Bull Durham - 1988

"Bull Durham" - 1988
Dir. by Ron Shelton - 1 hr. 48 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Hesitantly, I think "Bull Durham" is the greatest sports movie I've ever seen.  I've a lot of them, not all, but a lot, and if "Bull Durham" isn't the best, I can't think of another one that's better at the moment, and if you can, it's probably a matter of personal taste and splitting hairs.  This is a perfect storm - the right actors, a sharp script, actual insight into just about everything, and the kind of story and characters that are both down to earth and who feel like real people.  This is a film that eclipses it's genre, whichever one you want to plug it into.  It's a sports movie, a romantic comedy, heck, a straight-up comedy at times, and it's better and more meaningful than any of that would suggest.

The Durham Bulls are a low-level minor league baseball team in North Carolina, the sort of team you either start off with or end up there on your way out of baseball entirely.  Everyone other than the players, however, are there pretty much permanently, including the simmering Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), who is a part-time community college English teacher, who spends the rest of her time guiding one lucky player each season down the road from young man to man.  As she puts it, she gets 142 days (the length of a season), and they get a lifetime of confidence, which seems like a bad trade, but bad trades are a part of baseball.  This decision comes down to two men; the player on his way up, Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who is the living embodiment of a proverbial million dollar arm and five-cent head, and the minor-league veteran catcher who has been brought to Durham not with the idea of a future, but instead solely to break in Ebby, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner).

There are a lot of convergent stories here, far more than you'd expect to have going on in a standard sports movie.  And most impressively, each of the main characters are fully fleshed-out (even the ladies!).  There's the straight-forward sports story, of the Durham Bull's season, and of LaLoosh and Davis' respective progress towards their goals, with their unspoken futures hanging over their heads.  There's the mentor/student relationship(s), there's the personal relationships.  And then there's what the film is really about, which we'll get down to in a minute.

From any angle I tackle it, "Bull Durham" is an exceptional story.  It accomplishes two difficult things: this is a specific story set in a specific time and place.  And I don't mean that in a weird retro way, where the whole thing hinges upon knowing that nobody had cell phones back then, or none of it works.  The world of baseball is it's own universe, with it's own rules, but this isn't a story set on a grand stage.  The raggedness of the world isn't played for laughs; this is what it's like playing in the low minor leagues.  There are buses and meals that come in paper bags.  There's not enough liniment to go around.  There's no security, there's sparse crowds, and everybody sweats all the time.  There's a short moment on one of the endless bus rides that resonates, and shows why all of them are pursuing their dream, when Crash tells the story of his twenty-one days in the major leagues.  The other players are spellbound; they're technically professional baseball players, but they're all so far removed from the major leagues that they've certainly never played with anyone who's done so, and maybe haven't even really talked to anyone who has.

There are other flashier scenes and moments in "Bull Durham," but the movie is pretty much full of them, from our introduction to LaLoosh all the way to Crash showing up at Annie's near the end.  Things never lull, and some of the scenes are such unbelievably great film-making that it left me shaking my head (the peak of this was Crash's inner/outer monologue during one of his at-bats, providing not only a look inside of Crash's head and his approach to baseball, but also providing something that ESPN could never manage to broadcast, which is the best reason to make a movie).  Even something that feels like a throwaway thirty seconds early in the film, like the manager passing along the info to a struggling player that he's been released, comes back to play later on, deepening the impact of the later scene.

All of the fantasticness of the script and the setting and the action wouldn't mean a lot if the actors couldn't pull off the roles, and every single actor absolutely destroys everything in sight.  A lot of the film revolves around Susan Sarandon's character, she's written as someone who knows a lot of things and is always in control, but still needs to feel desirable.  Her's is a very complex character; she has a gift (more than one, to be certain) and knows it, and will use her knowledge to someone's great benefit, but doesn't resent it or really ask for anything in return.  And on top of all of that, she's the kind of woman that anyone would be lucky to have, in every respect.  Sarandon nails all of that.  She's the woman that you want to sleep with, she's the woman that will leave you better off than when she found you.  The script helps out a bit - rather than having her be a predatory "cougar" that's always two steps ahead of everyone, there's a scene between her and Crash where she gets furious because her love life has been affected by something that Crash has said.  Her insecurity at LaLoosh going celibate rounds out her character in a very real way.

Tim Robbins gets the broader comic character, and he's a lot of fun as the talented young doofus.  Paired with Kevin Costner's hard-ass character, they have a great comedic dynamic.  But part of what makes "Bull Durham" a great film is that this is all to a specific purpose.  The characters both grow, albeit in different directions at times, but they're at different points in their lives, and they don't stay static so that a sequel could come at a later date.  "Bull Durham" is a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.  Yes, it's a slice of time that contains a bunch of characters headed in different directions, but it works.

Ultimately, what makes "Bull Durham" a great movie, and not just a great sports movie or a great comedy, is that it's about something more than just sports, or laughs.  This is a film dedicated to exploring what desire is, in a hundred different ways.  The biggest example is probably that of sexual desire, and this is a very steamy movie.  But it doesn't rely on peeks of flesh to get inside of your head (the idea of flesh as having or not having value is examined differently, within the context of baseball), instead these are characters that want each other because of their uniqueness and excellence.  Annie has something to offer LaLoosh, LaLoosh has outstanding talent, and yet is largely unformed as a person, and Crash is fully-formed, and excellent at what he does.  For each of the three, they desire something different out of life.  Annie has the ability to help young men along their path, and gets to feel useful and desirable.  Crash wants what he can't have; to be younger, to have been better enough at what he does to not be stuck in Durham, mentoring some kid who doesn't value what he has, to be with a woman on equal footing.  LaLoosh wants, well, he's not entirely sure yet, but for now, what's in Annie's underpants is a good start.  One of my favorite moments in the film is when LaLoosh comes into the locker room the morning after spending the night with Annie, looking like an absolute wreck.  It's a mix of competing desires, and they're all compelling and valid.  But most of all, even if some of the desires are unreasonable or impossible, they're real, and feel real, and resonate deeply.

There's a good chance that how you feel about the movie will depend on which age you're at when you watch it, and that your view of it will change over time.  I remember thinking it was super funny when I was younger, a lot of Crash's motivations were lost on me, even when his actions weren't.  Susan Sarandon, at this point and time, is one of the sexiest women I've ever seen, as much for her character as for her appearance.  And her character is someone that you'd probably react to at any point post-puberty, but the more I understand what she's got going on upstairs, the more I like her.  A good movie, a really good movie ages like that.  The complexity that's lurking underneath what seems like a simple story about two ballplayers and a world-class groupie (if you want to look at it like that) changes how you look at the story over time.  For my tastes, "Bull Durham" is as good as it gets.  It's unique, it's paced well, it's insightful and relentlessly funny and real.  And it's got baseball as your plausible cover story for you wanting to curl up with a great romance.

5 / 5 - TV (HD)

Heathers - 1988

"Heathers" - 1988
Dir. by Michael Lehmann - 1 hr. 43 min.

Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I just want you to understand that no generation's ennui and nihilism can never be as dark and stifling as this.  I submit as proof the film "Heathers."  When people talk about "dark comedies," it's still frequently performed at a safe emotional distance, where horrific things are laughed at, yet still remain fairly implausible and unconnected to many people's everyday life (or the story just wallows in the "awfulness" of what's going on, with little emotional impact).  "Heathers" doesn't play that game; the story arc follows the pursuit of callowness, the dawning awareness of the effect of that on the people in this setting, and then the futility of trying to stuff all of that back into the bottle.  And while the characters are frequently flippant and deliberately mean, very few of them learn anything from anyone's behavior.

The titular "Heathers" are a trio of popular girl sharing the same first name, led by Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), a cruel girl who wields her power maliciously, and also including Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) and Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), and they're joined by the somewhat reluctant Veronica (Winona Ryder).  Veronica has an eye for the new kid, J.D. (Christian Slater), immediately gets in trouble for pulling a gun on a pair of jocks who try to bully him in the school cafeteria.  Veronica and H-Chizzle fall out after attending a college party where Veronica gets sick (maybe she drank too much, maybe she was drugged), and Chandles threatens to lord it over her once school resumes the next week.  J.D. and Veronica end up sort of accidentally poisoning H-Cheesy, and successfully frame it as a suicide.  And then there are more "suicides," and the stakes continue to grow.

There is a layer to "Heathers" that is easy to enjoy and super-digestible - the dialogue is snappy, unique, and such a document of it's time that, whether or not people actually talked this way before the film came out, they started to afterwards.  I haven't checked, but I suspect that the list of "quotes" from "Heathers" is actually larger than the entire internet put together, porn sites included.  This film is literally soaking in people trying to deal with their environment through flippancy, cruelty, and feigned boredom, which sets off Veronica's panic from losing control of everything around her, even her own actions.  And this isn't only a talky, dark film, it's also got a good visual sense (even more than just having some seriously '80s fashion going on).  There's a great visual scene involving a funeral and the entire congregation wearing 3D glasses, but there is also a steady stream of little touches and details that aren't acknowledged as being out of the ordinary (like one of the Heathers touching up her hair with holy water), but add up to make "Heathers" completely awesome.

The story itself is a fairly harrowing one.  There are a few ways to look at it; you could approach it from the idea that popularity is born and maintained out of cruelty, you could take the angle that all it takes is one unhinged (albeit charismatic) kid with a little know-how and a lot of stick-to-it-iveness to bring down hundreds.  There's also the view that you can never stomp out cruelty, not among teenagers nor adults (as Veronica's mom points out, when teenagers get upset about not being treated like people, that's usually when they're most being treated like adults treat one another - a cynical and incisive view), because someone will always pop up and assume an alpha role and wield that power to break people.  You also have a very intelligent, self-aware character in Veronica, who is unable to keep herself from doing awful things.  And if she's not able to stop herself, then what chance does anyone else have?  Students openly mock a trendy anti-teen suicide song, one of the Heathers tries to kill herself because people laugh at her for feeling overwhelmed, unfazed jocks will still try to beat up nerds in the parking lot outside of a funeral, gay-baiting and gay-bashing is a knee-jerk reaction to confusion.  This high school is not a jungle, it's a buffet for assholes.

And one of the most intellectually bothersome points made here is that people just want to wrap things up neatly and as quickly as possible, so they can not have to think about anything and move on with their lives.  Even in a situation where teenagers are seemingly killing themselves at an unbelievable rate, the detail that sells a pair of football players being gay is that they're found with a bottle of mineral water.  That's all it really takes to tie the whole situation up with a bow.  If the students are dumb and mean, looking at the adults in the film doesn't promise a richer, more meaningful future for anyone.  In the end, complete evil doesn't prevail, but things aren't resolved in a way that will allow you to put the idea that it could prevail to rest.  "Heathers" is a nasty little piece of business, one that's designed to stick with you even as you're laughing along and enjoying the tons of little things that make it a fantastic, rich, detailed film.

4 / 5 - Streaming

They Live - 1988

"They Live" - 1988
Dir. by John Carpenter - 1 hr. 33 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Magic sunglasses!  Oh man, if you're making a low-budget-ish kind of movie, there's almost no better gimmick than magic sunglasses.  I'm kind of upset that I had never seen "They Live" until last night, because it's a piece of glorious trash.  There are aliens, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, subliminal messages, a heavy critique of 80's consumerism...  All the things that add up to a superlative trashy movie.

Nada (Piper) wanders into Los Angeles in search of a job.  He manages to hook on as a day-laborer with a construction crew, where he meets Frank (Keith David).  Frank brings him back to the shantytown he stays at, where he can stay and eat until he gets on his feet.  But there's something hinky going on with the church across the street, and Nada can't resist prying.  The church is a front for a group of people who have been hacking into local broadcasts and talking about conspiracy theories.  Before he can say anything, a SWAT team rolls in, dozing the shantytown, chasing down the people from the church, and sending everyone fleeing in every direction.  Nada returns the next day, and finds some magic sunglasses in a hidden compartment in the church.  These glasses allow Nada to see things as they really are; advertising is boiled down to simple messages like "obey" and "submit," and that there are alien ghouls that walk among people unnoticed.  A lot of them.  Once they discover that Nada can tell them apart, he has to go on the run.

Director John Carpenter kind of specializes in great sci-fi ideas on a shoe-string budget (with both "Escape from New York" and "Starman" to his credit, among other films), and this one is a doozy, too.  Part of the appeal is showing off unusual settings, and I can't remember too many films from the 1980s taking place in a homeless camp.  And part of what you might think of when you think of that decade are yuppies.  "They Live" is a direct critique of that lifestyle.  One character even tells them that "we all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team."  Maybe the most pointed barb is, when Nada sees a fistful of money through his magic sunglasses, they read "this is your god."  Although, I must point out, the idea that the alien ghouls are out solely to extract money from people also means that money is everyone's god.  If it's worth enough to fight, defend, and die for, you also have placed money on a pedestal.

Roddy Piper is exactly the right guy for a movie like this, and him being in it is the main reason that I wanted to watch it.  His wrestling persona is fairly jittery and hyperactive, so it was nice to see him play someone a little more composed than I was used to seeing.  At the same time, only he could deliver lines like "I'm all out of bubblegum," and have it just feel right.  Also, Nada's extended alley fistfight with Frank was a lot of fun.  Piper managed to work several wrestling moves and even a couple of suplexes into the fight (belly-to-back and gutwrench, if you're keeping score at home), and the whole thing was drawn out and ridicuously awesome.  And Nada has a way with women...

Seriously, if you're even half-way into trashy, high-concept/low-budget sci-fi stuff, there's no reason you shouldn't have already seen "They Live."  I can't believe that it took me this long to finally see it.  It's a ton of fun, quotable as all get out, and goes by really quickly.  It's an 80's film in all the best ways.  But most of all, it's just super-fun.  There's no other way to put it.

3.5 / 5 - TV

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka - 1988

"I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" - 1988
Dir. by Keenan Ivory Wayans - 1 hr. 28 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

Even though I've seen (and enjoyed) "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" before, I was prepared to hate it this time around.  Why is that?  Maybe it's because of the "Scary Movie" franchise, maybe I just figured the humor hadn't aged particularly well.  Or maybe it's because writer/director/star Keenan Ivory Wayans has all but disappeared as an actor over the last decade or so.  Also, probably because I liked "Black Dynamite" so much, and feel that it probably mined this same territory a bit better (and a bit cleverer).  But dagnabit, "Sucka" ended up winning me over again.

Jack Spade (Wayans) returns home from the military when he finds out his brother has OG'd (over gold - death by too many dookie chains).  Mother Ma Bell (Ja'Net DuBois) and widow Cheryl (Dawnn Lewis) are grieving, and to top that are being threatened by a pair of Mr. Big's thugs (Damon Wayans and Kadeem Hardison) over a debt Slade's brother owed.  Jack decides that something must be done about this, and tracks down a retired black hero, John Slade (Bernie Casey) to take on Mr. Big (John Vernon).  John brings in his crew, Hammer (Isaac Hayes), Slammer (Jim Brown), and Kung-Fu Joe (Steve James), and they start things by making business more difficult for Big.

There are reasons to admire what Wayans is doing here, but I'll get to that later.  None of that matters if you create a bad, unfunny, unwatchable movie, which certainly isn't the case.  It's possible that a lot of people have never seen Keenan Ivory Wayans in front of a camera, so I'd describe his humor as what would happen if you mashed together Richard Pryor (in terms of physical acting) with the "Airplane!" crew.  The plot here is mainly a coat-hanger on which Wayans can spin asides and random jokes off of.  Unfortunately, the first act of the film isn't very funny (there's a lot of establishing going on, at the expense of the humor), but when "Sucka" takes off, it takes off.  For me, what broke the dam was a short interview between a news reporter played by David Alan Grier, where he was interviewing John Slade.  Slade mentions something about the streets, and DAG starts talking about how he wasn't raised around black folks, and ends up doing a "Dancing in the Dark" Springsteen dance.

And the scene that kept me rolling in laughter was where Ma Bell dresses down Jack in front of Cheryl, whom he's trying to impress.  Jack decides to right a couple of childhood wrongs involving a woman and a family of midgets in desperation.  When Cheryl asks him what that would prove, Jack says, "It proves I can beat a woman and a family of midgets!"  Baby steps, Jack, baby steps.  This style of humor has been seen in the films with the younger members of the Wayans brothers (Keenan's had his hands in a lot of those movies behind the camera), and describing the jokes that come would probably take longer than it would just to watch the scenes in question.  But the details do accumulate, jab after jab, and add up to a pretty funny movie.  By the time you see Flyguy's aquarium platforms or the bar that requires ridiculously over-sized hats (in which gun-wielding midgets hide), you'll probably have already been chuckling for twenty minutes straight.

As for why this is probably a fairly important film, take a look around 1988 and see how many other black directors were working in any capacity.  Wayans pulled off the trifecta here, writing, directing, and starring in his own film.  Just going down the cast, you can see some of the actors who worked on "In Living Color" show up in smaller roles; David Alan Grier, a ton of Wayans' siblings, even Chris Rock pops up in one of his earliest film appearances to buy a rib and get some soda poured into his hand.  And going backwards, getting Huggy Bear, Shaft, and Jim Brown to be in your film parodying blacksploitation films is no mean feat. It's basically Pam Grier away from having everyone you could think of from that genre featured.  Part of this is the fragmented nature of Wayan's humor, but watching "Sucka," you're going to see a lot of familiar faces.

"I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" isn't a great movie, but it's a good one.  It's kind of an outlier; people that were big before and people who would end up being big are present, and Wayans built a career off of this sort of thing with "In Living Color" and the first two "Scary Movie" films, but looking back, it's hard to believe that it got made at all.  The material that it was parodying was basically fifteen to twenty years old at the time; it would be like trying to get someone to pay for a bunch of comedians to make a "Pulp Fiction" or "Forrest Gump" parody today, except only if "Pulp Fiction" or "Gump" hadn't really made much money to begin with. Maybe the cultural life-span is different now, but you'd be taking on material that isn't old enough to be considered "classic," and isn't current enough for teenagers to have any familiarity with.  All I can guess is that someone thought Wayans was funny (which he is), and that the three million dollar budget would be inconsequential in the long run (it quadrupled that in it's theatrical run).  The result is an odd artifact; the somewhat unknown beginnings of the Wayans brothers comedy career.

3 / 5 - TV

Radio Bikini - 1988

"Radio Bikini" - 1988
Dir. by Robert Stone - 56 min.

Full movie

It's difficult to judge things out of their time, sometimes.  Usually, a good documentary either is based on fascinating subject matter, or it reveals something shocking and factual.  This documentary, released in 1988, is about the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests between 1948 and 1956, and features a ton of archival footage, presumably shot by the military at the time.  It was nominated for several awards, including the Best Documentary, Features in the Academy Awards that year.

So I was expecting a bit more than I got here.  First off, when I went to the Wikipedia page to find the Bikini Atoll page link, I was surprised to read that there had actually been twenty-three nuclear tests done at this site - the film focuses on only two of them.  It's entirely possible that the others were mentioned, despite the short run time, I had to split this film into two sessions to get through it.  Secondly, and this is admittedly an admission of my cynicism, I have absolutely no shock left in me when it comes to the US of A steamrolling a small group of people.  Relocating an entire island population (granted, only about two-hundred people) so that the military could blow up and irradiate the island over and over again?  It not only sounds plausible, but in comparison likely and and entirely reasonable.  During the same time span, the U.S. government was also responsible for the Tuskegee experiments and Japanese Internment Camps, so why wouldn't they have done this?  

And that's what I mean about it being difficult to judge things outside of their time, sometimes.  Twenty-plus years ago, I couldn't just pepper in Wikipedia links to prove my point, and providing information about an atrocity of sorts (I think that the military personnel that were deliberately exposed to radiation were treated more cruelly than the Bikinians, although that particular battle is not a contest I'd want to be competing in) was a much more revolutionary act.  But right now, if I learn more about a given subject by reading the Wikipedia entry than I did by watching a feature-length (almost - an hour is pretty short for a movie) film on the same subject, then time hasn't done the film any favors.

2 / 5 - NF Streaming