SCANNERS - #712

Back in high school and on through college, I worked a story called Lords of Order, first writing it as a graphic novel and then a screenplay. Intended as the opening of a trilogy (and predicting the three brothers structure of my eventual prose novels), the story was a gritty fantasy about teenagers with psychic powers being preyed upon by an evil corporation that may have had a hand in their creation. It was a John Hughes version of the X-Men, in its way, but now I see it was also quite a bit like an adolescent version of Scanners.

Released in 1981, Scanners was David Cronenberg’s fourth movie, and essential in his emergence as a prominent auteur. Scanners set the groundwork for both Videodrome [review] and The Dead Zone in terms of approach and theme. It’s effective for what it is, a B movie with a firm grasp of its own schlock, highlighted by impressive practical effects. One of the film’s earliest bits of gore, when a man’s head explodes, has found new life on the internet as an animated gif. Its bloody climax, however, may be the most effective, if not easily the grossest. If you want to talk about the psychic travails of puberty, I am pretty sure anyone who had any kind of acne problem can relate to the squirting pustules growing on Michael Ironside and Steven Lack’s faces.

The two men lead the film, both playing the titular “scanners,” the name Cronenberg gives to people with extraordinary mental powers. Their main ability is telepathy via direct linkage of their nervous system with another’s. Once connected, they can read minds and also influence the other person’s actions--but at great physical expense for themselves and their victim. They also seem to be able to inspire spontaneous combustion in a manner that is never explained, and hack into computers in a manner that shouldn’t have been.

Lack plays Cameron Vale, a scanner who is taken into custody by a nefarious corporation and its lead scientist, Dr. Ruth (The Prisoner’s Patrick McGoohan). The company is trying to cultivate scanners for espionage and other unsavory purposes, but they find themselves at odds with a rogue scanner, Darryl Revok (Ironside). Revok is looking to unite all known scanners, and killing the ones who refuse. Ruth and his cronies dispatch Vale to find the bad man, though the more he looks, the more Vale realizes not everything is on the up and up.

Cronenberg’s script is scrappy, but also threadbare. There is actually very little to the plot, and many scenes slam together without much connective tissue. Vale’s investigative skills seem to rely more on psychic predictions than real detection, and the gunmen who follow him around are never adequately accounted for. Scanners feels as if Cronenberg either didn’t have the budget to shoot more story, or simply didn’t care about why or how he’d get to the scenes of exploding heads and cars. The truth may be somewhere in the middle, as reportedly the filmmaker was rushed into production before there was a complete script with instructions to finish in time to qualify for a tax break.

Fans of blood-and-guts horror probably don’t care, however, and one could probably make some pretty good critical hay out of the political implications of weaponized genetics, particularly as science continues to learn more and more about how we are put together. For me, Scanners could have used with a bit more character work. The choice to make Vale a blank slate means we never quite grasp his motivation. Likewise, Revok is never permitted to preen in his villainy. Surely there was some Thanos-like justification for his mission Cronenberg could have injected here, but much like my bad adolescent writing, the only real driver seems to be possessing the power itself. Which isn’t really all that relatable and exciting for us normal folk out here in the audience. Though, maybe now I can resurrect that old script and fix it based on the lessons I gleaned from Scanners.

But probably not.

THE BREAKFAST CLUB - #905

This review was originally part of a write-up of the High School Flashback Collection, released in 2008. Go here to read the full piece, including my takes on Sixteen Candles and Weird Science.

For his 1985 film The Breakfast Club, writer/director John Hughes would hone his perception of the class structure of high school into a perfect diamond. Like a version of Sartre's No Exit set in detention, The Breakfast Club brings together what Hughes saw as the five iconic "types" that make up any high school: the brain (Anthony Michael Hall), the athlete (Emilio Estevez), the basket case (Ally Sheedy), the princess (Molly Ringwald), and the criminal (Judd Nelson). All five have gotten into trouble for various reasons, and all five have been assigned a special Saturday detention. Though none of them are friends going into it, they do all carry their preconceptions and have relationships that exist based on those lines. Over the course of their incarceration, they will cross those lines, get to know one another, and eventually reveal who they are based on what lead them to that room in the first place.

The Breakfast Club is deftly constructed, setting up its thesis right from the start with Anthony Michael Hall's voiceover about the categories the group feels they have been put in, and then promising to break those down. Hughes looks for the truth in those categories and builds real characters that conform to them while also being rounded out enough to bust the conventional wisdom about each. He starts with the outer trappings--the clothes they wear, the food they eat--and expands from there to show that these accoutrements bolster the outer masks--Judd Nelson's bravado, Emilio Estevez's machismo, Ally Sheedy's freakish demonstrations. These masks inevitably clash, but each time they do, a piece breaks off. Though each character lies about themselves, the fact that they demand honesty from the other students means they eventually have to own up, too. The bonding happens slowly over the course of the day, bolstered by their common situation and their common enemy, the principal stuck watching them (Paul Gleason). Arguments and pranks lead to deeper conversations, and it becomes clear that all the kids have real problems, and that most of those problems stem from the same insecurities about who they are, where they come from, and where they are going.

The last of the barriers break down in an emotionally intense scene that begins lightly, with the five enjoying their buzz after smoking out, but Hughes isn't content with an easy bonding session. Again, it's all about respecting the characters and the age group he's portraying, acknowledging their problems are real and not to be solved by the easy platitudes of an After School Special. Hall's character, Brian, asks if anyone will actually say hello to him in the halls on Monday, and the truth, as it often does, hurts. Once the honesty starts, though, there is no stopping it, and it paves the way for some final transformations that we might otherwise find unacceptable. Hughes leaves himself the escape clause that it might all be another ruse.

The ensemble cast here couldn't be more perfect. Hughes really was a genius of casting, and he gives his actors enough room to explore that they all invest their roles with authentic pathos. Every viewer enters the movie with a preconceived allegiance to one of the five but then leaves with sympathy for all of them. Judd Nelson has the showiest role, and he tears it apart. It's sad that he never had another part to quite match it. Ally Sheedy proves herself to be the most inventive of the cast, having the weirdest character to play and quietly indulging in all sorts of comedic business. Even when she is saying nothing, she is always lurking about, always watching. As the compulsive liar, she sees through everyone's images first, and being the true outcast, has no social consequence to face by drawing them out--except having to be social herself, the greatest and most subtle transformation of them all. (Well, pre-Extreme Make-Over.)

THE BIG CHILL - #720

I spent yesterday watching a couple of Woody Allen movies. Though they were from different parts of his career and set in different time periods, both showed the idly rich and overly liberal indulging in all manner of impossible and ridiculous behavior. In a lot of ways, Woody Allen characters are the kind of delusional upper middle-class bozos that most of us should really turn our backs on, their lives so separate from the average filmgoer that we can never hope to identify. Like a Vanity Fair article with punchlines.

And yet this somehow works for Woody. In a way that otherwise escapes someone like Lawrence Kasdan, even though he has the same out-of-touch attraction to the type of people he might rub elbows with but whom the vast majority of us will never meet or, if we do, actually want to spend time with. Is it that a Woody Allen movie like Everyone Says I Love You or even his latest doesn’t attempt to sell us reality, but instead entices us with the notion that we can peek in on a fantasy world where everyone is smart and says pithy things and has jobs that very few might actually have? In his world, a sarcastic writer is on staff at the New Yorker; in Kasdan’s, Jeff Goldblum writes for (the) People. But he feels sick about it. Except he doesn’t.

Perhaps it’s too late for me to finally see The Big Chill. I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, and he said, “But aren’t you a big fan of Grand Canyon?” And, yes, I am, I have a soft spot for Kasdan’s next ensemble drama, but I’d also wager it’s been since 2001 that I last viewed the 1991 film, back when it was released on DVD for the first time, and I recall thinking that it was already showing its age back them. Yeah, yeah, sure, we’re all connected. One life flows into the next. That was Kasdan welcoming us to the 1990s.

Whereas The Big Chill is fully set in the 1980s. Released in ’83, it is an apology for the Baby Boomers, an attempt to find soul in the infamously soulless decade. That’s why the music is all taken from the 1960s. No synthesizers are to be heard on this soundtrack--which famously established the notion of a moneymaking compilation album, impossible to replicate today without spending wads of cash, and yet ironically ignoring that many of its featured players, including the Rolling Stones and Steve Winwood, were not faring so well in terms of integrity on the time of release. Call me crazy, but I’d prefer a John Hughes movie any day. Sixteen Candles [review] was only a year away, was as ’80s as you please, and still looks as young as its characters some three decades later. Plus, screw you, the music is awesome and forward-thinking.

Whereas The Big Chill has the same desperation of its thirtysomethings on their way to a mid-life crisis. Which I’m in the middle of, so maybe that’s why I can’t understand what they are whining about. Like I said, it’s too late for me to have empathy with these well-off nostalgia whores. I just can’t.

Which doesn’t meant I can’t appreciate or even enjoy The Big Chill. As a time capsule, it’s fairly illuminating. As cinema, it’s a precious snapshot of many fine actors at an early stage of their careers. Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, William Hurt, and whatever happened to JoBeth Williams? Tom Berenger serves as a good parody of Tom Selleck, and Jeff Goldblum is laying the groundwork to be a parody of himself--and frankly, is the worst thing in this movie, the conduit for his auteur’s most sardonic and ultimately flaccid bons mot. Yet, as period-specific ensemble pieces go, I actually enjoyed The Big Chill a hell of a lot more than Nashville, the appeal of which largely escapes me. I also prefer Tim Burton’s second Batman to his first. It’s all about expectations.

For those who somehow missed this cultural touchstone--or maybe blocked it out of their mind, realizing it was for the old folk, because like me you were 11 when The Big Chill was first released--Kasdan’s movie takes a look at a group of college friends who have reunited after many years because one of their own (Kevin Costner, whose face is never seen) has killed himself. This starts them on an existential path where they play at a lot of denial before eventually digging into some of their own emotions. Amidst it all, they casually take some drugs, listen to old records, and talk about how good they have it. (Kevin Kline’s insider trading was treated as a running gag; Gordon Gecko was still four years away.) Except if you really look, they don’t dig deep at all. Their self-reflection is pretty shallow. Don’t hold your breath waiting for William Hurt’s character to ever tell you what he saw in Vietnam. It’s enough to know that he went, we can’t ever really hear the gory details. Psychology means evoking Freud, then downing the rest of your merlot.

And yet, again, I must stress, The Big Chill is an enjoyable movie. I don’t think it’s a very good one, but it’s pretty easy to watch. Nobody really says anything offensive, they’re too busy living lives that are offensive. Because these folks are meant to be real, they are representative of their time, and not some recollection of a literary dream that their write/director once had. Lawrence Kasdan, unlike Woody Allen, has no idea how tiny his sphere is. These are his people, and he is them. And I’m guessing it makes for a relatively accurate representation of how people lived--or at least, wanted to--while Reagan was President. As a museum piece, The Big Chill is fascinating; as vital drama, it’s as cold as the title implies. Just know that going in, it might just keep you from leaving the party early.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.