1983 @ 40: BRAINSTORM

A laboratory, filled with gadgetry that looks pre-prototype. One man is encased in a huge harness with bits and wires sticking out while another follows the readings of various bio-metres, as a cheeky young tester goes around the lab and into other areas, trying things like food and physical sensations. The guy in the harness is receiving the sensations remotely, tasting what the tester tastes. He reports back, accurately identifying everything conveyed to him by the technology. Break out the champagne!

We soon also find out that Michael (guy in the harness) has a troubled marriage, the woman monitoring the experiment who is leading the research, Lillian, who was smoking up a storm in the lab ('80s!) is going to pay for all those filtertips and the bossman in the suit might well cave to the military interests doing all that funding. Oh, and this tech that can record human sensations so that they can be replayed endlessly (like a looped orgasm) is kind of open to gargantuan abuse.

Cinema technologist Douglas Trumbull, whose skill can be seen throughout 2001: a Space Odyssey and his own directorial debut Silent Running, took the further step in bringing this story to the screen at a time when advances in technology were enhancing our daily lives as well as making the existential threats of the late Cold War exponentially terrifying. Trumbull's vision is an extension on what was known of virtual reality experiments (by NASA, among others) from passive immersion into direct stimulus. Like any technology designed to elevate humanity this has a big problem in the way: humanity. Forget about the porn possibilities, imagine what it could do for the torture industry.

It is this theme that presses and allows what might otherwise be a pedestrian thriller plot, as different characters encounter the possibilities of the invention (soon shrunk from a lab filling machine to a headset) and are plunged into experiences like psychosis or sex and eventually death and possible afterlife. The theme is compelling and the goodies and baddies plot only extends it. A lot of this is casting.

Christopher Walken is at a stage of his career where he appears to be discovering the unpunctuated vocal delivery that was to make him one of the impressions to perfect. To be fair, he uses it to give Michael the appearance of a purposeful scatterbrain but this trades screen time with the other side of the approach which renders him emotionless and dull. Louise Fletcher is more impressive as Lilly the head boffin, taking the character from impatience with authority to humility in the face of death. If you were soured by her turn as Nurse Ratchet, try this movie for some depth and warmth.

The mastodon in the room, though, is Natalie Wood as Karen the idustrial designer and Michael's wife. Her performance is fine, nothing outstanding but neither an embarrassing swan song. Wood died during the production. This was unrelated to the film but its occurrence brought production to a standstill as thecash strapped MGM and insurers went into a spin. That didn't help an efforts to add some dignity to the demise of a well loved movie star but the film, when completed and released two years later, wasn't burdened with the same bad business that accompanied the death of actors in the Twilight Zone movie at around that time, but emerged as a kind of farewell performance.

Even with this tragic setback, the film did get completed and to a fine sheen. My recent viewing revealed something I didn't remember from the cinema screening in 1983 and would have been undetectable on VHS and broadcast at the time. Most of the film is shot and presented in standard widescreen (1.85:1) but everything showing the point of view of someone in the VR is in scope (more like 2.35:1) so it widens out. I rented this through Prime in HD and it went from scope back to wide with the same letterboxing above and below, making it look like a mini-IMAX show. Trumbull had been  developing a format using 70mm stock shot at 60 frames per second (normal rate is 24 fps) but MGM freaked at the cost and logistics of getting it shown  far and wide so it varied between 70 and 35 mm. This is not particularly helpful as an indication but slow motion is often shot at 64 fps and projected at 24 but you don't really get much of an idea of the smoothness of the motion. If you've bought a digital tv in the past twenty years and winced at how scrubbed and tv-like movies look before finding out how to get rid of motion smoothing in the settings, that's more like what Trumbull had in mind. It might well be truer to the image but we're just too used to the old 24 per second rattling away. So, who knows how it would have gone down, anyway?

What remains of Brainstorm after this history is a solid vision of the technology to come. It's not quite pre-internet as there are frequent instances of people tapping in to the lab recordings through acoustic modems but that technology is allowed to function as a kind of plastic age magic (even though it was real at the time) but the online realm we live in now would require more than lip service with a story like this. Later excursions like Strange Days and The Matrix owe more than a little to Trumbull's notions here and more recent fare like Possessor show that the garden's still fertile. If it were to be remade (no, it shouldn't be but ...) it would probably need to intersect with AI to make any sort of dent. But then I wonder, would that not just push it irretrievably into genre territory to the point that it lost its ethical basis? Perhaps some futures are best left in the past. Seriously, visit or revisit this, if only to see what didn't happen.

1983 @ 40: PSYCHO II

After a black and white Universal logo animation and a replay of the shower scene from the original, we leap forward twenty or so years to a law court to witness the liberation of Norman Bates after decades in psychiatric care. This is not a joyous occasion for all. Vera Miles, from the original film, as the sister of the victim in the shower scene, goes all bammy, trying to overturn the decision. Norman gets driven back to the old motel which has become an off road oasis of sin under the management of the sleazy Toomey. Norman, known for his worst days locally, takes up a rehabilitation job at a local diner. There he meets and connects with Mary, the harassed young waiter. Mary's boyfriend dumps her and Norman offers her a room at his place. He has heaps of them, after all. She's understandably hesitant to take him up but her situation is bad. What could go wrong?

Making a sequel to an icon is a tough one. Do you just remake it with lots of goofy callbacks and updates or do you go harder and extend what you have? It's to the great credit to Psycho II's team that they chose the latter. The tortured Norman Bates so twisted by possession in the original has emerged through decades of care. He's edgy in the outside world and it takes him time to get into the swing and there's always the possibility that he'll just fall back into the same vortex of madness. That's the notion they went with and added a solid blurring of reality and fugue states to produce something not just new but felt necessary.

The sample scene from the original at the opening of this one is poignant here. It's both an acknowledgement and point of departure. There's no point in pretending that you're not treading on cinematically sacred ground because that's always going to be there. And this was 1983 when a rapidly popular home video market was making available a cosmos of retrograde cinema to audiences who didn't make it to the rep cinemas. By the time Psycho II came out the shower scene was long warped through pauses and replays on VHS tapes the world over. This chance to see it on a big screen before the next chapter was more than a "previously on..." moment, it was an invitation to more of Bates Motel.

It was blessed with fine casting, too, starting with the director. Australian Richard Franklin had already wowed with his Hitchcockian Patrick and Road Games thrillers and was a natural (Hitch-clone Brian de Palma had wisely demurred, it probably being a little too close to home). Franklin barnstorms the new material, keeping the ugly conspiracy plot close to the hazards it's meant to engender. 

Anthony Perkins returns as Norman but an older and more weathered man than the high strung bundle of nerves he was in the 1960 characterisation. His pathos is palpable and compels us to grind our teeth wanting his to get through and win against his new torments. Meg Tilly whose spacey presence had already illuminated screens in The Big Chill and would again in Agnes of God, brings an effortless vulnerability to Mary adding credibility to her difficult role. Vera Miles as Lila is all lifelong bitterness and shriek but that is serving the script she's given. Robert Loggia adds a gangster toughness to his Dr Raymond, wiping the table of the still tawdry cliches of psychiatrist characters (especially after Donald Pleasance had gleefully resurrected them in Halloween).

I avoided this film at the time, being a film student (on the theoretical rather than practical side) as I thought the original "text" was best left untampered or modified with '80s explicit screen gore. A fellow student argued much more wisely that Hitchcock would have got up from his laurel couch and done all the tampering and bloody violence that the culture would allow (at a time when the slasher sub-genre was only gathering strength). Yes, of course, he would have. Yes, he created all manner of invention as he circumvented the censors of his heyday but he was absolutely never above the call of popular cinema. Also, I don't know why the gouge-eyed corpse in The Birds didn't occur to me, it's still pretty strong. And after that I just never got around to it. Then the anniversary came up. 

Psycho II was a sequel that worked to be its own film while clearly in tribute to the greatness of its original when slasher sequels were almost to the last just more of the same with an advanced number in the title. It's odd to think of the concept of restraint here as Psycho II is intended to carry on the work of Psycho but restraint it is that in answering the question "what happened then?" it didn't say "what do you think?" but "it's complicated".

1983 @ 40: CHRISTINE

Late '50s Detroit. The assembly line of Plymouth Furies is grinding ahead in all the old colours like Sonic Blue and Seafoam Green. When a Fiesta Red one comes up, it causes an industrial accident. At the end of the day one of the line workers indulges himself with a moment in the driver's seat of that one. One social faux pas later and that dirty blues Bad to the Bone comes true. This 'mobile is alive and particular about who drives with her.

It's the end of the '70s and young bottle specs nerd Arnie is getting bullied at school and bullied at home by his parents. His one friend, one of those nicer sporty alphas that happen, tries to get him out into the world. One day they're driving home and Arnie stops the car. He's seen the wreck of the car we met in the prologue, called Christine after the young family who had her first all died in their own way while on board. But it starts and the grizzled old timer who sells it to him seems glad to see the back of it.

Chrstine likes Arnie plenty, and as he restores her at a local garage, he finds there's a long way she'll go to protect him and serve his interests. Also, he transforms in about a week from awkward nerd to cool young rocker. This gets him the attention of the bad guy who bullied him earlier, whose gang show up to the garage and trash Christine in a frenzied assault. Seems like an act of war, to me.

There is signature synthesised scoring and an overall craft on show but this never feels like a John Carpenter film. Fresh from the extraordinary streak from Halloween to The Thing, Carpenter had forged an instantly recognisable style of lean and mean narrative characters that swing from cartoonish action figures to people with depth and homebaked music that any filmmaker would happily add to a film. But Christine feels like a job rather than a chance to tackle a Stephen King story and have the high box office potential after The Thing had bombed (before it's real life on home video began, of course). 

And this is a very King story with staple bullies, magic and Americana coming out of its ears. At first, when you understand this and know the context, you might make the obvious comparison with David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, also dominated by its author's influence with a sparse film auteur's voice left in the mix. Both films work a treat, whoever's work they resemble, but I wonder if they'd swapped assignments would they have made films closer to their output. The scene that suggests this more than any is when Christine, battered and barely alive, rejuvenates herself in a show of dazzling practical effects work. Cronenberg was the car guy, after all (his other forgotten movie is Fast Company). But then, nah, both films form that blindspot that every director has at the beginning of their career when choices are made for career over their supposed lifelong vision. I'll never judge any artist who opts for a bread and butter project when that's the income and exposure they can use. Then again, do we rate Guillermo Del Toro by Blade II or Pan's Labyrinth?

One of the aspects of this film that always suggest how jobbing it is is the transformation of Arnie. The speed and profundity of his galloping confidence and arrogance are so marked that the idea is that this metamorphosis is driven by the supernatural force of Christine herself. When Arnie is examining the wreckage left by the gang he notes the movement in the car and, through his connection, takes an audience's position before saying: "Show me." This sets off the self reconstruction at the centre of the effects in this effects dependent film but also forms a point of no return. That might well be when he remember how little cost or struggle there was in Arnie's character change. Is this Carpenter saying, "hell, let's just get him alpha" and rely on some scenes of vestigial puerility to mark depth. The rest of it is pretty much mechanical in both a figurative and physical sense.

Well, there's a lot going on here to satisfy the quest for theme for those who will. There's the outright entertainment value of it that makes its screentime fly by. And it you didn't know it was John Carpenter making it while still in the first brilliant phase of this career you wouldn't need to. I suppose I just miss the mix of crafty cinema made within genre by a crafty cinephile who at his best (which is a long rap sheet) could always add originality. Is this film another proof of the Stephen King curse (that he kills auteurism)? The Shining alone challenges that but, then, that was Kubrick. There's too much variation in the time since, anyway. It's much more like a sharp artist clocking in. And when it's a still young John Carpenter doing that I can think of a queue as long as a city block that wouldn't show up with this kind of energy.

1983 @ 40: MAN OF FLOWERS

Ageing Charles Bremer spends his days using beauty to heal the persistent pains from his childhood. His house in one of Melbourne's leafy suburbs is palatial and filled with seasonal flowers. Flowers are so important to him that he confuses them with the artist's model whom he pays to strip for him as a duet by Donizetti pours into the golden light. Charles's life has given him a cushion in his inherited wealth. His soft and well spoken narration is formed of excerpts from letters he is writing to his long dead mother. This should creep us out. It doesn't.

Charles is given to us as a naif, a tap for the best and worst of the world around him. Depending on their capacities for self reflection those agents of the world variously learn about themselves or harden further into narcissism. Lisa the model almost feels guilty taking his money for her stripping performances, struck by his line drawing at the act. She knows there is more there to understand. His psychiatrist, venal and oafish, is drawn to Charles's stillness and opens up to him more than the professional reverse, but still fleeces him with extra sessions at heightened rates. And David, Lisa's boyfriend, the Neanderthal junkie action painter can only see Charles as an exploitable old square but even then lowers himself to paint what Charles prefers. The minister at the church across the road where Charles goes to play improvised twelve tone fantasias on the organ, sees Charles as a good man. The postman, bursting with facts and his interpretations of them to prove that the world is as "fucked" as he believes it is, agrees with the minister. Increasingly throughout this effortlessly areligious movie we are given Charles as a holy fool. 

If we see Charles's candle light toned sanctum as a utopia we understand that it is ripe for invasion and sacking. How this happens and how it is met are matters for spoilers which I won't give here, regardless of how difficult this film is to find. What I will say is that the astute writing that pits antagonists against each other along with all they represent is done with great craft and singled this film and all the earlier titles of its director Paul Cox against an Australian film industry that was largely directionless and low on substance.

Two elements make this so: characters so well written that even those of fewer dimensions come across as parented, and the canny dialogue written by Bob Ellis which is almost constantly funny. There are flaws, here and there. The hilarious self exposing radio preacher's hypocrisy is subverted by the clumsy choral jingle. The naming of the object which consolidates the conclusion is needlessly silly. But then there is the world of Charles's memory, presented as saturated silent cinema, glorious to see but constantly unsettling. His mother's hot/cold relationship with him and his father's often creepy attentiveness to the high tea realm of Charles's childhood as a boy rejected in an environment of material comfort. Poor little rich boy? Well, the blaring Donizetti singing links everything to do with his childhood, mother, assaulted self-esteem and his current daily attempts to address his departed parent becomes a kind of cosy straightjacket. If Charles's development was arrested at childish naivete it might just be that he had reason to fear pursuit of any knowledge. Will these turns of events be enough to break the torpor that prevents him from greater intimacy with the beauty he craves than just looking? 

Paul Cox was notable among his community of Australian film makers through his insistence on strong characters, plots with real working parts and rich dialogue. He came early to the attention of influencers like Phillip Adams and collaborators like John Clarke and Bob Ellis but if he didn't already have the discipline to fashion such complete films that would have meant little. I was drawn to Man of Flowers before its release by its immediate predecessor, the wonderful autumnal rom com Lonely Hearts (also starring Norman Kaye) and the tone that felt new in an Australian cinema context for being non-American and vaguely European (Cox is Dutch born). The settings and lines were all Australian but their finish had a more strident cinema craft to it.

I remember thinking it strange that one of my most respected tutors at Griffith Uni, Sylvia Lawson, grimaced when I mentioned that I was eager to see this film. On paper, it might look like an old man's tug fantasy including women stripping, lesbianism and an idealised kind of masculinity swathed in luxury and ready to take on younger alphas. I graduated that year and didn't see it until the following year when it continued to burn through the arthouses and campus cinemas, so I never did get to ask if she did finally see it. 

Would she have erased her resistance? Who knows? It did occur to me, though, that I might have been marvelling at it initially for the strength of its characters players and writing that set it so far apart from the rest of the local fare. Was I just celebrating something for doing the job it was meant to do rather than fall short through expectation? No, I think I would still have loved it, regardless. I know I saw it more than once, getting myself and small gangs out to the Schonell at UQ for more. Spotting the cameos was a fun foyeur conversation. Would any of us turn out differently if we'd had Werner Herzog as a dad? Are we sure that Patrick Cook doesn't do that with bronze? How much of the postie's rants were actually written by the playwright Barry Dickins who played him? And wasn't Bob Ellis --

Wait a minute. Bob Ellis' portrayal of the psychiatrist as a money grubbing Jew is a real sticking point, here. He's more east European than Viennese (i.e. he's not going for a Freud cliche) but his nasal toned callousness borders on panto. His dialogue would have been funny in any accent and the one he adopts is a clearly deliberate choice. Do we let the era forgive this? Was Ellis basing the voice on a doctor he had been treated by? You still shouldn't need the accent for that. Am I being too sensitive? Maybe I'm exposing my own guilt at finding it funny at the time. Maybe it really is just an imagined Euromash accent to make the lines funnier. It troubles me if I see it now and I think that would be the same with any comedy that tried something like it from the time. So, unresolved but needed mentioning.

Aside from that the cast offer characters that are both rich and real. Tony Llewellyn Jones's minister who can't look anyone in the eye suggests that has a history in his two brief appearances. Chris Heywood's boomy oaf screams internal insecurities that only a lot of cocaine can conceal. Alyson Best's Lisa uses her restrained performance to show us someone finding it hard to break from co-dependency and pursue something more like self-determined happiness. Without a word, Hillary Kelly gives us a woman who both comforted and alienated her son, giving too much regard to her husband's unimaginative authority. And finally it is Norman Kaye's movie; his Charles meets us as vulnerable as one of the petals on his beloved blooms meting out complications and hues that bring him to great depth while never raising his voice from its quiet, crisp, observational tone. He shows us Charles's damage through his gentleness which also proves his strength.

I fell off the Paul Cox wagon in the later '80s and really need to do something about that. He kept working up to his death in the mid 2010s, producing a new film or tv production annually, working with the likes of Isabelle Huppert and Irene Papas as well as his rep theatre cast of actors and writers. I haven't examined why I fell away from his audience but I think it was around the same time as I stopped anticipating new Peter Carey books or Hal Hartley movies and probably for the same reason that others had turned up on the block with different things to offer. But not everyone blands out the way Scorsese has. David Lynch just got more individualistic in vision. Back in the mists of poetry history, so did John Milton. For all I know, Paul Cox's strongest work was ahead of him after Man of Flowers. Maybe it's that. Maybe I just didn't want to risk finding out the opposite. Well, seeing this again and being reminded of its strengths and delights, I think I've just given myself some long delayed homework.

1983 @ 40: THE DEAD ZONE

Johnny Smith crashes his car and wakes up in hospital. All well, except that it's five years later and he's been in a coma all the time. His fiance is married with a kid. His job as a teacher is long gone. He has an uphill battle with his own body to rehabilitate and whenever he holds onto anyone he has visions of terrible things happening to them or their loved ones. He goes back home with his dad, after his mum collapses and departs the world. Word of his power gets around and he solves a serial murder case. After that, he flees from the attention that gives him, holing up in a house out of county while the mail from everyone who wants him for lost dogs or cancer cures piles up. Meanwhile, a troublingly populist politician is running for the senate and his presence is getting uncomfortable. So, as he asks his compassionate doctor who has helped him through all of this, if you could go back in time, knowing what you do now, would you kill Hitler?

This sombre but highly engaging near-supernatural thriller is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel. It's from the era when putting that name first on the poster sold tickets and ushered masses of audiences into cinemas that blazed with mediocrity. You can't blame the audiences; the exceptions were already impressive with Brian De Palma's Carrie and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as counter weights the odds of finding a good King film adaptation were promising, if eroding with each passing year of the eighties.

The early signs were promising with the veteran craftsman Stanley Donen on board to direct Jeffery Boam's screenplay keeping close to King's novel. Then it all fell apart. Donen bailed. The production company dropped it. When Dino De Laurentis picked it up he dropped Boam, tried King himself to rewrite the script, fired King and rehired Boam who tightened it up. Hi and bye to directors John Badham and the epic waster of time and talent Michael Cimino later, the then sub-radar Canadian David Cronenberg was given the gig. He beat the screenplay into shape and delivered the movie.

I seldom go into any production detail on the movies I celebrate on their anniversaries but this one is interesting as its gestation marks a few vital points in the cinema of the time. It's not just the King adaptations which would go into the decade to come and well beyond, it was the shift in what thrillers looked like. The early '80s saw a slicking up of the harder edged political/social speculative fiction like Parallax View, Capricorn One or Network into highly polished fare like The Star Chamber or Thief. The sense of lessons learned and quality raised was strong. Dead Zone is a perfect fit.

It's also a David Cronenberg film, an early one, from the time when he already had a string of horrors so individual that a sub genre had to be named to accommodate them: body horror. With each next film from the creaky but compelling Shivers through to the apex of paranoia science fiction Videodrome from earlier in the same year, Cronenberg had lifted his production game as well as skill with actors and discipline with ideas. Now, with some guaranteed big bucks to play with, this should have been a mega Cronenberg film of alienating visual power and heavily disturbing notions. Well, no.

What we get is a lean Stephen King story told with great economy and elegance. The still young auteurist film maker, given the opportunity to outgun himself with bigger money and distribution than the arthouse and drive-in outlets he'd had so far, stepped back from himself and told the story. The result is that any retrospective viewing done after Cronenberg's style had become more familiar to audiences in general (his next feature was the mega hit The Fly) usually involves a comment that it doesn't feel much like a Cronenberg film. That's true enough but it holds an interesting portent for the director's career from the end of the decade onwards which veered from his reputed visceral horror into far more subtle territory. By the time he got to Dead Ringers the physical disgust element was almost entirely offscreen. Naked Lunch might seem to stick out here but the skilful use of altering mind states to discover the path through that unfilmable book demonstrates restraint as well as acumen. Then there's M. Butterfly and most of his career after. When he returned to his signature m.o. it was remarkable and always compared to his earliest features. Dead Zone showed that he could do him even when he wasn't.

My conviction is that Cronenberg movies always contain a Cronenberg scene, no matter how conventional or mainstream they get. Kiera Knightley's facial contortions in A Dangerous Method or the sauna fight in Eastern Promises qualify. Even the largely forgotten Fast Company from his earliest phase with its fetishised engine oil threesome and animal-like screaming race cars might surprise. In Dead Zone it is the suicide of a character that stops time briefly by confronting us with its bizarre violence (again, mostly off screen but clearly suggested).

But the centre of this effect of slightly flavoured conventionality is the performance by Christopher Walken as Johnny. Herbert Lom, Tom Skerritt and the gang of faces familiar from the director's works to that time provide faultless support but it's Walken's gamut from understated gravity to sudden rage to pain so apparently held in that it's hard to tell if it's emotional or physical. The still young actor's strange, bug eyed alienness never served him better than here. His foil is Martin Sheen whose intensity in the then recent Apocalypse Now is all but erased by his explosive would be demagogue. This proto Trump roaring and gladhanding monster lines up perfectly in counterpoint. His surprising fate is a departure from the novel that King highly appreciated. 

Cronenbrerg's films had been settling into a more polished look for the past few outings but even his strongest to date, Videodrome, was obliged to plunge into heavy physical freakouts. The Dead Zone could not afford this if it was to effectively engage with the story of the magic powers and the political weight it needed to maintain. While Videodrome's continually disturbing suggestions and freakiness demanded a bloodier pallet the smooth winter whites and sable browns had to build the world that could make brain damage look like a miracle. David Cronenberg interrupted the world building of his own paranoia feasts to test himself. It worked. He made a Stephen King film, a good one.

1983@40: THE BIG CHILL

A group of old friends gather for the funeral. They're there for Alex, the hero of the group whose act of defiance against the establishment meant that he chose freedom against the rat race. That was in the days of rising activism on campus in the mighty '60s. This burial is in the '80s when all the friends have moved on, compelled by the cold world to abandon their ideals and find ways of living. But Alex's ghost still haunts them and he remains the central figure of the story beyond the grave: the friends measure themselves and each other by the ideals he is seen to have embodied and might well have died with him. But how real was the stance?

This eulogy for boomer idealism is to test it against the hard fact of Alex's suicide. The title sequence is a montage of the friends travelling to the funeral while a body is being dressed for the coffin. There's a strange slyness to this. At first we see trousers pulled over legs, neckties fastened as though the person is dressing himself. A few shots later we understand that it is a corpse and the last shot in the sequence is of a shirt cuff being pulled over three stitched slashes on the wrist. Over this is played Marvin Gaye's magnificent version of Heard it Through the Grapevine which adds a solemn and spooky ambience to visuals that are often cheeky or humorous. I said it was strange.

As we meet them at the funeral service we get used to dialogue packed with one-liners from a small number of sharp minded thirty-somethings and a sense of how far they have diverged from their glory days in the good fight. Meg the lawyer quit legal-aid to represent corporate interests as "they were only raping the land". Karen who could never make up her mind about Nick or Sam landed in a flavourless marriage to a man she would have called square at twenty. Hunky Sam got into acting and is now a TV star in a Magnum PI style show. Nick, the druggy one, now deals and the beaten up state of his Porsche speaks volumes. Michael ditched his great American novel to write articles that have to be no longer "than it takes your average person to take the average crap." Harold and Sarah got married. He's in business (a shoe shop called Running Dog!) and she's a doctor. The house everyone's staying at is theirs and its big enough to accommodate them all. 

Care was taken to prevent this becoming a kind of pageant of sins or virtues, taking more the flow of the differences wrought by the decade between the '60s and the '80s. Nixon then but Reagan now, from the MC5 to Billy Joel (American mainstream culture always felt awkward around punk), from Easy Rider to Kramer vs Kramer, some progress and some stagnation. When Michael who struggles with the reality of his aging complains about the oldies Harold keeps putting on the turntable he gets rebuffed immediately. They all still dig the big football game and play in the yard at half time and the old days anecdotes flow as freely as the Chardonay, but this is not a story about old cronies singing the great numbers, it's a story about the effects of enforced self-reflection. All of these people have grown accustomed to their choices and are happy enough until wrenched out of their tanks and exposed. The results of this and their flow on effects form the drivers of the narrative.

The one character I haven't mentioned yet is Chloe. Chloe is the twenty something girlfriend of Alex. She's more hippy dippy than you'd expect if you were stereotyping an early '80s kid but her attraction to Alex makes more sense if she's like that. While Meg Tilly's committed performance takes the character into the kind of spacey entitlement more typical of characterisations of millennials if provides a strong push back to all the nostalgia guilt around her. She is at the other end of Alex's pendulum, a sprite of the current day, unweighed by sentimentality, and it is she who delivers the truth in a single line that unravels the idolatry of Alex practiced by the others. She provides the point of departure by which they must stay or fly free. The results are sobering. 

On nostalgia, one of the features of this film that got people talking as much as the story and performances is the needle drop score. Late '60s hits burst out of the speakers like a golden oldies station. They might set a scene, garnish a montage, render a line of dialogue ironic; it is one of the most energetic and hard working examples of a trope begun in the '60s with the likes of Easy Rider. From The Stones requiem for the decade You Can't Always Get Want You Want at the funeral, to the Temptations' Aint Too Proud to Beg over the washing up scene that was copied in everything in the '80s from feature films to softdrink commercials, every song is chosen for lyrical content, tone, mood etc in a way that both points to the sentimentality and indulges in it. There's even a cover version in the prologue scene as Harold and Sarah's toddler is singing a Three Dog Night song in the bath. It works so well in this film that it dominated mainstream cinema for over a decade.

The cast includes names that came to dominate the '80s and in some cases go well beyond them. Glen Close brings her intimidating Earth Mother powers. Kevin Kline charms the way he would in everything, playing a polished version of himself. William Hurt's Nick travels the largest arc from directionless but loveable neerdowell to Alex's effective replacement. Tom Berenger could not have been better cast as Sam, the Tom Selleck style TV hero who, here, has a ball undercutting the Hollywood overconfidence when Sam finds himself overwhelmed by the words and deeds of everyday people. Jeff Goldblum is having a ball as the constantly horny Michael with the million deadpan quips (as well he might as that's exactly how he's been acting ever since). As noted previously, Meg Tilly as Chloe seems to have fallen from the ether as the razorsharp naif. She would continue to be cast as wide-eyed psychos for the balance of her career. The most central character of Alex was cast and included in scenes, played by a young Kevin Costner. All we see of him is the corpse being dressed at the beginning (which doesn't include a single shot of his face). Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan has wisely never released Costner's scenes as extras nor included them in any altered cut of the film, knowing to leave well enough alone. Here's to him.

This was a credible hit on release but I first really knew it as a peculiarly localised cult film. When I moved down to Melbourne from Brisbane my flatmate (and uni friend) moved among student politics circles and one house among them played this movie like a favourite album and could quote it line by line. It was like a pastel toned Rocky Horror Picture Show interactive screening except it was on VHS. It wasn't hard to see the appeal. This was the mid '80s and the last big push of student activism in Australia before Universities became harder to go to and increasingly squeezed out any but the most career orientated courses, producing a kind of sausage factory of corporate fast talking goofballs (can you guess my politics?) and these lawyers, doctors and senators to be were looking down the barrel of their own thirties (never mind middle age) and silently vowing never to turn out like that. The big idealist of the story is, after all, being suited up for a funeral at the beginning. 

Should this be attempted for generations beyond? A Gen X one to carry on directly from this which would cede the floor to a millennial one etc? I wonder if the principles would be all that different to warrant it? I'm trying to think of a cute kitchen scene in the early '80s with Throbbing Gristle's Slug Bait bashing out of the sound system. Yeah, bad idea.

I am now of an age I cold not imagine being when I was a twenty year old university student. While it was and is a chore to imagine the angst of '60s warriors growing into their sellout lives, it's not hard to care for them. I still feel the problem here of the movie itself suggesting that lifelong care about politics, environment and anything that fires up youth must inevitably be discarded as youthful naivete. I don't think the film is forcing that read but it is there for the reading. Indulging in some black and white thinking, I can't see an alternative involving these people suddenly taking up the old banners after the revelations of this weekend. Their responses are subtle and, realistically, not of even effect.

Few I knew from my student days have done what they dreamed of. Almost none, self included. By the same token I don't know of any who have changed their politics in the way these characters did. If anything, I stand further left of the leftism that I started developing while at university and don't expect to change that at all for the remainder of my years. So, it's not a feat to forgive these characters in a fiction for lives reversed for the purposes of growing up and keeping the chill out. However, I still want to throttle some of them at least for apologies that involve disowning their ideals. I know, it's fiction and it just works better if they do that but, crikey, those ideals aren't like old lego, they can help you make the good choices. So, ok, maybe The Big Chill does have more to say to us now than it did to its lightly aged boomers in the first place. For that, I'll rate it. And it's fun.

1983 @ 40: WAR GAMES

After a nuclear war drill ends with a whimper the Pentagon decides to go with automating the process to end all that pesky ethical hesitation. Meanwhile, David in Seattle hacks into his high school to change his results and keeps going until he gets into the Pentagon. One of the resident apps on the system is a nuke war simulation. When asked which side he wants, he chooses Soviet. Seems fair.

As this film is old enough for some readers not to have seen it (or heard of it) I won't be putting spoilers in. But I can say without losing sleep that the Pentagon's system can't tell between a game and a real attack. That's pretty much built into the premise.

War Games was a hit, mining the late Cold War fear of nuclear holocaust and pop curiosity about computer systems and hacking. It was also the big movie debuts of its central duo, Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick who had Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller in their near futures. The computer technology is vintage with the home setup looking boxy and clunky (acoustic modems and voice synthesisers) but the higher up it gets the more it resembles the old '60s trope of computers as magic boxes with flashing lights. But this is not a documentary about information technology, just its use by that old enemy of humanity: humanity.

John Badham directed, taking over from Martin Brest. Brest had envisaged a dark thriller but was fired in favour of Badham with his teen movie approach. But the big dark cloud of nuke apocalypse was still moving overhead so it couldn't quite play out like a Dean Jones and Jan Michael Vincent Disney pic and get away with it. What we do get is a credible cold war thriller lightened by teen energy. The '80s at the cinema were already turning into the first wave of worldly teens so the tension between David and the heavy from the Pentagon is not the kind that ends in a line about pesky kids. Dr Strangelove, a decades old black satire about the nuclear threat, was still a riot of palpably nervous laughs. 

This means that War Games plays as an efficient thriller with an ethical heart which manages to be neither dismissive of the gravity nor hampered by it. The teens are, if not quite wholesome, beautiful and not beyond tough life lessons. Matthew Broderick pours all the cool sass he would refine for Ferris (a film I hate but whose cultural value I'm forced to admit) which probably served as his audition for it. Ally Sheedy is interestingly both excited by the thrill of the badness but increasingly drawn back to the ethics that applies not just to the early hacking but the war system that reveals itself.

The middle act pursuit by the pair of the brain behind that system might stretch credibility now (where it would be shown to be crushingly difficult) but if you can suspend yourself across it you'll be treated to a fine dialogue about the terrifying possibility that nuclear cataclysm has moved outside of the control of human will. It's fine because it's delivered in a situation of safety and comfort and spoken gently. It's like sitting down to hear bad news.

The world wouldn't know about it for many years but 1983 was the year when annihilation was averted when the Soviet system misidentified a detected early warning blip as an attack. That was averted by a single officer refusing to execute his orders. It wasn't known but the possibility of life on earth being reduced to foraging among ashes due to an error was in the shade of every conversation about the news. John Badham is not given place among the auteurs but his rap sheet is solid. After decades of TV his move to the big screen included the Frank Langella Dracula and Saturday Night Fever to start with. By choosing to nurture the gravitas of his young stars and let it emerge from the vigour of their sense of fun. Doing that kept the film on message without letting it drag and delivered a note of hope to an audience that was in danger of accepting the threat around and above them. It's not the life-suckingly bleak Threads or even the more sanitised The Day After but War Games still works. Could we do one for the climate crisis? That already comes with a teenage star.

1983 @ 40: VIDEODROME (Long and with spoilers)

Max Renn's life is about to change but it was already pretty nifty. As one of the heads of an alternative tv station he gets to seek and choose all the stuff the boring outlets won't. When we meet him he's off to talk to some Japanese soft porn pedlars. As he and his fellow execs um and ah about it he agrees, saying they need something tough after all the soft core they've been casting. Then he's off to his video pirate friend Harlan who has snagged something special from the airwaves. It's a few seconds of sexual torture. It looks real. Max, who has seen things best left barely imaginable that are too much for him, is hooked. The source of the footage is an entity called Videodrome. He puts one of his contacts on the trail. She comes back with a hard caution to stay away, saying, spookily, that they have what Max does not, a philosophy. 

Max appears on a tv talk show with a media guru, Brian O'Blivion, and tough love radio host Nicki Brand. Max makes a successful move on Nicki while O'Blivion (who will only appear on a small television in the studio) gasses off about tv being the retina of the mind's eye. Later, in his apartment, Nicki picks out a video marked Videodrome, thinking it's porn. Their sex that night includes some home sterilised piercing and a massive hallucination that they are in the Videodrome torture room, writhing on what looks like a giant ribbed hotplate. The next time she's around she tells him she's going to Pittsburg, where Videodrome is made, so she can audition. He fails to convince her to stay, or stay away, and she goes off into the night, never to return.

There are other pieces on the board but the last one I'll include as plot has to do with the media guru. He runs an outreach centre on skid row, welcoming the dispossessed in for some tv and a soup kitchen meal. He doesn't get to meet Brian but O'Blivion's daughter Bianca who deftly keeps him from getting too close, promising to send him a cassette of her father to explain things. The tape arrives that night. O'Blivion begins with his usual academic provocation before his voice enters the room for real and begins a two way conversation with Max before getting strangled to death by an executioner who, after a quick self unmasking, turns out to be Nicki. The itch that's been irritating Max's belly expands from a rash to a large vulval slit. He's been scratching the irritation with his pistol and, compelled, he plunges it into the orifice. He struggles to wrench his hand back out but the gun is still lost in there. This is a David Cronenberg film.

Not just any David Cronenberg film. Having challenged audiences from the mid '70s onward with the likes of the plague of sexual parasites in Shivers, the mutated vampiric armpit spike in Rabid, murderous children generated by pure rage in The Brood, and explosive telepathy in Scanners (yes, I know, Fast Company, but it's just not convenient here) Cronenberg had emerged as one of the most original thinkers in world cinema. Having used the Canadian tax dodge to make Shivers, he'd smuggled some compelling thought about society, sex and science into what was sold to the American drive-ins as a big schlocky monster movie.

The smuggling approach served him well until he stepped beyond need for it with Scanners which pushed the thinking forward and let the threat for part of the plot rather than the other way around. By the time he got to Videodrome the power of the concept was far too strong to just lie on top and needed to be woven more tightly into the fabric of the film. Cronenberg was no longer convincingly borrowing from the world around him but building his own that just resembled the real one. If Toronto looked like a modern metropolis by day it felt like the real city lay dormant, stirring after sunset to envelope at the individual level, all who roamed it with a thick night illuminated mainly by tv screens. It was a night whose reality behaved like dreams, leaving all who lived it scrambling around looking for explanations, anything, to tame it through rationalisation. As strong as his thinking had already got, Cronenberg had never achieved this level of complexity. Nor had he rendered it so enjoyably.

That's the thing about Videodrome. If you keep at making movies with sophisticated concepts you're apt to get more sophisticated but with this one Cronenberg was able to use his experience as a film director to add one last goody into the mix: warmth.

If there is one thing that holds earlier Cronenberg features back from higher celebration it's the shortfall in performance. It's not about small budgets equalling lower tier actors. It's not even about beginner writing. The good performances in early Cronenberg films happen despite his direction of lack of it that leaves the others wooden and amateurish. We're talking the likes of Samantha Eggar, Oliver Reed and Patrick McGoohan along with a small number of locals who were picking up craft during these experiences and outside them. While it took baby steps, by the time he was able to cast the dynamic talent of James Woods for Max Renn, Cronenberg's people were like the cattle that Hitchcock had smirked about in an earlier decade.

Woods comes on with a interpersonal assault plan that swings rapidly between disarming candour and outright sleaze. His come on to Nicki on the tv show is meant to make us cringe but it also shows that his tolerance of mainstream order has limits. Add to that Woods's readiness to show his character failing even on a tiny scale which prevents us from turning off an arrogant self-entitled player. Mainly, he's all flaws; he needs experience to find his decency which Woods demonstrates through a credible filter of impatience.

If Debbie Harry as Nicki feels a little wooden it's more down to inexperience. There is a long line of rockstars who fail to convince cinecameras, already long by then, but Harry brought from her schooling from fame and performance the power of contrasts. She was acutely aware of her beauty and its global celebration but her punk roots had shown her the value of looking like Aphrodite and sounding like a Bowery bum. Nicki Brand gets a slightly more cool jazz take on this but the roughness remains and, when blended with the character's transgressive sense of adventure the performance blooms. It shocks Mr Sin himself, Max Renn, into timidity. 

The pair of them anchor their respective sides of the Videodrome screen that allows the extraordinary moment at which her ballooning image from the screen opens its mouth to accept his penetrating head. There is more than a little trade on what audiences at the time would have made of the frontwoman of Blondie in this context but Debbie Harry meets it and even lifts the relatively unknown James Woods to her podium. The actor James Woods jovially complained about the heavy reliance on practical effects, particularly the abdominal orifice, saying, "sometimes I just feel like the bearer of the slit." Debbie Harry responded with, "now you know how it feels."

If you delve into disc extras or just read about this movie you'll find quite a rocky developmental road. If you sift through the history of various cuts, rethinks in credits sequences, deleted scenes you'll see a few different movies coming through. The "soup or veg" moment I knew from a tv version in the '80s, finally seen again in the Arrow 4K, is not missed. There is a scene between Max and Nicki in the back of a limo which shows Debbie Harry in impressive form that was long excised. All of the deleted scenes I saw deserved deletion. What is left is a wonder of economic storytelling where one scene closes in on the same thing that another opens outward from, hallucinations become indistinguishable from reality and the descent of Max into the befogged state in which he achieves clarity is seamless and thrilling.

Necessary mention here of longtime collaborator Howard Shore's score. Combining synthesis with orchestral sounds he provides a grinding liquidity. I used to think the main instrument was a harmonium. If you've ever played one you'll know how hard you have to work just to keep the airflow with the bellows pedals and how that precludes almost everything beyond plain chording.

If it had been another Scanners we would celebrate it as coolly. The warmth of Videodrome gives way to the emotional integrity of The Fly. Videodrome is the source point for Cronenberg's survival as a film maker. From this we can see the branch off from the body horror to relatively straight drama and then recombination with titles like Dead Ringers. With this proof of concept for creating fluidity between states lets us accept the two-places-at-once scenes of the hitherto unfilmable Naked Lunch. All of David Cronenberg's strengths come from this knotting of the early experiments into his enviable fruition as an artist.

In the '90s Videodrome was hailed for predicting reality tv. Well, maybe, although the earlier Network does that a lot better. What Videodrome does is suggest the kind of internet that emerged after the split between the navigable surface that the graphical world wide web gave us and the continued unchecked development of the submarine mass of the dark web. I don't just mean that there are some nasty currents running beyond the light of Google but that when the mainstream web was corporatised it behaved exactly as all such absorptions do and rendered the worst of us acceptable. No need for conspiracy thinking, it's all right there on our screens. Not all of it is nefarious it's just that it can be and that can be very hard to tell.

Early scenes that show the cheerful Harlan showing Max the torture scenes include poignant cutaways to Harlan avoiding sight of the screen himself. Bianca O'Blivion's assertion that the signal could just be delivered over a test pattern contextualises the brain damage that her father called the New Flesh could grow like worldwide crops every time someone looked at a screen. She has already infected Max with a tape of a much more powerful dose than he'd previously had. Her admission that she thought he was to be her assassin is followed by a moment of audible regret that might be the very second between the director's cold presentation and his discovery of warmth. Then, later, Max is shattered when Harlan and corporate exec Barry Convex tell him the Videodrome works on everyone who sees it, as they insert a tape into his abdomen that sends him off to murder his colleagues.

There is no happy ending here. Max, beyond retrieval, finds a kind of safe haven in a condemned ship, talks to an image of Nicki on a tv in the hold before blowing his brains out with the whispered slogan: "Long live the New Flesh." Brian O'Blivion had theorised earlier that television was reality and reality less than television. Don't watch television, anymore? Ok substitute "the screen" and it works again. Our contemporary videodrome is not the sci-fi nightmare of the one in this movie but that might be because it doesn't have to be. We don't need a subliminal signal telling us what to think as we'll get to the thinking in our own time. You shouldn't panic about this as long as you still can discern all the old standard contrasts, even when the screen is normalised as it is now. We don't need to opt out violently like Max but we will need to keep on the right side of the illusion on the wrong side of the screen. Videodrome still works and will work again.

Viewing notes: I have had copies of this film from the DVD era onwards, including Criterion DVD and Blu-Ray editions. It's always been quite well served on digital video by contemporary standards with good extras and strong audio visual transfers. The version I watched for this blog article was Arrow's 4K box that comes with a raft of extras, two versions of the feature cut and a packed booklet. The Dolby Vision enhanced 4K video takes the image to a clarity level that I was constantly marvelling at. Whether it was pores in skin or the depth of the image. While much of the film's evident technology places it in time, the quality of the presentation is so stellar that it looks freshly minted.

1983 @ 40: RISKY BUSINESS (Spoilers)

Joel Goodsen at seventeen is at the top of the heap. He's a white, upper class, American teenager on the way to a pretty assured bright future as part of the eternal march of alpha citizens into unbound glory. His comic flaw, essential for this story, is that he is decent. At lunch with his fellow seniors, talking about their future plans he stops them by asking them if wealth is all they care about. They laugh as though he's joking but when one of them asks what he wants to achieve he almost stumbles over the words that he wants to help humanity. They laugh harder.

On weekend while his parents are away for the weekend and leave the running of the opulent family home to him a friend of his pranks him by ordering a call girl to his address. She knocks revealing herself to be black and trans. In a disarming exchange, he sends her off with care fare and money for her time and she gives him the number of someone more like what he was thinking. This is the young and golden Lana. All fine 'n' dandy with a montage of initiation sex deluxe. He's still young and callow, though, so when, the next morning she bills him for $300 he has to think quickly and get to the bank to plunder his bonds. When he gets back she's gone with a conspicuously expensive art piece. Getting that back is the cause of a series of misadventures, traps, cons big and small, and life lessons that in a few days supply more practical education that he is going to get at Princeton. If something realistically comparable to this story was told in the 40s it would end with Joel being made a man. But this is the early '80s and what it suggests is that, in learning the elemental skill of negotiation with the worst life can hurl, Joel becomes a better person. This is complicated, though. read on.

The thing to get out of the way first is that this is the film that broke Tom Cruise who acquired Hollywood stardom by it which he retains to this day. Hindsight would suggest he was implanted in his own future by this part (not his first but close enough) as this story of wresting control from hostile forces describes most of his roles hereafter. Here, not knowing what is to become of him, just like his character, he is a good looking teenager and that's almost all he has to be. The nuance comes with how he injects the decency flaw into scenes that will escalate to it becoming a strength. When gangster pimp Guido is at the passenger window with a pistol trying to get Lana out of the car, Joel recognises that falling apart like his friend in the back seat is only going to worsen the situation so he expresses a fragile resolve that seems to surprise himself until he can get them out of the immediate situation safely. But he's left a signature which turns up later. It's a good turn.

The other thing that Cruise does here, inadvertently, is to establish one of the decade's hero templates. Whether it's him or Ferris Bueller '80s teens were lifting off to localised greatness to fulfil the great pitch of the time as the reign of Reagan trickled down (or said it did). These don't always travel well through time and the decades have left Ferris looking like a bully (or even a figment of Campbell's psychosis) but Joel still comes across as, more or less, ok.

Circumstances see to his failing some of the high achievement aspects of his senior high school record but his acceptance of Lana's suggestion that they team up and use their resources. By this, he is not just being pragmatic but bucking the stolid system of tokenism that his formal schooling imposes. He has lost touch with the societal handrail and embraces the path that proves his prowess at business to exponentially greater degree. He has learned the advice his toxic friend gave him at the beginning to just say, "what the fuck?" and keep driving on. Cleverly, a scene where that friend, Miles, is confronted with the effects of that advice, he calls it bullshit that he just said in the moment, his shallowness is exposed by Joel's successful employment of the line. It's just occurred to me that Miles with his bravado and Hectoring ridicule and pranking of Joel is a clear prototype of Ferris; take the whimsical charm away and he's just an entitled, bourgeois oaf.

Night Shift from the previous year treated sex work similarly as a business that could be done along the same lines as any other service industry with the workers getting a much better deal out of it. The peak scene of this is the massive house party managed by Tom as a roving spruiker and Lana on personnel and PR management. You could write this entire scene off as an ad for underage tricking; there is no resolution of the issue offered (one client looks about 12 and his having to get home early is even joked about). There's a joke about how many sex workers present for duty but there is also the complaint of exhaustion by one of them afterwards. They might well be making more dosh than normal but haven't they just been in the service economy's version of a sweatshop? And aren't the bosses still the ones really raking it in?

At the end, Joel having impressed the Princeton recruiter who was sorted during the house brothel party ("Princeton could use a guy like Joel"), and having bargained his new fortune for the return of the goods in the ransacked house, having kept his mouth shut through his mother's chiding of him for damaging an ornament (happened during the bargaining scene), and having seemingly smoothed the business side of his relationship with Lana is left with a joke that if she wants a relationship with him it is gonna cost her. She didn't reply when he asked if the sex on a train jaunt was to distract him from the burglary of the house. Was she noncommittal or offended by the question? Unclear.

What is clear is that, in their final moments with each other, strolling around the greenery of a Chicago park, she is not deemed good enough for him now. He might well step up to the years of study and specialisation as an MBA and grow up to fight Gordon Gekko on the seas of high finance but he cannot be dragging a call girl around on his arm. Chuck is happy to walk off into the sunset with Belinda at the end of Night Shift but he's a grownup, Joel is probably a future Republican donor. He was probably instrumental, come to think of it, in getting his chum Brett Kavanaugh off the hook for the Supreme Court spot.

I've said so little about this film as a film and I should say something as it's worth it. There is a kind of tradeoff arrangement here between fantasy and reality which in turn plays on the audience's covetous relationship with the lifestyle on the screen. We begin with shots of a working city by night and there is a bookending sequence to suggest that, whatever happens between those two points, the grand old town and the cogs and wheels that keep it running endure. Then we are plunged into an inky blackness and find an eyeball turning as though checking for threats. We roll out to see that it's Tom Cruise's eye behind the screen of his Ray Bans. As the synthesised score by Tangerine Dream bubbles on, he speaks to camera: "the dream is always the same." Before relating an anxiety nightmare in which his distraction by a beautiful woman makes him impossibly late for an exam.

There is a lot of dream/reality tension in Lana, as well. She first appears as a young woman entering the house as a sex worker, courteous within the bounds of professional caution. She continues to tease, taunt and play Joel until circumstances throw their interests together. Rebecca De Mornay brings a lot of detail to her turn, stepping up to the depth of the screenplay to give us a young but heavily experienced survivor belying, by our assumption, the fragility of her beauty. Are the scenes in the sex montage at the beginning real, though, or Joel's art directed memories? I would lean to the latter. The famous scene (not a montage) on the train is intended as sex plus love in a risky setting, a coming of age prize, and it's served up with a lot more grit.

And then, it's only a little personal because it is still just business.

The world building of the rich and influential is consummate (I remember being dazzled by the massive graphic equalizer the Goodsens had as part of their stereo system) even to the social distance between the opulence and the grimy rust coloured night world of greater Chicago. We see a lot of the textural cheek of the '80s mainstream which had incorporated the French New Wave traits of the movie brats in the '70s but added a lot more comedy. This, like Splash or Ferris Bueller or even The Breakfast Club could never have been '70s movies. That's not because the '80s drove mainstream cinema further into gritty realism but further away from it. The tropes, tricks on the eye, casual satire and clean sheen image were part of the consumables of the movies, along with soundtrack albums with neon cover art.

Tom Cruise still peers over the frames of his Ray Bans the way that Ferris would and so many other teen movies and those that promised a kind of rock and roll adventure. But the Ray Bans were expensive and the rock 'n' roll more likely to be Huey Lewis than Suicidal Tendencies. The only real rebellion in these tales of growing up fast was against personal timidity, the social organisation was never in any danger of so much as a few questions and they shook it off like dandruff. This was the same time as the look of punk was being absorbed by cereal commercials and the spirit of it scraped off and discarded. This and its like gave every kid in the audience the promise of riches and power through saying, "what the fuck" and all their parents the assurance that they need only let the wild oats be sown and they would fall where they landed without further growth. Too heavy for a fun movie? Well, the movie is fun. It's even more fun now watching a future megastar begin his stardom with iconic status as he slides in socks jocks and shirt to the strains of Bob Seeger singing about old time rock 'n' roll. Well, the old time rock 'n' roll wears the new clean line movie style as well as ever. But it's still old time rock 'n' roll.