Some Kind of Wonderful (Howard Deutch, 1987)

Working-class kid Keith spends his days dreaming of becoming an artist while his anxious father (John Ashton) hopes he will settle for something more practical.

Keith also fantasises about the girl next door, Amanda Jones (Lea Thompson), who is ensconced into their school’s upper echelon.

When she breaks up with her cheating boyfriend Hardy (Craig Scheffer), Keith finds himself her unlikely rebound.

Keith’s seeming good fortune is a bombshell for his best friend, Watts (Mary Stuart Masterson), who has been quietly pining for him.

As Keith and Amanda prepare for their first date, Hardy plots his vengeance, while Watts wrestles with her feelings for her best friend.

The question becomes not whether the new couple will endure, but how their coming together will pull apart the world around them…

It is hard not to watch this movie without thinking of its predecessor.

Filmmakers will often return to similar themes and storylines - Howard Hawks with Rio Bravo, and Alfred Hitchcock with his ‘man on the run’ thrillers.

Some Kind of Wonderful was John Hughes’ attempt to make up for the concessions he made to the end of Pretty in Pink.

Tonally it is much darker, and more of a straight drama.

Watching this movie and Pretty in Pink, it hit me how much class has disappeared from movies like this.  

Amanda Jones is the girl down the street but because of her relationship with Craig Scheffer’s Hardy she has been elevated in the school’s social hierarchy.

Aside from the climax, Jones is the most significant improvement on the template of its predecessor.  

Whereas Pretty In Pink’s Blane (Andrew McCarthy) was a bit of a blank slate, Lea Thompson’s Amanda Jones is given an interiority.

Like the protagonist, she is trying to work out her own identity.

Our hero not only recognises the love he feels for his best friend, but the film does not treat Amanda as a catalyst for this realisation. She is given her own arc in which her breaking off from Keith is an act of independence - she does not feel any need to justify herself in relation to a man, or her old social set.

Keith also has to let go of the assumptions he has about her.

I have no real set feelings about lead Eric Stoltz. I have only seen a few of his performances, and this must be the most significant role I have seen him in.

My first awareness of him was probably the trivia about him playing Marty in Back to the Future.

He is well-cast as the artistically inclined Keith. He is more inherently intellectual and - crucially for the love story, there is a lack of horniness to the character that feels partly deliberate, and a result of the casting. Stoltz does not convey the kind of lust that was part of a lot of eighties teen movies.

The film also shows more nuance in how it presents Keith’s perspective. The character is more of a romantic, and does not seem that interested in Amanda as a sexual object. 

There is a certain ambiguity, or maybe hypocrisy to the character - the fact the date turns into a test of Amanda’s substance as a person shows Keith is as capable of being superficial as anyone else. 

 The character is self-absorbed - the fact he cannot see Watts’ interest in him being the bleedingly obvious example  - and the film punctures his assumed air of self-awareness. Stoltz manages to avoid tipping the character over into being cliche - one can imagine the character being played with a more overt lack of empathy, but Stoltz’s sincerity makes the character’s stumbles into misogyny more pointed.

Scheffer’s Hardy is more of an obvious problem, but Keith’s attitude and paranoia about Amanda is potentially more dangerous.

His feelings are not without merit - in a film that is aiming for realism, it makes sense that the character should be suspicious of his rapid change in romantic fortunes. But in the dinner scene, Keith is drawing on the same assumptions as Hardy.

It is a very nuanced character, and Stoltz does a very credible job. I do not think he has the same charisma or appeal as Ringwald, but his lowkey presence serving the more ensemble nature of this story.

As with Amanda Jones and Blane from Pretty in Pink, Watts is not a straight facsimile of Duckie. 

She is the yin to Keith’s yang - from their blurring of gender roles, to the way she grounds Keith’s flights of fancy, they are a platonic couple from the outset. 

This is personal bias but I also get more chemistry from Masterson and Stoltz than I do Ringwald and Cryer. 

According to the actress, Watts was originally meant to have a more ambiguous gender expression (the two lovers’ names were also reversed in earlier drafts of the script). During the course of rewrites, Hughes switched the names between Stoltz and Masterson’s characters, and the newly christened Watts was reworked to be more of a conventional love interest. 

Masterson is great, although I wished she was in the movie more. 

The tone of this film is slightly more dramatic than Pretty in Pink. What humor there is comes from bad boy Duncan (Elias Koteas) who goes from being a potential antagonist to a friend - Koteas manages the difficult job of making the character amusing, but never loses the character’s sense of unpredictability or danger.

A fine film, and a fascinating companion piece to Pretty in Pink.

Related

Pretty in Pink

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

Delta Force 2 - The Colombian Connection AKA Operation Stranglehold (Aaron Norris, 1990)

After a team of DEA agents are kidnapped by drug lord Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), Delta Force veteran Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) is tasked with organising a rescue.

When a friend is murdered by Cota, McCoy’s mission to save lives is complicated by his own desire for vengeance.

I was not put onto Delta Force 2 until the Action Boyz podcast reviewed it last year. Even then, it took another catalyst to get me to switch it on.

I’ve been slowly making my way through the filmography of Brian De Palma, and one of my highlights of watching The Untouchables was Billy Drago as Capone enforcer Frank Nitti.

With those deepset eyes, the full, sullen lips, permanently in a half-sneer, and that wonderfully dynamic voice, veering between reedy and a deep growl, Drago was born to play extremes.

 He was so eye-catching, I wanted to see more of him. 

He is one of the best elements of Delta Force 2, a very silly movie that has gained a terrifying weight in the months since I first watched it.

As drug lord Ramon Cota, Drago understands exactly what kind of movie he is in, leaning into the character’s sadism with relish.

Cota is a cartoon of depravity - part of his introduction is killing a man, enslaving a woman for sex, and ordering the murder of her baby. It helps that these actions are kept offscreen - they are so hideous that listening to Drago casually toss them off comes off as ridiculous.

With his army of henchmen and palatial estate (complete with evil boardroom and attached gas chamber), Cota is basically the devil as Bond villain.

And the Bond comparisons do not end there. In fact, I think one of the Norris brothers is a Bond fan - the staging of the parachute stunts is reminiscent of the pre-titles of Moonraker, while McCoy’s attempts to climb the side of the mountain are very similar to For Your Eyes Only.

The movie starts quickly: a DEA team tries to catch Cota at a Carnival costume party. While the agents unmask the wrong person, they get ambushed by assassins dressed as clowns (another reference to Moonraker?). 

Norris’s McCoy is quickly assigned, and they capture Cota. The villain gets out on a technicality - and then seeks horrific retribution against McCoy’s friend Bobby Chavez’s (Paul Perri) family.

Bobby goes on a solo mission, and is captured by Cota. It looks like it is about to become a revenge picture. But then he is murdered by Cota in a ridiculous contraption.

So the film turns into a rescue mission of the DEA agents, with additional motivation from his friend’s death.

At this point, the movie starts to lose steam.

This movie should be used as an example for what not to do with a ‘men-on-a-mission’ movie.

We are shown preparations for the mission, but these preparations are not structured in a dramatically fulfilling way. There is no obstacle to work out and overcome, no team-building, no development of a strategy.

We just get a collection of soldiers doing various tasks - it is too to be a montage, too non-specific in focus to carry any weight.

For context, I watched a couple of Norris movies around this one: Forced Vengeance and Invasion USA. 

The latter was more instructive on the Cannon ethos.

 

Cannon movies took the moral absolutism of the action genre - bad people can only be stopped by violence - and pushed it to the most ridiculous extreme.

Company co-honcho Menachem Golan was famous for cutting his action pictures to the bone, chopping out anything that was not an action scene. Invasion USA is almost a supernatural thriller, as our hero magically shows up whenever the villains are creating trouble.

Delta Force 2 seems caught between two different types of action picture - the simplistic shoot-em-ups Norris had made previously, and something more sophisticated (the lip service paid toward international law and working around it to catch Cota).

Ultimately, despite the international intrigue of the plot, Delta Force 2 does not seem that invested, and defaults to a straightforward action picture. When it does, the movie is fun - but then it will fumble seemingly familiar elements like the training sequence.

The finale is another frustrating flub. 

This film has been operating on a base kind of action movie logic - we have spent the movie building Cota up as the embodiment of evil. And he is also shown as the head of a massive army of thugs. 

You are meant to watch his actions, and his opulent hideout, and expect some kind of violent retribution - Cota will die and his hideout will get absolutely destroyed.

As the third act gets underway, McCoy is allied with Begoña Plaza’s Quiquina Esquilinta, the woman whose family Cota slaughters at the start of the film.

Based on her reappearance, one would expect that she will play some kind of role in Cota’s demise - maybe saving McCoy at a key moment and/or delivering the killing blow to the villain - a dramatically satisfying resolution to the chaos Cota unleashed on her life.

That assumption would be wrong. Not only does she not get her revenge, Cota murders her and is captured - not killed - by the film’s hero.

What’s worse is that the build-up to Quiquina and Cota’s reunion feels like the set up to a final confrontation - his shockingly easy dispatching of her is a surprise, but it completely deflates any catharsis.

Usually I like a little more originality from my action pictures, but with Delta Force 2’s fumbles of basic genre cliches and plot moves made me feel the opposite way.

Individual set pieces are fun - resolution aside, the third act delivers on the action - and Drago’s performance is a joy. While watchable, I would recommend the film to a very specific audience - burgeoning action movie filmmakers.

You can learn a lot from watching a wide variety of films - and watching a movie that is not fully functional, not achieving its own goals, can be more instructive than watching films which do.

Watching Delta Force 2, as a critic who loves action movies, was a lesson in appreciating and understanding how the genre works. 

A less palatable lesson was contextual.

When I first watched this movie, Trump had just broken international law, kidnapped the president of Venezuela. I decided to bench this review for a month or so. And then Trump and Netanyahu started an illegal war with Iran. 

As the world’s superpowers give up the pretence of an international rules-based order, Delta Force 2 feels like even more of a relic.

In the movie, our heroes bristle at being unable to violate another country’s sovereign airspace to destroy a menace from south of the border. This conflict with rules of engagement and international law is more foregrounded than McCoy’s struggle to abandon the rescue mission to just assassinate Cota.

And now the US is acting with impunity. They are not even attempting to fake a justification for their senseless destruction.

Delta Force 2 was not a hit. Its cultural footprint is almost nil. But in its own simple way, it encapsulates a mode of thinking about America’s place in the world that is now directly informing foreign policy in a way that it never has before.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 2009)

When his family’s circumstances force him to rethink his plans for Harvard, college graduate James (Jesse Eisenberg) has to take a summer job at the local theme park to make up the shortfall.

James forms bonds with the various misfits who keep the park running, including the worldly Connell (Ryan Reynolds) and a young woman in a similar stage of crisis, Em (Kristen Stewart).

As the summer progresses, his relationships with these new friends force James to reconsider his future in very different ways…

I watched Adventureland a few months ago, and have been tinkering with this review ever since.

Revising it after watching Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, I was struck by the parallels. 

If anything, the working class struggles of those earlier films find their echo here - in a film set in the same time period, featuring characters who just a step beyond the Hughes protagonists - they have left high school, but they are still stuck in place.

There has been no great awakening, no greater sense of plan or purpose.

I was a big fan of SuperBad, Motolla’s previous film, and so I was keenly following the production of this film.

From memory I do not think it got a cinema release.

I remember leaving it a little disappointed. I had been expecting SuperBad 2. By that measure, Adventureland never stood a chance.

But despite being completely contrary to my expectations, it stuck with me.

Its sense of melancholy and hopelessness resonated. This film was coming out right in the middle of the financial crisis, which made its characters’ struggle against the materialism of their peers hit even harder.

In the years since Adventureland’s release, Eighties nostalgia has become an industry unto itself. 

It makes Adventureland’s portrayal so refreshing: The period is not treated as a joke or a site for homage. If anything, it is a bleak foreshadowing for every generation to follow in these characters’ footsteps.

John Carpenter once said the eighties never ended, and it is hard to disagree (even in NZ, we are still living with the repercussions of the changes of that decade through our localised version, Rogernomics).

While the decade’s focus on accumulation, on making money, looms over them, the characters in Adventureland find themselves searching for meaning outside of the daily grind.

The cast are uniformly excellent.

Adventureland might feature the best use of Ryan Reynolds.

Cursed with a deadpan wit and good looks, Reynolds either comes off as too smarmy in comedies or too insincere in straight dramatic roles. He is not incapable of delivering a good or great performance (Mississippi Grind is heartbreaking), but few films have caught his innate vacuousness.

This character is a fraud. A cool front hiding a complete lack of character. Reynolds is incredible.

He might be older, but he is also caught in his own kind of arrested development, and seems content to stay there.

This is bragging but I have been a fan of Kristen Stewart before her breakout success in Twilight.

I had seen her in Panic Room around the same time I had seen SuperBad, and I was struck by how unmannered and understated her performance was.

I was not that plugged into actors but Stewart seemed so singular I went looking for her other work. The film that sold me on her was Speak, a quietly devastating TV movie about sexual assault that she had anchored with an understated, though highly literate, emotionally charged performance.

I had kept her on my radar, and ended up going to see Twilight when it opened. While I thought she did a good job, the movie did not hook me - I was glad to see the movie succeed, and hoped it might pave the way for more high-profile gigs in movies featuring witches and huntsmen. 

Adventureland was the movie that confirmed my feelings about Stewart, and I was completely unsurprised by the critical reappraisal she has enjoyed after the Bella-Edward-Jacob fever had died down.

Seemingly more mature and together than her new beau, Em is even more lost than James. What Stewart sells is the tragedy of self-awareness - Em is stuck in a situation she loathes, but she has no idea how to get out of it.

It is a performance that juggles the characters’ contradictions with delicacy and a lack of external signifiers. Em is constantly trying to put on a front of ironic detachment, but Stewart never loses sight of the character’s deepset sense of loneliness.

In the lead, Jesse Eisenberg manages to dodge a familiar archetype (the neurotic intellectual college leaver) - his comic asides feel more like an emotional release, and less targeted for the funny bone.

This quality applies to the film’s tone overall, and was probably a reason why I was not keen on it on my initial viewing - there is no rat-a-tat of banter ala Superbad, and no big setpieces.

Adventureland is quieter, more melancholic and reflective. 

Greg Mottola has had a successful career in the years since (put your hands up for Confess, Fletch!), but I hope gets back to this territory.

A great film.

Related

Starter for 10

Confess, Fletch

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!