Working Girl (1988) [R] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert, December 21, 1988.

The problem with working your way up the ladder of life is that sometimes you can’t get there from here. People look at you and make a judgment call, and then, try as you might, you’re only spinning your wheels.

That’s how Tess McGill feels in the opening scenes of Working Girl. She is intelligent and aggressive, and she has a lot of good ideas about how to make money in the big leagues of high finance. But she is a secretary. A secretary with too much hair. A secretary who rides the Staten Island ferry to work. A secretary who started talking like a little girl when she was 11 because it was cute, and is still talking the same way, except now she is 30. There is no way anybody is ever going to take her seriously.

One day Tess (Melanie Griffith) gets a new job and a new boss in the mergers and acquisitions department of a Wall Street firm. The boss (Sigourney Weaver) is a woman of almost exactly Tess’s age, but with a different set of accessories. For example, she talks in a low, modulated voice, and wears more businesslike clothes, and has serious hair. If you want to get ahead in business, Tess muses, you’ve got to have serious hair. Tess gets along fine with her boss until the boss goes on a skiing holiday and breaks her leg and is supposed to be in traction for six weeks. Then Tess accidentally sees a file in her boss’s computer and finds that the boss was about to steal one of Tess’s brilliant suggestions and claim it as her own.

This makes her fighting mad, and so she begins an elaborate deception in which she masquerades as an executive at the firm, and figures out a way to meet a guy named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), who is the right guy at another firm to make the deal happen. She meets Trainer at a party and gets drunk and ends up in bed with him, even though she explained to him, I have a head for business and a body for sin. Will he ever take her seriously now? Yes, it turns out, because he likes her, and because he thinks her idea really is pretty brilliant.

That’s the setup for Working Girl, the new Mike Nichols film, which is one of those entertainments where you laugh a lot along the way, and then you end up on the edge of your seat at the end.

Structurally, the film has some parallels with The Graduate, Nichols’ 1967 classic - including a climactic scene where an important ceremony is interrupted by the wrong person bursting in through the door. But Working Girl is the other side of the coin. The Graduate was about a young man who did not want to make money in plastics. Working Girl is about a young woman who very definitely wants to make money in mergers.

This is Melanie Griffith’s movie in the same way The Graduate belonged to Dustin Hoffman. She was not an obvious casting choice, but she is the right one. And in an odd way, her two most famous previous roles, in Body Double and Something Wild, work for her. Because we may remember her from those sex-drenched roles, there is a way in which both Griffith and her character are both trying to get respectable - to assimilate everything that goes along with serious hair. Supporting roles are crucial in movies like this. Weaver’s role is a thankless one - she plays the pill who gets humiliated at the end - and yet it is an interesting assignment for an actor with Weaver’s imagination. From her first frame on the screen, she has to say all the right things while subtly suggesting that she may not mean any of them.

If she is subtle, so is Ford, an actor whose steadiness goes along with a sort of ruminating passion. When he’s in love with a woman, he doesn’t grab her; he just seems to ponder her a lot. Weaver and Ford provide the indispensable frame within which the Griffith character can be seen to change.

The plot of Working Girl is put together like clockwork. It carries you along while you’re watching it, but reconstruct it later and you’ll see the craftsmanship. Kevin Wade’s screenplay is sort of underhanded in the way it diverts us with laughs, and with a melodramatic subplot involving Griffith’s former boyfriend (Alec Baldwin), while all the time it’s winding up for the suspenseful climax.

By the time we get to the last scenes, the movie plays like a thriller, and that’s all the more effective because we weren’t exactly bracing for that. Working Girl is Nichols returning to the top of his form, and Griffith finding hers. [Ebert’s rating: **** out of 4 stars]

Blogger’s comment: Sigourney Weaver's character, Katharine Parker, is definitely a sociopath. She's all about control and winning, and she is willing to lie, cheat and steal while feeling no guilt, shame or remorse. And when she's finally caught, she plays the helpless woman. Classic! There's also excellent supporting role work by Joan Cusack as Tess’s best friend Cyn, and Philip Bosco as CEO Oren Trask. And Carly Simon's iconic Let the River Run, is heard frequently throughout the film.

Labels: comedy, drama, romance

Internet Movie Database 68/100 

Metacritic 73/100 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=68, viewers=64) 

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Let the River Run (Carly Simon)

Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert, August 12, 1988.

The car itself is the star of this movie, the low-slung, bullet-nose that looks like a discreet cross-breeding of the postwar Studebaker and the Batmobile. And the most amazing fact about the Tucker automobile is that Preston Tucker did actually succeed in building 50 of them, just as he said he would, before he was shot down by the Big Three from Detroit and their hired guns in Washington.

Would automotive history have been different if Tucker had put his dream into mass production? Probably not. The Tucker would probably have thrived for a few late-1940s years and then joined the long, slow parade of the Hudson, the Kaiser, the Nash, the Studebaker, the Packard, the Willys and all the other makes that your dad always warned you couldn’t get parts for.

And yet Francis Ford Coppola’s new film is not so much about the car as about the man, and it is with the man that he fails to deliver.

Tucker: The Man and His Dream paints for us a Preston Tucker who is a genial, incurably optimistic dreamer, a man who gathers a small band around him and inspires them to build a great car, and yet all the time he lacks an ounce of common sense or any notion of the real odds against him. And since the movie never really deals with that - never really comes to grips with Tucker’s character - it begins as a saga but ends in whimsy.

Tucker is played by Jeff Bridges with a big, broad smile and a knack for finding hope even in the ash heaps of his dreams. He lives in the center of a large, cheerful family, with a wife (Joan Allen) and a brood of kids who seem cloned directly from those late-1940s radio sitcoms where somebody was always banging in through the screen door and announcing that he smelled fresh apple pie.

Tucker made his fortune during World War II by inventing and manufacturing the Tucker Turret for Air Corps bombers. Now he thinks the American public is ready for a truly modern automobile - one with great design and good mileage and safety features like pop-out windshields and seat belts. His master touch is a third headlight in the middle of the front grille that will turn in the same direction as the steering wheel. But Detroit doesn’t much like the idea of seat belts - they might give the public the idea that cars aren’t safe - and they don’t like the idea of Tucker, either.

Tucker applies for the use of a war-surplus manufacturing plant on the Southwest side of Chicago, and gets it. He and his team throw together a prototype automobile out of spare parts scavenged in a junkyard. He’s a master at personal publicity, floats a stock issue to raise money, sets up his assembly line and starts racing against a deadline for introducing his first model.

But it’s about here that the movie really loses its grip. We are never given any real insights into what makes Tucker tick; we see him from the outside, like the public, and he’s all bluff and charm and sideshow pep talks. The problems of the assembly line are also painted without any details. There is no sense here that the movie gives any serious attention to the process.

The worst scene in the movie is the most crucial: the scene where Tucker is scheduled to unveil his new beauty to the assembled American automobile press. We get a passage that’s too long and too confused, a comedy of errors as the workmen try to push the big car up a ramp as a fire starts backstage and Tucker stands in front of the curtain bamboozling the press. A little of this would have made the point; Coppola pushes it to distraction.

It is difficult, by the way, to avoid the notion that, in Preston Tucker, Coppola sees a version of himself. Coppola says he has been fascinated by the Tucker legend ever since he first saw a Tucker car in the late 40s, and he has owned a rare collector’s model during the 10 years he has been trying to get this dream film off the ground.

Many details are the same between the automaker and the filmmaker: the loyal wife, the big family, the close-knit group of friends who pitch in at all hours, the grandiose schemes, the true genius, the peculiar knack of confusing the public with unnecessary explanations and, in particular, the ability to hold a launching - or a premiere - in the worst possible way. Coppola is known for holding secret previews that the press somehow gate-crashes, leading to premature and hostile reviews. And he is known for fiascos like his ill-advised decision to publicly announce that he was having problems with the ending of Apocalypse Now, allowing self-doubt to cast an unnecessary shadow on his masterpiece.

The parallels between Coppola and Tucker are so obvious that it’s surprising Coppola didn't observe one more: He has been as protective of Tucker’s private life as he rightly is of his own.

Tucker does not probe the inner recesses of Preston Tucker, is not curious about what really makes him tick, does not find any weaknesses, and blames his problems, not on his own knack for self-destruction, but on the workings of a conspiracy. And it makes the press into a convenient and hostile villain. This won’t do. If we’re offered a movie named Tucker: The Man and His Dream, we leave feeling cheated if we only get the dream. [Ebert’s rating: ** ½ out of 4]

Labels: biography, drama

Internet Movie Database 

Metacritic 74/100 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=72, viewers=66) 

Big (1988) [PG] ****

Josh Baskin is a twelve-year-old boy living in a New Jersey suburb of New York City. He and his best friend Billy Kopecki are just discovering girls, and Josh has his first crush on the older Cynthia Benson. Josh tries to impress Cynthia at a local carnival, but when he can't get on the roller coaster because he's too small, his frustration leads him to the mysterious Zoltar arcade game, where he makes a wish to be BIG.

The following morning, Josh (Tom Hanks) discovers that his wish has been granted, and he now inhabits the body of a thirty-year-old. After frightening his mother (Mercedes Ruehl), Josh runs away from home. He and Billy then begin a quest to find the Zoltar game so Josh can reverse his wish. Before long Josh has a job working as a computer operator at a toy company in NYC, but when CEO MacMillan (Robert Loggia) meets Josh at the FAO Schwarz toy store, and recognizes Josh's unique perspective on children's toys, he promotes him to VP, where Josh soon comes to the attention of Susan (Elizabeth Perkins) a marketing manager at the company. Susan begins to fall in love with Josh because he is a grown up, and in the process she rediscovers her own youth and innocence, transforming from a cool professional to a doe-eyed ingénue.

Tom Hanks does a wonderful job portraying a twelve-year-old boy trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old man, who gradually becomes so comfortable in his adult body that he nearly forgets he is a child, until Billy reminds him. Hanks has great romantic chemistry with Elizabeth Perkins, while Robert Loggia is wonderfully sympathetic as a father figure. The film asks each of us to consider what we would wish for if we had a Zoltar game, and how our choice would change our life and the lives of our family and friends. I recommend the 130 minute extended cut, rather than the 105 minute theatrical version; the additional 25 minutes definitely increases the depth and continuity of the film.

To paraphrase screenwriter Robert McKee: At the film's pivotal point, Josh (Tom Hanks) faces a decision; he can choose an adult life with a fulfilling career and the woman he loves, or he can choose to have a fulfilling adolescence. He makes the mature choice to have his adolescence, expressing with a fine irony that he at last became big. For he senses, as we do, that the key to maturity is to have had a complete childhood. But because life has short-changed so many of us in our youth, we live, to one degree or another, with a false sense of maturity. Big is a very wise film.

Labels: comedy, drama, family, fantasy, rom-com-faves, romance, space-time, Tom Hanks
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=73, viewers=84)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=79, viewers=78)
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James Berardinelli's review (3.5 stars out of 4 = 87.5%)

Bull Durham (1988) [R] ****

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net, on July 25, 2009.

If one was to make a list of the best baseball-themed movies of all time, Bull Durham would have to be in consideration. Alongside the likes of The Natural and Field of Dreams, it remains one of the best-loved hardball titles. Filmmakers like the diamond and its surroundings as a motion picture setting because of the game's mystique and flexibility. It can be used as an opportunity to plumb the depths of nostalgia, as in The Natural, or as a metaphor for ideas like redemption and renewal. The goal in Bull Durham is a little different: verisimilitude. This is about showing what it's like for athletes who play for the love of the game and not the expectation of multi-million dollar contracts. It's about the men who toil far from the spotlight and whose daily concern is not whether they will be promoted to The Show but whether their stats will allow them to bat another day.

The action focuses upon a season with the high-A Carolina (minor) League Durham Bulls. For the most part, the Bulls are comprised of more suspects than prospects - a motley crew of minor league lifers who would rather play for the meager paychecks the Bulls offer than work at Sears. There is an exception - young fireballer Ebby Calvin LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), a star in the Bulls' major league affiliate's firmament. However, while LaLoosh can get his fastball up to about 100 mph, he rarely knows where it's going. In his Bulls debut, he strikes out 18 (a new league record) but also walks 18 (another new league record). In order to help LaLoosh along, the Bulls purchase the contract of veteran catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) so Crash can act as an on-field mentor. The pitcher also gets some off-field lessons from Bulls fan Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), who selects one player each season to be her special project. This year, it's LaLoosh, whom she nicknames Nuke. When it comes to Annie, all Nuke is interested in is sex, but Annie has other plans. In addition to bedroom tactics, those involve broadening his mind. On one occasion, she ties him to the bed then reads to him from a volume of verse by Walt Whitman. Stormy seas occur, however, when it turns out that the chemistry between Crash and Annie is stronger than what exists between Nuke and Annie.

Crash and Annie are meant to have the kind of rich life experience that can rub off on an unrefined prospect like Nuke. Annie's life philosophy goes something like this:

I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones... I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring... which makes it like sex. There's never been a ballplayer slept with me who didn't have the best year of his career. Making love is like hitting a baseball: you just gotta relax and concentrate... You see, there's a certain amount of life wisdom I give these boys. I can expand their minds... I make them feel confident, and they make me feel safe, and pretty.

Crash also has a monologue in which he encapsulates in terms both profane and poetic the way he looks at the world:

I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. (Irony note: Costner would go on to play Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK - a man who most definitely did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.)

Although the movie is structured around the education of Nuke LaLoosh and the romantic triangle that develops featuring Crash, Nuke, and Annie, one of the pleasures associated with Bull Durham comes from how it reveals inside knowledge, such as what is said in a mound conference and how a catcher motivates a pitcher. Some of what's in the screenplay almost seems too offbeat to have a real-life analog, but writer/director Ron Shelton, who came up through the minors, has stated in numerous interviews that all of the seemingly unlikely incidents are recreations of actual events he witnessed during his baseball tenure, including the unorthodox method in which a rainout is engineered.

Bull Durham was the first step toward Shelton earning the unofficial moniker of the sports movie guy. Between 1988, when Bull Durham was released, and 2003, when Shelton left feature films for television, he was involved in eight sports-related movies as a director and/or writer. And it wasn't just baseball - boxing, basketball, football, and golf were all represented. Bull Durham was Shelton's directorial debut and it earned him his only Oscar nomination to-date: Best Original Screenplay. He lost to Rain Man, which proved to have long coattails at the early 1989 ceremony.

None of the leads - Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins - were first choices, but all proved more than capable of handling their roles. For Costner, this represented the first of three baseball movies in which he would appear (the other two: Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game), plus he would also star in Shelton's golf movie, Tin Cup. At the time when Bull Durham came out, Costner was at the apex of his career, having skyrocketed from obscurity to fame with The Untouchables. Bull Durham gave Costner an opportunity to emote - something he was largely denied when playing the straight-arrow Elliot Ness, and the role of Crash showed that this actor could get down-and-dirty and cuss with the best of them.

Bull Durham brought together Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and they have been an off-screen couple ever since. Sarandon is older than both her co-stars (at the time of filming, she was 41, Costner was 32, and Robbins was 29), and this is a rare instance in which an over-40 actress is allowed the opportunity to function as a sex symbol. Although chemistry is evident in the pairing of Sarandon and Robbins, it is perhaps surprising that more vivid sparks fly between her and Costner. It's a good triangle, though, with plenty of sexual tension to amp things up and not much melodrama to bring them down.

As sports movies go, this one is unconventional, dealing more with the minutia that provides the foundation of life in the minor leagues than with the actual games. The genre formula calls for the film to end with a big game, but that doesn't happen here. Instead, Nuke is promoted to the majors, Annie and Crash light the blue touch paper, and Crash (his job done) is released. There is no championship game, no-hitter, or similar contrivance. Those who complain that Bull Durham is anti-climactic are missing the point. The qualities that distinguish Bull Durham from so many other baseball movies are its low-key humor (in contrast to the overt jokiness of Major League and The Naked Gun), the smartness of the dialogue (see that above monologues), and its true-to-life depiction of what it's like to be an A-ball player. Bull Durham put the Durham Bulls on the map, but it also reminded baseball-loving movie-goers that not every film has to end with a home run to be a home run. [Berardinelli's rating: *** 1/2 out of 4]

Labels: baseball, comedy, romance
Internet Movie Database 7.1/10
Metacritic 73/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=79, viewers=68)
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Dirty Dancing (1987) [PG-13] ****

Set in the summer of 1963 at Kellerman's Resort in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, it's the story of Frances Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey), an idealistic teenager who dreams of working in the Peace Corps. Over the course of that magical summer, Baby grows up; she discovers her love of dancing, falls in love with Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), a dance instructor at the resort, loses her innocence, gains some wisdom, and earns the respect of her father and the admiration of her mother and older sister.

The dance choreography is brilliant and the music is nostalgic and evocative. Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are perfectly matched on the dance floor, and the romantic chemistry between them is sizzling. The screenplay is inspired, with some memorable dialog, and there are fine supporting performances from Jerry Orbach as Baby's father Dr. Houseman, and Jack Weston as resort owner and manager Max Kellerman.

If you're from the Sixties, or even if you just enjoy films set in that era, films with romance, passion, music and dancing, films like American Graffiti, Back to the Future, Grease, Peggy Sue Got Married, Pleasantville, A Summer Place and That Thing You Do!, then you will treasure Dirty Dancing.

The surprising popularity of this beautiful film inspired screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein to adapt her script for the stage. Performed worldwide, the stage musical has been an incredible success and has broken all attendance records for musical stage productions at London West End theaters. You can find out more about Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage by going to DirtyDancingOnStage. And don't forget to check out the rich collection of extras on the 20th Anniversary DVD, including recent interviews with Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze.

Labels: dance, drama, music, romance, Sixties, teenager
IMDb 70/100
MetaScore (critics=65, viewers=76)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=88)
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The Time of my Life
Time of my Life (Final Dance)

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) [PG-13] ****

What if a talented, artistic, but socially inept high school boy was obsessed with an unattainable, social climbing co-ed? And what if, at the same time, he had an attractive, rebellious, drum-playing female friend who loved him, and would do anything for him, although he was completely oblivious to her?

Keith (Eric Stolz) is the artist, obsessed with beautiful but clueless Amanda (Lea Thompson). Although Keith's desire drives the action, the core of the film around which Keith and Amanda revolve, is Watts, the rebellious drummer, played radiantly by Mary Stuart Masterson. Watts is frustrated by Keith's inability to see how much she loves him, and how right she is for him, blinded as he is by his fascination with Amanda.

Keith and Watts have great chemistry together, especially the scene in which she gives him practice kissing, to prepare for his big date with Amanda. This film is much better than some recent teen romance titles such as Can't Hardly Wait, Down To You, and She's All That. You can see in Masterson's portrayal of Watts, the acting ability she would bring to her later films such as Fried Green Tomatoes, as well as two of my personal favorites: Bed of Roses with Christian Slater, and Chances Are with Robert Downey Jr.

Labels: comedy, drama, high-school, romance, teenager
Internet Movie Database
Metacritic 55/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=64, viewers=70)

Roxanne (1987) [PG] ****

A film review by Roger Ebert, June 19, 1987.

Roxanne is a gentle, whimsical comedy starring Steve Martin as a man who knows he has the love of the whole town, because he is such a nice guy, but fears he will never have the love of a woman, because his nose is too big. His nose is pretty big, all right; he doesn't sniff wine, he inhales it.

The movie is based on Cyrano de Bergerac, a play that was written in 1890 but still strikes some kind of universal note, maybe because for all of us there is some attribute or appendage we secretly fear people will ridicule. Inside every adult is a second-grader still terrified of being laughed at.

In Roxanne, the famous nose belongs to C.D. Bales, a small-town fire chief, who daydreams of a time when the local citizens will have enough confidence in his department to actually call it when there's a fire.

In despair at the incompetence of his firemen, he hires a firefighting expert (Rick Rossovich) to train them. The expert arrives in town almost simultaneously with a tall, beautiful blond (Daryl Hannah), who is an astronomer in search of an elusive comet.

Both men fall instantly in love with the woman. At first she has eyes for Rossovich, who is tall, dark and handsome. But he is totally incapable of talking to a woman about anything but her body, and after he grosses her out, who can she turn to except Martin, the gentle, intelligent, poetic fire chief?

Martin is afraid to declare his love. He thinks she'll laugh at his nose. He assumes the role of a coach, prompting Rossovich, writing love letters for him, giving him advice. In the movie's funniest scene, Martin radios dialogue to Rossovich, who wears a hat with earflaps to conceal the earphone.

What makes Roxanne so wonderful is not this fairly straightforward comedy, however, but the way the movie creates a certain ineffable spirit. Martin plays a man with a smile on his face and a broken heart inside - a man who laughs that he may not cry. He has learned to turn his handicap into comedy, and when a man insults him in a bar, he counterattacks with 20 more insults, all of them funnier than the original. He knows how to deal with his nose, but he has never learned how to feel about it.

Hannah provides a sweet, gentle foil to the romantic fantasies of Martin and Rossovich. She has come to their small town because the air is clear and she can get a good view of the comet with her telescope. She isn't really looking for romance, and although she thinks Rossovich is cute, she's turned off by lines about her body. She likes his letters, though, and when she finds out the letters are really from Martin, she is able to accept him for his heart and not for his nose, which is the whole point, so to speak, of Cyrano.

All of the corners of this movie have been filled with small, funny moments. Michael J. Pollard, the getaway driver in Bonnie and Clyde twenty years ago, is back as a weird little fireman. Fred Willard is the pompous local Mayor Deebs. Shelley Duvall, as Dixie, the owner of the local cafe, does double-takes at the strangeness of ordinary life. And Martin proceeds manfully ahead, rescuing cats from trees, helping strangers, fighting fires and trying to still the beating of his heart. [Ebert's rating: *** 1/2 out of 4]

Labels: comedy, drama, romance
Internet Movie Database 6.6/10
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=70)

Blu-ray

Blogger's comment: Even after thirty years, this film still holds up well because, as Roger Ebert says, it creates a certain ineffable spirit. There are several small supporting roles that deserve mention as well. John Kapelos plays Chuck, the owner of a Nelson, B.C. store named All Things Dead, who has a larger-than-life ego and tries to seduce every attractive girl in town. Shandra Beri plays Sandy, a local bartender and casual friend of Roxanne and Dixie, who is able to befriend Chris because he doesn't have a romantic interest in her, and who has a filmography of only 4 acting credits. Heidi Sorenson plays Trudy, the girlfriend of Mayor Deebs, was Playboy Playmate of the Month in July, 1981 and has a filmography of only 18 credits. And Brian George plays Dave the cosmetic surgeon who refuses to operate on C.D. because he has allergies to anaesthetic, which could be fatal. Brian, of course, has an acting filmography with nearly 300 credits spanning over forty years, including his recent work on The Big Bang Theory as Dr. V.M. Koothrappali, Raj's father.