cults in cinema's margins. It's why directors like Lucio Fulci can be released in lovingly restored ultra high res long after the last crumbling VHS of their movies has withered into history. 4K is a collector's market, not the mass that is still happy enough with streaming or even the much cheaper DVDs. Phase IV made it to 4K because its reputation precedes it and it famously has a lost ending.

I should point out that you could get this film on DVD and Blu-Ray (two different labels brought it out in the past decade) but when the preservation-crusading Vinegar Syndrome (the name refers to deteriorating film stock) set it up they delivered a multi-disc special which not only has the long ending but on a reproduction of the print previewed in 1974 (that led to the ending being cut to begin with). 

The reason for me to bang on about this is that Phase IV, for all its virtues, falls well short of what a contemporary viewer might make of it as science fiction. After decades of the likes of Cronenberg (whose work it will remind you of) and ever more elaborate fare, this thoughtful and visually stunning film feels small and ... dull.

This is partly due to Bass's lack of skill with performance. The heavily British Nigel Davenport has few restraints, the much subtler Michael Murphy's performance works despite itself against his co-star's blustering. Lynne Fredrick is given so little to do that when she communes with the ants it seems for real. The olde-worlde tape reel computer banks (which really were computers rather than set dressing) and printed circuit boards of the cubist mushroom lab can only provide so much authenticity before the acting against the lack of breakout action begins to drag the middle act from cause and effect to a series of things that happened.

Once we do break out and some of the climactic moments have been unintentionally subverted, we are treated to a stunning conclusion which pays off all the impressive micro work we've been witnessing and takes it somewhere else.

On the original ending: it's great but would have felt strainingly long, especially to the suits who cut it in preference for something that kind of said it in less time. The problem is that it doesn't. The dreamlike sequence of the full Phase IV has the look of a De Chirico painting and the emotive content of a Moebius graphic novel. The very contemporary electronic score provides a perfect bed for this ever widening coda. The problem is that, in order to respect the history of the film, we are given the cut version as the best treated edit. The preview cut is on one of the extra blu-rays and plays perfectly well but it ain't 4K. This reminds me that the recent afforably priced Wicker Man 4K offers 3 cuts of the classic in UHD because that's the way it should be. See also, recent releases of Apocalypse Now and The Exorcist. The alternative is to release the typically bloated "director's" cuts (quotes there as many of them are not) as the only versions available (looking at you, Amadeus). At least, here we do get the original fruition in context (and, really, Blu-Ray resolution isn't anything to sneeze at).

So, while it's hard to unreservedly recommend Phase IV as a sci fi essential, it remains a frequently impressive entry in the roll call of existentialist fiction, made in an era when such big thinking got funded without having to recreate what went before and with at least a chance given to genuine creativity. If that excites you (and it should) find your way to a copy of Phase IV.

BACKBEAT @ 30

John and Stu are fast friends, through partying and playing rock and roll and fending off the violence of the local yobs. Life's ok but about to get better. Stu sells a painting which is enough to buy an electric bass and, by coincidence, just in time to get off to a club residency overseas. Life in Hamburg, playing sets of classic rock and show tunes between strippers, can be gruelling but with sex and speed on tap, it's a pretty good gig for the young 'uns. Then the students start filtering into the shows and one, Astrid, catches Stu's eye and won't let go. Now, even if you have the most casual acquaintance with the story, here, you know it's about The Beatles.

The reason Backbeat was so impressive at the time was that it all but ignores this. It establishes that this is a story of the pre-fame days of the biggest band in history and then relaxes to tell the story of the kind of intense relationships we have when we're young adults. It might, of course, have been about a fictitious group but this story was already there in the timeline. Adding what the audience knows is to come brings a zest to it. This means, that when we start with a difficult shared experience with John and Stu we're happy to continue with them without gagging to see the whole band. When we do, it's a joy. They're wise cracking as they load their equipment on to the ship bound for Hamburg and later they do what made them famous. By then, all expectations catered to, we relax into the love story between Stu and Astrid which has two triangles attached to it from John's unquestioned love of Stu and Astrid's lifelong love Klaus. When we get Beatles content it's just part of the mix.

On that, an astute decision was made. The sets that the band plays don't need any Lennon MacCartney numbers. There were so few that their absence would not be missed in this context. So, it was the more easily cleared Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Frank Ifield etc. which is how the sets would have sounded. And then this was recorded by a group of current indy rock figures from the '90s, members of Nirvana, R.E.M. (well, they had been indy), Sonic Youth and so on. While the first number we see the band play sounds a little too slick and tight, later songs have a more realistic raggedness which feels a lot more live. 

The club scenes also feel credible with a mix of sailors and roughnecks there for the strippers (and some for the rock and roll) and students for the spectacle and scene. And there are some fine cinematic moments of world building showing the  seedy Reeperbahn, chief among which is the elongated entrance of Astrid in a taxi, shot from above the bonnet, reflecting the neon, as it courses through the night life like a shark. Montages of the band trading time on the stage with the strippers is narratively sound as well as diverting. Astrid's photography of the band in various locations for images that would enter history is also a montage with a thrilling feel.

If there are flies in the unguent here they are in the dialogue that presages phrases that came later. John describing the endless sets they had to do as a hard day's night, is very whiffy but there are also lines from that movie and Stu talks about feeling like he's working eight days a week. The earlier, starker, The Hours and Times, set at the start of Beatlemania, resisted this, though it might have credibly put them in. The later Nowhere Boy not only steered completely clear of this but never mentioned the band's name once. Their appearance in Backbeat is wince-inducing in a film otherwise so meticulous to show the rougher aspects of being in a band when that young. We get the micro-resentment, the rivalry for the leader's attention, the ridicule and ragging outside of the glory moments onstage where all the dreams are fulfilled (well, not even there). This feels authentic. Like a fair few people I know, I was in a few bands at this level (don't ask, you will not have heard of any of them) and never encountered an outfit that didn't have conflict evident with the slightest of surface scratches. It's the crowning achievement of Backbeat insofar as it is a Beatles film. The cute anachronisms in the dialogue leave an unpleasant taste.

Stephen Dorf gives us a cool but awestruck artist, ready to break out of the increasingly evident confines of band life. Sheryl Lee, who had signed on for Twin Peaks to play a corpse but ended up as its strongest cast member, is utterly solid as the young overconfident student, spouting aphorisms that would've sounded profound and exciting to a nineteen year old. She speaks them with a knowing curl, aware that they are largely the kind of descant to her cool nightlife. Outside of that context she delivers a genuineness that lets us warm to her. But this is Ian Hart's film as John Lennon, pained and witty, loving and destructive, driven and lazy. Unless I'm physically in front of this movie I recall the role actually played by a young John Lennon, so close is the look and my projected persona. This is the same as Hart's turn in The Hours and Times, even with an awkward Beatle wig, I recall the performance the same way.

The rock band movie sub genre is plagued by hokum. Even when it's a fictitious group and doesn't have to play up (or down) to history it can get dodgy. Eddie and The Cruisers is one of the worst bunglings of a decent idea I've seen to the point where just recalling it feels embarrassing. David Chase's Not Fade Away is so long and too realistic it just ends up being boring. It's worse when it's a real band, though. Oliver Stone's The Doors does even more damage through idolisation than the execrable Jerry Hopkins biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. Sid and Nancy is another exercise in how to render an interesting subject cringey through being too clearly a fan's view. It's always odd to me that something as invigorating as cinema can fail at capturing the excitement of rock music so very consistently.

Some get through. Expresso Bongo is bizarre enough to stand on its own as a kind of early rock fantasy. The Cliff Richard movies are acceptable cheese for admitting that they're showbiz first. If you want something with genuine drama and good performances, go back to Jailhouse Rock. It works. That'll be the Day is very good but it sequel Stardust is a messy failure. I like Control more than the eponymous documentary about Joy Division. On that, the best films about rock and roll have been straight up doccos rather than fictionalisation.

As to the films from the Beatles themselves, their first feature is a joy, the second a blithering mess with unresolved industrial racism, their own production only good for its music video moments, the big animation more than passable rainy afternoon entertainment and then there's the depressing Let it Be. It makes me grateful that the only movies that their rivals in chief made were a good concert/interview film (Charlie is My Darling) and a compelling and troubling one (Gimme Shelter) without a scripted line of dialogue for the running time.

Why I still like Backbeat so much is in its resistance to idolatry. Sweep the goofy future lines aside and you have a worthy love story in the foreground with a fraught one of creative life and fame chasing beneath. Those are the right stage placements and priorities, here, so that a well turned world can be built that keeps its gifts on display without the need to break anything. The coda sequence of the statements of what happened to the major players has been a feature plaguing retrospective cinema since American Graffiti. They appear over home movie style footage of a day at the beach and, really are completely unnecessary. Then again, Sam Taylor Johnson did the same thing in Nowhere Boy and it, too, might have escaped without them. The very last one in Backbeat is an unacknowledged pointer to the film's source. It's about Astrid and how the project was born from interviews with her about those times. I wonder if we might not just have had that one for poignancy. 

Review: CIVIL WAR

Weatherbeaten journalism team Lee and Joel set off across an America wracked by internal warfare to try and get the grail, to interview and photograph the beleaguered Trump-like President. Along for the ride are old time reporter Sammy and raw neophyte photographer Jessie. So begins one of the tensest road movies you are ever likely to see.

While not directly about the scenario of the effects of a second Trump term, the parallels are impossible to dismiss. The opening scene has the despot preparing a broadcast speech in which he tries out a number of superlatives to describe his blowhard rhetoric. Outside of that, though, the film is vague enough for events shown and referenced to have an even handed tone. When someone describes the Antifa Massacre, it's as natural a part of the conversation that it needs no explanation: we don't know if Antifa massacred or were massacred. 

Some combatants are in civvies, others in uniform. There is an anti-government military called the Western Forces as well as the old regular army. Both sides are well equipped, drive the same kind of tanks and wear camo and Kevlar. One pair of uniformed soldiers explain that their situation has been reduced to kill or be killed, whichever side they or their antagonist is on. Another pair in uniform are found mopping up after an atrocity and really could be from either side as they themselves are reduced to expressing the power of armed combatants as givers and takers of human life.

In a design coup, the Western Forces flag is the stars and stripes but there are only two stars. It is the very kind of cultural shock that the great sci-fi dystopia cinema of the '70s would use to freeze viewer comfort with something wrong but very plausible. If not quite seeing the apes riding horses and cracking whips in Planet of the Apes it's close to the corporate anthem being played in Rollerball. Writer/director Alex Garland has been here before in 28 Days Later, Annihilation, Ex Machina and Men, weaving the familiar with the confronting to feed his audience's imagination. I would imagine this film is an uncomfortable watch for Americans.

While the theme is grim and constant and the sense of unease is set at a unending pulse, Garland has packed it up in the familiar genre of the road movie. This means dialogue and personal change are on the menu and Kirstin Dunst's hard-arsed photojournalist must find a way out of her stress at the potential disasters in the car in the shape of the old man and the young woman who might not only endanger everyone's lives but destroy the entire mission. Wagner Moura's rockstar approach to his profession recalls the depictions of Sean Flynn and Tim Page from Dispatches. Cailee Spaeny lets her character's enthusiasm collide with the realities of what she's got herself into. Stephen McKinley Henderson provides great gravitas. Beyond them is a Gulliver's Travels or Heart of Darkness of a cast who work to provide a quilt of foreseeable true life horror.

If Civil War falters anywhere it is in its length. At 1.49 it isn't outrageously long but there is so much repetition of military action and some individual scenes of it feel interminable that we are in danger of losing sight of our central quartet. I can understand a desire to convey the fatiguing grind of a mounted assault or a sniper baiting but too often we live through scenes that have long made their points. I could easily imagine that a cut of about 30 minutes would not be noticed.

But Civil War is not just about its points (to varying degrees of subtlety) but the flow of the experiences we are following. It's Brecht's proposition: don't make me ask what I would do if I were him or her, make me wonder if I would act the same under the circumstances. Garland's vision of a torn nation is offered as a sobering choice to world audiences, what would we do if it came to this? One scene depicts a community apparently completely untouched by the devastation. It bears a heavy eeriness similar to the sight of Manhattan streets without traffic or the shattered amusement park. As we recognise this vision with relief before seeing its price, we might wonder how we are still the way we are. I'll finish with a quote from John Webster because I don't do that enough: Say, 'tis well, security some men call the suburbs of hell, only a dead wall between.

Civil War is on general release.

FOOTLOOSE @ 40

Ren moves with his mum to a rural town where they have family connections. There they find the town has legislated itself back to the days of the Pilgrim Fathers where teachers talk of book banning (and then burning) and the lead vocalist of the Statschurch has pushed the act of dance into abolition. The town's teens adopt a kind of '50s as imagined by the '80s look and sneak off to the local drive-in diner to blare the kind of Toto-esque dreck that was regulation in the culture that had never quite done punk right. And, they dance. Then the preacher man appears to make sure his daughter has enough pocket money for pizza and the whole thing collapses into an anhedonic void. Chicago mover Ren has his work cut out.

The reason I avoided this film at the time of its release is the same that kept me away from others like Flashdance or Xanadu: they were featured as clips on Countdown for weeks at a time and looked like pants. I remember being over at a friend's for dinner and someone there, among the kewl inner city post-punques, admitted to being curious about Footloose and it was like saying they wanted to try out discipline pornography. Career beneficiary Kevin Bacon talked about his spiky hair in an interview, saying it had started a trend. While it's more early Ziggy than Johnny Rotten, it's still a style that had splashed across the pages of checkout magazines for latter part of the previous decade. So last night's view was my first and I did it because I wanted to get into how '80s it would be and, like Class last week, get my knives out for a hit job. Trouble is, it's actually pretty good.

Once you clear the absurd premise (though it's based on a real case) you'll see a surprisingly grown up piece of '80s teen rebellion cinema that feels very comfy to walk around in. John Lithgow's Reverend Moore begins the movie with a screaming sermon about his role as the town's moral shepherd. Afterwards, when Ren is meeting some of the locals, someone mentions the banning of Slaughterhouse Five from the library and Ren calls it a good book. When facing off the resulting icy stares, he digs in an calls it a classic. The guy whose banned the book says that Ren must like reading and makes it sound like a barb.

That's the kind of thing I feared the movie was going to do, bang all the nuance down and harvest the dramatic spikes and outcrops. But after this start, these begin smoothing out as we get to see depth in the characters, including Rev. Hardarse. His zeal is given motivation from a family tragedy in which his son died in a crash while zonked on booze (and presumably, too much dancin') but it's not really needed. It's actually pretty easy to forget until they remember to bring it out again. Nevertheless, the church leader's influence over the town's culture manages to play both as caricature and character. Allowing this as a viewer requires some doublethink but it can work and, if it does, the big underlying theme is rendered visible.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan was gearing up for his second term. For four long years he had been marshalling the wizards of trickledown economics (i.e. bullshitters who got away with it) and elevating the profiles of moral majority (who were neither) interests until a senior staffer defended the despoiling of forests by saying that Armageddon was around the corner so who cared about the environment. And let he then, the dogs of capitalism call'ed Reganomics, wild in the streets and hungry. You can read up on Reagan at your leisure. It's really no stretch to see the town in the movie as the model of Reagan McFagin-ville. Between the redneck boys who challenge Ren to a joust of tractor chicken (it's won by a shoelace which you'll have to see to understand) and the parents zealots who actually do end up burning books (so are they in favour of the concept of property or not?). This last act gives Lithgow's preacher a moment of believable and relieving depth as he prevents it continuing. At home he fights both wife and daughter (which is when the spectre of the son gets dusted off again) and it squeezes the narrative effectively.

I realise this article's getting all sloppy but that's in response to the strange way this film plays out, sometimes against itself, but ends up being thoroughly watchable. Part of this is due to performance. Kevin Bacon as Ren was not a newcomer to the screen (he has a pretty solid kill scene in Friday the 13th for starters) but this was his breakthrough. He gives Ren a quiet intensity that barely masks a growing anger at the worst of the town. Chris Penn gets to raise his character's goofiness into more serious territory. Sarah Jessica Parker pushes personality into Rusty that might have effectively remained a functional character. 

But my money goes to the one in the cast who did not climb to the celestium after this film, Lori Singer. Not only is she solid as the Reverend's daughter Ariel there's a moment I noted that will stick with me. She and Ren are in his car and getting closer to each other in their prolonged love/hate courtship. Ren breaks the mood by regressing into his adolescence and telling her she's probably been through a few guys. Her expression deflates, her face is asking "again?" before it hardens up again and she's back in self-medicating sass-girl mode. After that, she is beyond viewer dismissal, not just a romantic interest or the rebel child of the preacher, she's a rounded player and worth the trouble.

Yes, this is an '80s movie so you get the big inspiring training montage where Ren transforms himself into a dance warrior from a Wagner opera. But you also get an impressive teen stunt where Ariel tries to get out of one moving car and into another with an oncoming lorry charging like a megaton bull (don't say that aloud; people will look at you). And it is an '80s movie with a big public meeting scene in which a teenager schools the old duffers on the council. And it is an '80s movie in the the big dance off at the end (you are not going to convince me that that is a spoiler) while the big Kenny Loggins number blasts out of the speakers. But that's probably why you started watching in the first place.

When that was happening, I asked myself if I actually would have enjoyed this one at the time and I couldn't quite find the answer. As a recent Griffith University graduate with a lot of cinema theory under my belt and a life long allegiance to one rationalisation under Godard, part of me stayed away. But that was under the assumption that the movie would be far more clumsily didactic than it was. As someone who has always enjoyed the pop end of culture, however big and clumsy it gets, big football chanting pop songs, eye-piercing colour schemes and advertising fonts (especially in the '80s) and big goopy movies like this. I would have had no trouble recognising the look and feel borrowed from the previous decade's New Hollywood auteurs (this film never looks like Grease, even in the finale). I would have smirked at the radio fodder attempts at noo wave music and the fashions that made everyone as criminally vanilla as Ally Sheedy after the makeover scene in The Breakfast Club. I might have felt intrigued by the absence of a reason for Ren and his mother to trade big, fun Chicago for the modern Roanoke (I kept wondering if it was DV-related).

The fact is that Footloose surprised me. While I was never convinced of the gravity of Reverend Moore's zeal it was played with enough depth to allow me to put it on the fable shelf and follow the more immediate journey of acceptance and compassion. No, it's not Last Temptation but nor is it Porky's and whether it's a serious critique peeping out of the blouse of a dance movie or not, it kind of ... works.

CLASS @ 40 (Spoilers, so I can discuss this one)

Working class scholarship boy Jonathon gets into an exclusive school and then gets pranked by his roommate Skip on his first day. A prank arms race later and they're friends forever. After several disastrous attempts to get Jonathon a girlfriend, Skip sends him off to a pickup joint at the nearby metropolis. A few more disasters later and Jonathon gets picked up by the hot-as older woman Ellen who takes him back to her hotel to have sex in the glass walled lift and then to her room for more. Jonathon returns to the dorm swinging Ellen's trophy knickers which jets him to school hero within minutes. Then, Skip invites him back to the family mansion for Christmas Jonathon fits in fine before Skip's mum turns up. It's Ellen.

When this film was approaching release (in the third last day of 1983 so I'm counting it as 1984) the trailers promised a naughty update of The Graduate, focussing on the lift scene and a few odd slapstick moments. What I saw at the end of the year on VHS was a dramedy that fell somewhere between Ordinary People and Porky's but with the convictions  or depth of neither. Yet, it's made of the kind of ingredients that might make real substance from its title. Instead, it's goofy pranks in the dorm and attempted steamy sex with Ellen on the town. The notion of social stratification implied by the title is barely addressed and the other side of it, of savoir faire, is lost in the tension between the school friends. There is one action that might claim the concept of grace but it is placed there so much telescoping and leaden writing that it's as though the film is saying: "See? This is classy!" And even then, that decision is forced by subcultural norms.

Skip's big moment, after his discovery of Jonathon's lover's identity, is also undermined by how he came by the information he could use against Jonathon. He tricked it out of him in a prank. Talk about a forced hand compelling an act of grace. By this stage there's also another Jumbo plodding around. After that cathartic discovery, Skip's father visits him in the dorm to say that Ellen has admitted herself to pyschiatric care. It's Anna Karenina under the train but this is the '80s so she's off to get some zombie pills and a talking cure. The coast is then clear for the lads to duke it out in the mud until they fall over laughing at how crazy it all is.

A scene between Skip's parents, after Ellen has drunk herself numb at dinner, pretending Jonathon wasn't across the table, shows Dad in a patrician rage at her disgrace. This woman, caged by her life, had chosen a form of pleasure acceptable to her that offered something flavoursome and forbidden. Yes, it's adultery and that's a real issue but the punishment she finds is that of a wayward wife but an errant mother. There are complications here: as soon as she found out that Jonathon wasn't a uni student but a schoolboy she abandoned him in a moment of horror, but then, later, she prevents a second rejection by him (ever the honourable bloke) with a fresh seduction. As much as the stunning and effective Jacqueline Bissett provides this film, she is, after all reduced to a teenage wank reverie and then, insofar as she is at all real, immured in the thick silencing purgatory of a mental facility. Oh, and all that time that Skip's dad was telling him about this, those burgundy knickers were still stretched between the horns of a wall ornament over Skip's dorm bed. Skip had just left them up there, after knowing whose they were.

So, I could do what other people of my age do when they talk about this one and mention Rob Lowe's scandal, Andrew McCarthy's fading career, and the appearance of John and Joan Cusack as well as Virginia Madsen, all in adolescent form before their own breakthroughs later in the decade. But, having done just that, I'll instead recall my impressions on first seeing the film as a twenty-two year old. 

This was at the end of my first year after uni, what they might smirkingly call a gap year now, but so much of what I gleaned there was still active. I saw a mild comedy that mixed uneasily with a coming of age story in which the reversal of the autumn/spring partnering was offered as both a boyhood miracle and a sinister exploitation. People who have never read Lolita but think they know it generally don't know that it condemns its predatory narrator. Back then, at twenty-two (I had actually read Lolita by then) I couldn't quite make it past the contempt in Ellen's fate (even that it was reported rather than shown). We were meant to join the lads in a big laugh now they've really gone through it together and will be friends for life. Watching it again last night, this effect, the screaming void of hollowness beneath that laugh or at least the attempted diversion of it, made me wince. Two boys chortling over how they made it through, who would be headed for societal leadership and the kind of class reinforcement only hinted at here, are effectively laughing at all the chumps who are yet to be ground by their own life lessons. Maybe the film should have been called Status Quo.

Viewing notes: Class is currently available via subscription on Prime.