The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension

"The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai", (Richter, 1984) One person's cult movie is another person's rotten tomato. Score one for the Solanum lycopersicum. though if you are a fashion-freak, you may enjoy it as an 80's period-piece. It might also solve the mystery of Peter Weller's career. (Buckaroo Banzai). The plot is both generic and nonsensical - our eponymous hero has to save the earth from a band of aliens - but it is really no more than a vehicle for the campy dialog that must have sounded really funny at the run-through. Admittedly, there are some great lines now and then but the whole experience is too tortuous to go through more than once.

Man of the Year

Man of the Year (Levinson, 2006) Politics are no laughing matter. Or are they? Maybe our current malaise is so deep that only a comedy can really reveal the mess we are in. After all, political satire has a long and distinguished history. More Mr. Smith goes to Washington than The Manchurian Candidate (even the good version), Man of the Year is an attempt to show not only the lack of any real choice we have between the Republican and Democrat parties but also the way that an election might be stolen.

SPOILER ALERT: Barry Levinson is an accomplished enough director to get what he needs out of his cast including just enough but not too much out of Robin Williams as Tom Dobbs, a comedian who hosts a news satire TV show (and Jon Stewart gets the nod here) and Christopher Walken who plays Jack Mencken his manager, who acts as an on-screen narrator to the story as it unfolds from the decision of Dobbs to rise to the challenge set him by a member of the audience to enter the Presidential race. Although he has made his reputation as a hard-hitting satirist, Dobbs attempts to take the high road in his campaign eschewing any advertising in his attempt to be a clean candidate beholden to no-one but 'the people'. However, his desire to stick to 'the issues' doesn't seem to be what his potential supporters want and, after a hilarious parody of a Presidential debate, he finally gives in to the urging of his manager and his writer, Eddie Langston, (played by Lewis Black channeling Al Franken?) and runs a campaign that looks more like a mixture of a rock concert and a motivational speaker's tour. It seems to work when on Election Day, after having polled around 17% of the vote, he surprisingly emerges as the President-elect.

The truth is that he has won because of a glitch in the voting machines that have been mandated for the election. They are manufactured by the Diebold Delacroy Corporation, headed by Hemmings (Rick Roberts) and aided by Jeff Goldblum who gives the only dialed-in performance as Stewart, the 'creepy guy' legal counsel. This fault in the software is discoverd by Laura Linney (Eleanor Green), (who is anything but dialing it in but when does she ever?) but her warnings are ignored by her superiors who do not want to do anything to damage the company's reputation and, hence, the value of its rapidly rising stock. In fact, they are so concerned to cover up that Stewart arranges for Green to be injected with so many drugs that she becomes incoherently belligerent and they can justify firing her on the pretext of sending her to drug rehabilitation. However, Green is determined to get the truth out and to confront President-elect Dobbs with what she knows. But, how could she get close enough to him? Levinson, who is also credited as the writer on this movie, finds a way to marry the two elements of the story (and forgive the pun) by introducing a romantic twist to the plot. Dobbs may be a savagely funny public performer but he has had little success with the opposite sex. So he is open to Eleanor's advances even after he is warned of her supposed drug problem because he is attracted to her. And, of course, we know the ending: the bad guys are exposed, Dobbs goes back to what he does best, holding the politicians accountable from the sidelines and he gets the girl. It's not a great movie but Levinson manages to switch from political satire to political thriller without it feeling too incompatible though this is a rather toothless and unfocused attack on the political system compared to the director's earlier Wag the Dog (1997).

Silverado

Silverado (1985)

What a Western is, is a picture frame, and you can put any kind of picture you want in there. With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Lawrence Kasdan interviewed March 21, 2003 IGN.com


"Now, I don't wanna kill you and you don't wanna be dead".


Silverado is like every Western you have ever seen and, inevitably, like no other. It feels like it is director Lawrence Kasdan's homage and reinvention to the Westerns of his past in the way that his screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark seemed to be his updated tribute to the Saturday morning serials of his youth. It has just about every cliché you can remember: the four heroes with their code of honor who come riding across the scrubland; the crooked sheriff; the rapacious cattle rancher; the vulnerable wagon train; the saloon; the whore with a heart of gold; the slick gambler (called Slick); the classic Western town; the final gun duel in the empty street; the gun slinger with his twirling Colt 45's; a rousing score by Bruce Broughton that sounds like every Western score you have ever heard and most of all, 'that' landscape and so on and so on. Copies they may be but ones that have a faithfulness that comes from an appreciation for the genre rather than a mockery.

Kasdan keeps the action going with a shoot-out every fifteen minutes even as it builds to the classic confrontation. The script fairly crackles with cowboy dialogue melded with witty one-liners. Even the anachronisms seem to work: an African-American gunslinger (Danny Glover) and a feminist pioneer (Rosanna Arquette). Yet the movie has a modern sensibility too - the heroes aren't quite the pure 'white hats' - Kevin Kline plays Paden, a drifter, who is happy to casually kill a man for stealing his hat even though he will risk jail to save a stray dog and throws his lot in with the villainous Sheriff Cobb (Brian Dennehy) before he is forced to act on his better instincts. Kevin Costner is surprisingly bearable (given his later outings) as the happy-go-lucky sociopathic brother of Scott Glenn who comes to the rescue time and time again. Added to this you also get John Cleese as an ex-pat sheriff and Jeff Goldblum , the aforementioned Slick as well as Linda Hunt, who comes close to stealing the whole movie as Stella the owner of the Midnight Star Saloon.