Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Desperately Seeking Susan is written to be a kind of sex–crime–comedy film in the vein of Something Wild and Miami Blues. This is the PG-13, unfunny version of those movies. The script is actually great, but the director doesn’t seem to know this is a comedy. This really could have been hilarious, but it isn’t. Still there are a few highlights: Giancarlo Esposito has a great cameo, Aidan Quinn is gorgeous, and Madonna is perfectly dynamic and sexy and fun (without being funny, because, as I think I’ve noted, this movie is bafflingly unfunny).

Flesh + Blood (1985)

I like Paul Verhoeven’s weird portraits of people who don’t really know what they want and are pulled in multiple directions. His films are always sexy, always violent, and always a little gross. This is a story set in medieval times, but it’s no Decameron. This is a joyously grim and totally perverse tale that has a lot more in common with Verhoeven's earlier Spetters than it does with Pasolini's much more celebratory version of the middle ages.

Year of the Dragon (1985)

This was intensely racist. It was also bloated and way too long. And its main character was a hateful, misogynist prick. John Lone is sort of wonderful in Year of the Dragon, though. Definitely a star. I think the thing that I just can't understand about this film is the way Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, and China are all conflated by this movie. There's a great, redeemable Chinese character who gets to tell Mickey Rourke's character off – cool. But then he of course comes around to seeing things from Rourke's point of view. No thanks. This was rough going.

The Journey of Natty Gann (1985)

The Journey of Natty Gann sounds like a sci-fi movie, but it is a sweet tale of a girl and her wolf and an Odyssey across the northwest during the Depression; it has gorgeous scenery, is completely and totally sentimental in a Disney sense, and has an adorable and chaste romance between a very young John Cusack and the fifteen-year-old heroine.

For me, though, the standout (aside from the fucking awesome wolf) was Ray Wise, who is rather wonderful in this film. I've always thought of him as a character actor, and he is, but here he has a giant part and does superb work carrying the movie. I've never seen the lead actress, Meredith Salenger, in anything else, but she's very good in this.

On Disney+, where I watched this, there is a warning before the movie about "tobacco use" – three kids sneak a puff on a cigarette in the men's room before they get in a fight and start punching one another. There is, however, no warning about the punching, or the attempted sexual assault Natty Gann experiences from a guy who picks her up while she's hitching north, or (and this is what I actually found disturbing) the several scenes where real violence is done to animals. The poor wolf is in a dogfight which we actually see, and it's rather shocking for a kids movie.

Silverado (1985)

This is diverting and fun – almost all of the actors are comedians – and I enjoyed myself. Scott Glenn is so great. He is truly an underrated performer. And I love see Kevin Costner in movies in the early 1980s. He's so cute and fun; in Silverado he's downright playful. He's absolutely delightful to watch.

Kevin Kline is, quite oddly enough, not playing for laughs, even though this is obviously a comedy, and I'm not sure what that's about. But his seriousness doesn't get in the way of the pleasures of Silverado, which are really all about friendship and shooting the bad guys off of horses when they aren't expecting it.

Remo Williams: the Adventure Goes Nowhere

Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was, apparently, supposed to have a sequel or two – The Adventure Continues, perhaps. Well, there's a clear reason why this adventure did not continue. Remo Williams is dumb. Now, dumb is of course, fine, but this film spends the majority of its time on the elite assassin Remo Williams training for doing the things he's going to do instead of doing them. I swear to you that this training takes up some 75 minutes of the 120-minute film, maybe even more. It's so boring. This is the kind of thing most filmmakers would make into a montage sequence. There's just no reason to watch this adult man train to be a fighter for this long – especially since the martial art he's allegedly learning is totally fictional.

There is another very large problem. The person training Remo is a wise old Korean sensei named Chiun who is played by Joel Grey. It's 1985. Joel Grey as Asian martial artist? Really? Worse yet, this film was nominated for an Academy Award in one category: Makeup. The yellowface makeup in this movie was deemed so extraordinary that it deserved an Oscar nomination.

Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins was directed by Guy Hamilton, who directed a few excellent James Bond films in the '60s and '70s (Goldfinger and Live and Let Die), and one can see how this film is of a piece with that stuff, but this one falls flat. I usually like 1980s sci-fi stuff, although this turned out to be more of an adventure film than science fiction, but Remo Williams was junk.

Twice in a Lifetime (1985)

Honestly, and I mean this sincerely, who cares? 

Twice in a Lifetime is a Bud Yorkin movie about a fifty-year-old guy who is bored with his very boring wife and finds someone much more fun and attractive who is actually interested in him and wants to leave the house and stop watching television. But here's the thing, everyone in this movie is a sad-sack. I think maybe this would be interesting if this weren't scripted like a kind of Hallmark thing with tidy endings and silly platitudes, but it is scripted like that.

The worst part about Twice in a Lifetime is that Amy Madigan, who plays the main couple's oldest daughter, is furious about her parents breaking up and can't seem to be even remotely reasonable about it. Instead she shrieks at her mother, shrieks at her father, shrieks at her little kid and just generally makes things much, much worse. It's really painful. And most of the movie I was saying oh, grow up, kid. She plays a twenty-seven-year-old who behaves like a teenager. It's embarrassing. What's odd about this is that I am not sure how the movie feels about this foolish woman. Her point of view is sort of treated as if it's reasonable. It isn't remotely reasonable.

Anyway, this was a bit of a slog. It's just not very enjoyable to watch. And of course that's fine in a movie, but this one doesn't have a point of view about any of it. It's just a story of a marriage that broke up and the two people in it got a new lease on life. Good for them, I say, but not much fun for the viewer.

Brazil (1985)

There is something about the quirkiness of Terry Gilliam's films that is not for me. I think to me it feels as though his movies really have no stakes. Like, they depict these terrible dystopias, but everyone is inured to how weird they are, so none of it really feels bad. No one is really in pain here. (That's not actually true, of course, but Gilliam doesn't dwell on the people in pain in his dystopias. His films are always about main characters who don't feel the pain staring in mute and unresponsive surprise at those who do feel it.) This film does boast a cool cast, including Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Ian Richardson, and especially Katherine Helmond, who is really really great. But it didn't matter. Brazil just isn't for me.

Mask-the-Cher-movie not Mask-the-Jim-Carrey-movie

Mask is sentimental and sweet. In kind of a boring way. And the more I think about it, the less I like this movie. The trouble with Mask is that it literally has no surprises in store for viewers. 

Actually, there is one moment were I was really surprised by a turn Mask took. This really nice guy who we've known the whole film turns against his best friend and is really mean to him. It's an odd sequence because the movie never revisits this terrible moment. The kid never apologizes for it, and the film doesn't seem to find this behavior to be a problem. 

The ending of Mask is sort of odd, too. Bogdanovich, who has made a very sentimental movie, chooses not to go for a big sentimental finale. It's an understated choice, and it definitely makes for a better movie. But it's too little too late. I thought this was cheesy.

Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters

Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters is possibly the best film about a theatre person I've ever seen. Paul Schrader incorporates theatrical sequences from three of Mishima's own novels into the film narrative here, which is told in flashback as well as in 1970 when Mishima died. This is gorgeously made, and I loved it.

The Practice of Love (1985)

Die Praxis der Liebe is Valie Export's fascinating, challenging, but ultimately pretty superb meditation on (at least to my mind) Irigaray's concept of woman as the sex which is not one. This is an exploration of women's art, women's writing, women's knowledge, sex, power, and the patriarchy. I was really into it.

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)

Eye roll. Anthony Higgins is fun as the fencing master in this movie, and if I'm honest I will admit to liking Bruce Broughton's too-sweet score, but otherwise... this kind of wink-wink nostalgia movie – heavily dependent on the dramatic irony of knowing who Sherlock Holmes will be as an adult – is not for me. The fact that Barry Levinson's usual brand of nostalgia in this case is tainted a) with an absurdly boring heterosexual love plot between two teenagers and b) with a heavy dose of Orientalist colonial racism made Young Sherlock Holmes decidedly less than enjoyable.

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

Well this is weird. My friends with whom I do an unseen movie night (where we watch a movie that none of us has seen before) chose this insane children's film as our movie this week. So many strange things happen in it that make no sense and fail to connect up. The movie follows the logic of, say, a father who is telling a bedtime story to a child who keeps interrupting to ask weird questions so that he has to keep inventing nonsensical explanations for things. In short, The Peanut Butter Solution makes no sense. It was fun to watch, though.

Angry Harvest

Angry Harvest (Bittere Ernte) wasn't directed as well as it was written. (It was directed by Agniezska Holland and written by Holland and Paul Hengge from a novel by Hermann H. Field and Stanisław Mierzeński.) In other words, the film is more intelligent and interesting on paper than it ends up being on film. The direction was more claustrophobic than it ought to have been, and it avoided suspense almost purposefully.