A brief non-musical interlude.  This is a very subjective list, things I have fond memories of enjoying at the time and that have stuck around for me since.  If I had a bigger desire to fit in with the nostalgia crowd I could claim to be a big fan of Back to the Future and The Goonies but that would be a lie, as, in a different way, would be writing about Ran which I know a few things about but have never quite got around to watching.

After Hours

Griffin Dunne is very high up on a list of people who should have been in more very good things.  After Hours is one of that strangely addictive and compelling sub-genre, the yuppie horror movie – the random event that somehow leads you to the wrong side of the tracks and suddenly  you’re out of your depth and one bad thing leads to another that’s even worse and your normal life, which may only be a mile or two away, seems to have gone.  The best examples of this from outside cinema are Charlie Higson’s early 90s novels, especially ‘Getting Rid Of Mr Kitchen’.  The bit with the phone number is my favourite bit in this.

The Breakfast Club

My second favourite brat pack movie.  I still find it surprising that Judd Nelson, in particular, didn’t make it through to leading man material – in fact although all of the leads have had careers acting and directing one way or another none of them have ever really matched that one morning spent all together. It’s cliched and obvious, unrealistic in a way that fantasy stories can only dream of and so ‘us and them’ minded as to be ridiculous.  And perfect.

Runaway Train

I developed a small habit of going on trips up to London to see films and I remember seeing this in a cinema somewhere around Tottenham Court Road. I’d seen a review on tv and hunted down somewhere that was showing it.  It was also one of the first films I went out and bought on video (around that point in the mid-80s when the film industry accepted that owning copies of their favourite films wouldn’t stop people going to cinemas to see new ones).  Runaway Train has John Voigt playing against type, at the time, as they hardest man in the jail, who escapes with Eric Roberts having to cope with a train that goes rogue and the law in pursuit, and the strange sight of Rebecca de Mornay as the dowdy plain one who’d been sleeping on board.  Things get more and more desperate and end as they must.  Kurosawa scripted this (or at least wrote an initial screenplay which was then worked up by others) – a Japanese idea developed and shot in America with a Russian director, which helps to explain how they managed to make a film bleaker than Hollywood usually cares for.  Not a bundle of laughs but worth it.

Brazil

Not always a bundle of laughs and definitely definitely worth it – Brazil is one of my favourite films.  Coming from all sorts of background ideas – what the future might look like if the future looked like the 40s, as Gilliam conjours up a radical take on adapting 1984 for the big screen, with what I’ve always thought of as a defining performance from Jonathon Pryce (as in if I ever see him in anything else at all it’s simply wrong) and brilliant performances from a string of others, including having the audacity to hire Robert De Niro and then make him wear a mask for almost the whole time he’s on screen (but what a hero he makes).  The set designs are wonderful, the small performances are all absolutely spot on, the music is perfect and everything ends in the only way it should.

The Purple Rose Of Cairo

I just me a wonderful new man.  He’s fictional but you can’t have everything. The Purple Rose of Cairo is a beautiful telling of the relationship between dreams and reality, as Celia finds relief from the grind of her life in the depression and her borish oaf of a husband in the local cinema until, one week, the leading man steps off the screen and runs away with her.  Woody Allen has said he was under pressure from his backers to give the film a ‘Splash’ ending, letting them run off into the sunset together, but the end he stuck with is infinitely better – she has to choose reality, because anything else would mean going mad… but she still has the movies, and the smile that slowly relaxes her face in the closing scene, as she watched Fred and Ginger dance cheek to cheek, is one of my favourite moments in the whole of cinema.

Desperately Seeking Susan

Another kind of  yuppie horror movie without the restoration of order that After Hours has – Madonna became all famous somewhere between the shoot wrapping and the film coming out and that meant this got seen by a lot more people than it might have done.  Of course Steven Wright’s presence alone should have justified that.  I love the complex synchronicities of the plot, the way neither of the leading women really transform at all through the film – Arquette always looks hopelessly out of her depth and Madonna was allowed to just be herself for once and therefore helped make a really good film. The songs are good too, although best is the use of the theme from ‘Crazy For You’ underneath quite a lot of the action with the song itself ever turning up.

No Surrender

This seems never to have had a DVD release, and my VHS copy is decidedly sketchy these days.  As a final act of defiance against his businessman/gangster boss, the departing manager of a Liverpool club has double booked the Veterans of the Orange Order and the Catholic Pensioners’ Social Club for New Year’s Eve, and Michael Angelis, as the new manager, has to try to cope, with the help and hindrance of half the cast of Brookside,  Elvis Costello without his glasses an Joanne Whalley before she added Kilmer.  It is very very bleak and very very good – Ray MacInally is outstandingly good, Bernard Hill too,  but there isn’t a duff performance (except maybe Elvis, but that’s kind of the point).

Insignificance

Four people in a variety of hotel rooms over the course of one evening – Marilyn Monroe, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein (in all but name)  drift in and out of each other’s orbits and talk about the connections between them (Marilyn, on the whole) and the way of the world.  An absolute must see film if only for Marilyn explaining the theory of relativity to Einstein using a wind up train and a balloon.

Jagged Edge

The kind of film they don’t make any more, even then, a fantastic courtroom thriller with the brilliant Robert Loggia as the foulmouthed PI helping Glen Close defend rich boy Jeff Bridges against the charge that he murdered his wife and maid.    Written by Joe Eszterhas who has spent almost every moment since squandering his considerable talents (this and Charley Simpson’s Apocalypse) went on to write Jade, Basic Instinct and Showgirls.  This film has several incredibly engaging narrative threads woven together around the central issue of the criminal trial, has a brilliant cutaway shot at the end of the trial as Close tells the Press her story, and really and truly doesn’t give everything away until the very very end.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman

A fantastic storytelling film – Raoul Julia and William Hurt are held together in a South American jail, and Hurt passes the time telling the stories of trashy movies, driven by his obsession with the leading man, which Julia visualises for us, but all is not quite as it seems.  The conflicts between Julia’s machismo and Hurt’s high camp are fantastic, as the two men gradually come to an understanding, always through those films.  It can’t do everything the book does – the book comes laden with footnotes  on all sorts of things  – but the leads are great and the movement between life in the cell and life through memories of films is magical.

My Beautiful Laundrette

An everyday tale of racist skinheads, asian small businessmen, kissing cousins and homosexuality.  God, wasn’t Channel 4 something?  Written by Hanif Kureishi, co-starring a young Daniel Day-Lewis and directed by Stephen Frears, who’s more recent film Dirty Pretty Things lives in the same world as this one but shows how much he’s learned in Hollywood in the intervening years. He’s one of those schizophrenic directors, Frears – one minute it’s no budgets and The Van and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (twice in one series! hurrah!) and the next it’s Oscar contenders and loads of cash and Uma and Keanu and High Fidelity and so on.

A Zed And Two Noughts

Two brothers lose their wives in an accident when a swan flies into their car, and they try to come to terms with the loss by investigating how life begins, and by examining how dead things decay, looking at more and more complex animals as the film progresses.  Beautiful and terrible, with more of Frances Barber (almost all of her, in fact) and a brilliant Michael Nyman score.