Ballando Ballando (Le Bal) (1983)

I’ve been trying to find a good copy of Ballando Ballando for years and found one last week, so I am finally watching it. Ettore Scola’s film is charming and funny with some very silly, delightful performances. The conceit is a nightclub where we spend nearly fifty years from 1936 to 1983 and we see many different characters over this time, but all the actors are the same. The music changes, the dances change, but there’s no spoken dialogue and we watch the passage of time. It’s a set of cinematic restrictions ripe for farce, and it’s successful and always fun to watch.

This is not really interesting to anyone except me, but now that I've finally seen Portrait of Chieko, The Walls of Malapaga, and Ballando Ballando, the number of Foreign Language / International Feature Oscar nominees I've seen has jumped to 337 out of 347 nominees (that number includes this year's five movies). This leaves me only Io Capitano, Perfect Days, and The Teachers' Lounge from 2023, and then Daens (1992), Memories of a Marriage (1989), Nights and Days (1975), The Deluge (1974), The New Land (1972), Live for Life (1967), and Dear John (1964) from previous years.

Body Double (1984)

Body Double is a surreal, occasionally sexy, but rather bizarre neo-noir. I think the real problem for me was that there was absolutely zero mystery in this film. I knew who the villain was immediately, and the film doesn't do much of a job trying to hide it. The only thing I was trying to figure out was what was real and what was a movie – turns out it's all a movie? I don't know. 

Tavernier Triple Feature

I watched three Bertrand Tavernier films at the end of June. Tavernier died recently (in March) and the Criterion Channel put a bunch of his films up for us. 

A Sunday in the Country (Un Dimanche à la Compagne) (1984) is understated and lovely.

Daddy Nostalgie (1990) is smart and slow and sad. It's Dirk Bogarde's last performance, and I love that man so much, so this is a pleasure in many ways. It's also a very interesting character study. Jane Birkin's character is constantly getting angry for no reason, or rather, there's something in her character that prompts her to quick rages. It's a very, very interesting film.

And then there is La Vie et Rien d'Autre (Life and Nothing But) (1989), which is plainly Bertrand Tavernier's masterpiece. This is an incredible, moving antiwar film set in the year following WWI. Tavernier's focus on the dead, on the absolute and total loss of life is extraordinary, humane, and almost unbearable. I loved this film. Philippe Noiret and Sabine Azéma are wonderful.

Songwriter (1984)

Songwriter is a great time with some great songs. It's ridiculous country music fun for most of its running time, and Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson are a delight. Lesley Ann Warren is in this too, and she gives a truly fantastic performance. She's funny and sensitive and just delightful, although I can't say I care much for her singing. I liked the script too! This is an unjustly ignored little comic gem. It's sentimental in all the right places and even occasionally serious, but it doesn't take itself too seriously. I had a great time.

I watched this on Amazon Prime and it was the last film that I hadn't seen from the 1984 Oscar cycle. (This was the year Amadeus won Best Picture. The year of Beverly Hills Cop and War-Time Romance and Sesión Continua and El Norte and Footloose.)

The Loveless (1981)

Atmospheric and slow. The Loveless is very Florida. But it weirdly just never gets interesting. The acting is bad across the board. The directors are more interested in a kind of faux-fifties style than in anything else, and worst still, the men grope each other and stare at each other but never actually fuck. It's like this weird American version of Fassbinder's Querelle but with a strict disavowal of homoerotics, even though the entire film is shot from a homoerotic perspective. I didn't like this at all.

Beverly Hills Cop

Beverly Hills Cop is pretty much perfect. It's an excellent script with a brilliant central performance by Eddie Murphy, and it's really, really funny.

El Norte (1983)

Gregory Nava's El Norte is really sad and pulls absolutely no punches. Young farmworkers laboring under slavery conditions in Guatemala travel to the United States in hope of a better life.

To be honest, El Norte is rough. It's stunning that this movie is talking about anti-Latino racism in 1984. And this movie is smart about race and about labor in California. El Norte is an impressive feature.

Splash (1984)

Splash was apparently a big hit in 1984.

Um... ok. This film is a live-action cartoon. No one in it behaves like a real person.

It does have three or four pretty great jokes – I really was cackling when Darryl Hannah tells Tom Hanks what her real name is in her own mermaid language – but mostly I thought this thing was pretty terrible.

After a while, even where the next joke would be became obvious.

Also this shit is insanely sexist. I guess I could be more specific about that, but, like, a mermaid falls in love with a young commitment phobe for reasons – well, she falls in love with him because the writers say she does. But this woman has basically no subjectivity of her own. Her only function is to love this dorky man, to appear naked several times, and to be the butt of various jokes.

The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

This script is legitimately terrible, and The Muppets Take Manhattan isn't funny at all. Joan Rivers and Gregory Hines each have funny bits in it, but mostly this is just absurdly bad.

Just as an example of how terrible this thing is, at the end of the movie – which one might expect to be a moment when the muppets, in fact, take Manhattan – the muppets are performing their college show on a Broadway stage but then we move inside the show, in which a real minister is apparently marrying the pig and the frog. This is in the Broadway show they're doing, but also lots and lots of muppets are there, including the entire cast of Sesame Street. The pair are married and then... the movie's over. The plot of the movie is completely given over to the wedding ceremony, and whether or not the show the muppets were doing for their Broadway audience was a success or not, we shall never know. I am imagining, however, that their show was a success, because for some reason people in the muppet movies seem to enjoy the muppets' musical performances – except, that is, when the plot dictates otherwise...

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romancing the Stone is a ton of fun. It's funny, it's full of great action, absurd sequences, and wonderful characterization. I had a blast.

Another Country (1984)

This is... not Maurice. I think the main issue here is that this is only a story about schoolboys and the stupid English prep school system. It is a critique of this system and of British masculinity and hypocrisy and homophobia, and that's all good and well, but unfortunately Another Country doesn't really aim higher than that. It's good, and it's fun to see Cary Elwes (so cute) and Rupert Everett and Colin Firth, but this film just doesn't ever really lift off. The problem is that Another Country has this frame of Rupert Everett's character in the USSR in the 1980s, and we know that he was a spy and turned against the UK. I would've been super interested in the spy story, but the movie is only interested in Britain and its hypocrisies. This is a play, too (although the film is not stagey at all), and I wonder if it worked better on stage.

Sesión Continua (1984)

I gotta say I really love José Luis Garci's movies - this is the second one I've seen and they have such a beautiful quiet way about them. I have personal reasons for being moved by Sesión Continua in particular, but that's because the film is a kind of meditation on living through work or avoiding living through working. And then... the plot of the film the director and screenwriter are making is about falling in love with someone much younger and being inspired by the youth of one's beloved. (This was a film, incidentally, that Natey, a guy I was dating last summer, had planned to watch with me when he got home from Spain in the fall – before we stopped seeing one another.)

This is all subtle and comic while at the same time managing to be poignant. It's a kind of particularity of Garci's movies that they can be broadly funny, even farcical, while also being sad or bittersweet – sometimes even in the same scene – as when a scene begins with the writer and director discussing plot points at an outdoor café and it sounds to a terrified innocent patron like they're plotting a kidnapping, but as the scene ends we hear the director muse about how his daughter is having an affair with an older man and how that makes him reflect on his own age.

The real star here is José Bódalo who gives an absolutely brilliant performance as the head of the film studio. He is ill the whole movie – probably prostate cancer – but his own illness is a kind of red herring for what Garci's film really has in store. But, man, Sesión Continua is so good. This is an excellent follow up to Volver a Empezar.

This film wasn't released in theatres in the US and has never appeared on DVD. I watched Sesión Continua via the Cave of Forgotten Films website here.

Lynch's Dune

I don't like David Lynch in the first place (sacrilege! I know!), but this film felt particularly disconnected and arbitrary. In fact, it seems to me like simply a bad adaptation of a necessarily much longer, more complicated novel. Lynch just tried unsuccessfully to shove all of it into the movie. One does see where George Miller got his villains from, though. Mad Max: Fury Road is feeling even more derivative than usual after this movie.