For the week of January 1st, the Criterion Collection, of all places, is offering a special edition of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club. Such lofty treatment (Criterion handles Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, for Pete's sakes!) seems counter to a film that is simplicity itself; a group of five teenagers (Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Hughes favorites Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall) overcome their social prejudices and defenses with one another during an all-day Saturday detention. That's about it, and outside of some canny pop-music use (long live Simple Minds' "Don't You [Forget About Me]") and a well-timed montage or two, Hughes stays out of the film's way. His direction is unfussy, preferring to give ample space to the many monologues and dialogue exchanges shared by his young cast (in a way, it's a wonder more people haven't tried to adapt the film for the stage). Yet despite the lack of visual polish (which Hughes would soon overcome on the more vibrant Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off), The Breakfast Club remains one of the signature films of 1980s - right there with, I kid you not, Raging Bull and Do the Right Thing in terms of cultural significance - and so perhaps the need for proper digital preservation is more than justified. The film helped establish a new kind of teen melodrama. Before it, you had sleazy, Animal House-inspired sex comedies like Porky's fighting for screentime alongside preachy message movies such as Foxes (and occasionally, the two genres would overlap, as with Mark Lester's knowing exploitation classic Class of 1984). In The Breakfast Club, however, the atmosphere was both more realistic and more innocent. These five kids weren't obsessing about getting laid or getting high: they were dealing with outsized expectations and youthful insecurity, and Hughes' masterstroke was that he gave these teenager-scaled issues real weight. Without The Breakfast Club, there'd be no Pretty In Pink or Cameron Crowe's masterful Say Anything, as well as Judd Apatow and Paul Feig's Freaks and Geeks, which took Hughes' mission statement and deepened it past anything Hughes imagined. Sure, some elements of The Breakfast Club haven't aged so well. The resolution is far tidier than real life allows, and the adult characters (Paul Gleason and John Kapelos) don't have an ounce of the nuance as the kids do. But the good stuff is so good that we can see the film's staying power.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "instead of rehashing yet again the many big and small reasons why The Breakfast Club is rightfully considered one of the very best teen films to emerge from the '80s, let's just quickly mention a couple of reasons why it might be great to revisit as this year comes to an end. At a time when so many young people are taught to retreat in 'safe spaces' where they can only hear the soothing echo of their own thoughts, this film actually very effectively argues that it is in their best interest to go in the exact opposite direction and in the process routinely reexamine their perceived strengths and weakness. There is also a wonderful and very appropriate for the current social climate message about true love and happiness, and how they can be discovered only by those that have the courage to drop the masks that they have used throughout their lives to hide real or fictional insecurities."
From Universal Studios comes one of 2017's most underloved pictures, the raucous docudrama American Made. No one would imagine that this film would be as much fun as it is; you hear, "a frustrated pilot (Tom Cruise) starts running guns and drugs between the CIA and the Central American cartels AND is also maybe responsible for helping poison the region (and eventually the Middle East) to American influence," and I can't even blame you for rewatching Moana instead. However, you ignore American Made at your own peril. Between this, The Bourne Identity, Go, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the great Edge of Tomorrow, and this comedy-docudrama-thriller, I realized Doug Liman makes ideal high-concept escapism: he's a shameless entertainer, yes, but he keeps the proceedings so jagged and intelligent that we barely notice the formula. So it goes with American Made, which might be the most relentlessly pleasurable film of 2017. Liman attacks the film like he's Hal Needham with a political consciousness - yes, he throws in infographics and withering criticisms of American foreign policy, but he does so within the framework of a screwball stunt comedy, of all things. Cruise's Barry Seal bops around the globe with abandon, veering from one jaunty flying sequence to the next (it's hard to pick a favorite, but the gonzo setpiece wherein Seal has to take off from a much-too-short runway is definitely a contender), and he's so damn charming that a long time passes before we realize the extent of the damage he's causing. Yet when Liman drops the moral hammer, he does so without ever seeming preachy or didactic. Rather, American Made starts ratcheting up the tension, whether it's Seal realizing that his CIA handler (a smarmy Domhnall Gleeson) has abandoned him or trying to manage his wife's unstable brother (Caleb Landry Jones, further cementing his place as this generation's Timothy Carey, for better and worse), ultimately crescendoing at a point when...well, you can certainly Google "Barry Seal," but why ruin the surprise? Best just enjoy the ride, the career-best Tom Cruise performance, and the curdled bile that lingers as the credits roll. This is the movie I wanted The Wolf of Wall Street to be.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film is "a fascinating story of man with no real scruples about what he is doing, one way or the other, so long as his bottom line grows larger and the high he gets from bettering himself becomes ever more the rush...It's all about a balancing act, knowing when to 'just say "no"' as Nancy Reagan reminds everyone at one point in the movie, but here saying 'no' to hubris and danger, saying 'no' to rolling the dice one more time when one is already up big. The movie slows down a little in the middle as it has a bit too much fun with Seal's excesses - though that's certainly necessary to build the plot - and the end is a minor letdown because it's easy to see where it's all headed from pretty early on. But Liman and Cruise run with it and get an awful lot of mileage from it, finding a wonderful balance of smooth character building, frolicking fun, and deadly serious drama. The film is quick-paced, high-energy, and the leads are exceptional. Cruise really can't escape the Cruise persona, but he stretches as far as he's capable and between his work and Liman's the audience quickly becomes more absorbed in Seal's story and world and less the actor's aura."
Finally, Kino Lorber is bringing three cable-TV staples to Blu-ray this week: the bleak docudrama The Executioner's Song, the Robin Williams crime-comedy Cadillac Man, and the awful sex farce Blame It on Rio. I mention the last one as a warning - stay far away from Blame It on Rio. The film was smutty garbage in 1984, but it's even more toxic today; this whole thing hinges on the "wacky" misadventures that ensue when fifty-one-year-old Michael Caine starts having an affair with his best friend's seventeen-year-old daughter (Michelle Johnson, who spends the whole movie being leered at by those in front and behind the camera). If making light of what's essentially pedophilia wasn't gross enough, Blame It on Rio also uses teen suicide to generate screwball banter and ultimately decides that Caine's horrifying indiscretions merit some kind of pleasant nostalgia. I'd expect this kind of puerile crap from someone like John Derek, but director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Larry Gelbart are responsible for, respectively, Singin' in the Rain and M*A*S*H. I guess they wanted to ensure prime real estate in Hell? Only buy this Blu-ray if you plan on nuking the disc from orbit. Thankfully, the other Kino titles are much better. An adaptation of Norman Mailer's iconic true-crime novel, The Executioner's Song introduced many people to Tommy Lee Jones, who's just magnetic as Gary Gilmore. Gilmore became a cause célèbre in the death-penalty debate, and Jones makes visceral Gilmore's journey from near-feral ex-con (his scenes with on-screen love interest Rosanna Arquette have an almost poetic futility) to unlikely political icon. It's a great performance, and it helps to paper over some of The Executioner's Song's cinematic shortcomings (it did begin its life as a TV movie). By contrast, Robin Williams gives a different kind of virtuoso turn during Cadillac Man's first act. When you see Williams's gloriously sleazy car dealer on the hustle, working potential buyers almost as aggressively as he does the (many) women in his life, you're reminded what a fleet intensity he could bring to his best roles. That ADD-mania of his stand-up bits somehow became a hyper-focus on screen, and for about a half hour, Cadillac Man plays like a lost classic. But then director Roger Donaldson goes and mucks everything up, turning Williams into an unlikely negotiator after Tim Robbins' gun-toting loser takes Williams' dealership hostage, and the energy just drains out of the movie. Williams and Robbins get a decent comic rhythm going, except we've seen this movie before: it plays like the sitcom version of Dog Day Afternoon, with increasingly trite plot contrivances taking the place of character and insight. Still, it's worth it just to watch Williams work.