They Shot the Piano Player (2024)
Spanish director Fernando Truaba is one of those [...]
Archive for March, 1984
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)
I have probably seen every Tarzan movie that was ever made, most of them terrible, but all with the realization that Tarzan is not a character that you can really do much with once you take him away from his basic preoccupations: rescuing Jane, falling in love, swinging through the trees and communicating with the […]
Romancing the Stone (1984)
My guess is that Kathleen Turner could have spent her entire career playing variations on Matty Walker, the femme fatale in noir thriller Body Heat. It might have been tiresome after a while but certainly lucrative. In a way, she’s already done that, as Steve Martin’s cheating wife in The Man With Two Brains. Romancing […]
Slapstick of Another Kind (1984)
You know those silent movies that you’ve heard about that have aged and deteriorated because they weren’t place in proper storage? The same fate should meet Slapstick of Another Kind, a movie that was so unpleasant to sit through that, I’ll confess, I didn’t finish watching it. I dropped out during a scene in which […]
Police Academy (1984)
I suppose, maybe, on some weird juvenile level Police Academy might be funny. I mean, in the same way as that guy in Math class who made duck noises with the arm pits. It was funny to somebody. And yes, I tend to have a juvenile sense of humor. I like crude, rude R-rated jokes, […]
Tank (1984)
Tank is a movie that I didn’t like as much as I wanted to, but at the same time isn’t a movie that I can’t dislike as much as I’d like to. I’m of two minds here. It is one of those Man Against the Establishment movies about a guy who has been wronged by […]
Children of the Corn (1984)
I have seen Stephen King adaptations both great and small and I have figured out that the best of these are playing at a very human level. I am thinking of Carrie, Christine and The Dead Zone. His best work brings out the fears in very real characters, those that we can stand next to […]
Harry & Son (1984)
I have had the misfortune to be in a restaurant having dinner when a family at another table decides to air out their differences so that the entire place could hear them. This has happened more than once but the result is always the same. The entire place goes quiet, the wait staff looks nervous, […]
This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Rob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap is one of the funniest films ever made, a fake documentary that examines the downward spiral of a heavy metal band whose best days have long passed. The film plays like any number of pompous rock documentaries of the eighties, with all the preparations, problems, headaches, half-baked philosophies and petty feuds that come along with musicians […]
