Movie Review: One From The Heart (1982)

Genre: Romance  

Director: Francis Ford Coppola  

Starring: Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Nastassja Kinski, Raul Julia, Harry Dean Stanton  

Running Time: 107 minutes  

Synopsis: In Las Vegas, mechanic Hank and travel agent Frannie (Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr) are a bickering couple in a stagnant relationship. After one argument too many, they go their separate ways for one night, seeking romantic flings. Accompanied by his friend Moe (Harry Dean Stanton), Hank is infatuated by alluring circus acrobat Leila (Nastassja Kinski), while Frannie is pursued by performing pianist and waiter Ray (Raul Julia). The couple's promising affairs may have unexpected consequences.

What Works Well: Director Francis Ford Coppola's passion project reimagines Las Vegas on a studio lot as a pristine, vividly dreamy, and neon-drenched test ground for romantic commitments. Hank and Frannie's adventures over one night are narrated by the music of Tom Waites and Crystal Gale, with an emphasis on surrealistic visuals often superimposing the couple's emotionally attached but physically separated movements. Thematically, the narrative contrasts the thrill of novelty with the unheralded joys of a long-term commitment.

What Does Not Work As Well: The triumphant and audacious style is undermined by minimal content, flat characterizations, and flimsy emotions. The over-reliance on music to tell the story relegates the script to bullet points, exposing Hank and Frannie as uninteresting characters floundering in misguided expectations of change to salvage the relationship. Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia fare worse as empty impressions of fantasy lovers. 

Key Quote:

Leila (to Hank): If you wanna get rid of a circus girl, all you've gotta do is close your eyes.

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Movie Review: Mr. Mom (1983)

Also Known As: Mr. Mum  

Genre: Comedy  

Director: Stan Dragoti  

Starring: Michael Keaton, Teri Garr, Martin Mull, Ann Jillian  
Running Time: 91 minutes  

Synopsis: When Detroit automotive engineer Jack Butler (Michael Keaton) is laid off, his wife Caroline (Teri Garr) leaves behind her stay-at-home life and enters the workforce at an advertising firm. Jack faces a steep learning curve caring for their three kids and running the household, and attracts the lustful attention of neighbour Joan (Ann Jillian). Meanwhile Caroline excels at her job, but also becomes the romantic target of her boss Ron (Martin Mull).

What Works Well: With Michael Keaton and Teri Garr carrying the easy harmony of established couplehood, the John Hughes script gives equal opportunities for mom and dad to discover the hazards on other side of front yard fence. Comedy is the primary objective, and enough jokes and funny sequences find their target to maintain a steady stream of fun, with vacuum cleaner "Jaws" a highlight. But the semi-serious commentary about Jack finding pride in housework registers, as does Caroline's journey through the thrills and dangers of the corporate world.

What Does Not Work As Well: For an engineer, Jack sure does stupid well, managing to wreck a supermarket and a house with mindless effort. Some of the failed humour attempts are from the bottom slapstick drawer, while the visual style does not stray far from television movie-of-the-week fare.

Key Quote:

Caroline (to her kids): Look guys, take it easy on daddy. Remember, he's a rookie.



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The Movies Of Teri Garr

All movies starring Teri Garr and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Viva Las Vegas (1964, uncredited)

The Conversation (1974)

Young Frankenstein (1974)

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

One From The Heart (1982)

Tootsie (1982)

Mr. Mom (1983)

After Hours (1985)

Dumb And Dumber (1994)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Tootsie (1982)

A comedy about gender politics, Tootsie delivers excellent laughs with sharp social commentary, propelled by a virtuoso Dustin Hoffman performance.

Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) is a struggling actor based in New York City. Passionate about his craft but with a reputation for being difficult to work with, Michael's career is slipping away into low-key suburban theatre productions. Desperate for a last chance at stardom, and much to the horror of his agent George (Sydney Pollack, who also directed) and room mate Jeff (Bill Murray), Michael dresses up as a woman, adopts the persona of Dorothy Michaels, and lands the part of a hospital administrator on Southwest General a tawdry but popular daytime television hospital drama.

Michael gives Dorothy an independent, feminist edge, shaking up the show and quickly becoming the toast of the town. But Michael's love life starts to get really complicated. As Dorothy places more demands on his time, he neglects potential girlfriend Sandy (Teri Garr). Meanwhile, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), who plays the resident tarty nurse on Southwest General, finds herself strangely attracted to Dorothy, and Julie's widower dad Les (Charles Durning) is also quite smitten with the new star. Finally, the lecherous but semi-senile John Van Horn (George Gaynes), who portrays the senior doctor on the show, sets his sights on Dorothy as his next sexual conquest.

The unusually rich screenplay (co-written by Barry Levinson and Elaine May, among others) is able to maintain focus on the hearts of three characters, as Michael, Julie and Les all undergo journeys of discovery about what really matters in their lives. With a light touch but deliberate steering by Pollack, Tootsie delves into the skirmishes between the sexes, uncovering plenty of new angles to explore.

Michael thought that transforming into Dorothy would provide a superficial career boost. Instead, Dorothy became the change agent through which Michael gains a new perspective on his relationships. Michael becomes a better human being as Dorothy, with unexpected consequences.

While Michael's dour intensity and serious mannerisms mostly turned everyone off, Dorothy demands and provides R.E.S.P.E.C.T., and as it turns out, love and affection flow smoothly and in all directions when mutual respect is a common foundation. It becomes only normal that Dorothy's honest, open, playful and forthcoming personality attracts both Julie and Les. In Julie's case the purity of the relationship almost overcomes traditional gender boundaries, while for Les, Dorothy's virtue proves to be an immediate attraction to a widower.

Dustin Hoffman delivers an extraordinary performance, measured by how quickly the make-up is forgotten, and how powerfully Dorothy's presence as a woman is established and maintained. Michael's occasional stumbles in Dorothy's heels serve not only as comic touches, but also as a reminder that there is an actor beneath all those womanly clothes.

Jessica Lange, coming off career-making but highly intense roles in The Postman Always Rings Twice and Frances, demonstrates a glow for serious humour, Julie a much more interesting role than most comedies accommodate. Julie is allowing herself to be belittled in front of the camera as the airhead nurse, and off-camera by the show's director (Dabney Coleman). Dorothy proves to be an inspiration, and maybe more, prompting Julie to change her attitude towards relationships and more importantly, towards herself. Lange won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, the only win from 10 nominations received by Tootsie.

Terrific depth is provided by Durning, Garr, Coleman, Pollack, and Geena Davis making her screen début in a small, barely dressed, role. Durning, in particular, finds the sadness within a jovial but lonely man looking to fill the void left by the loss of a life-long love. Bill Murray pops up unannounced as Michael's laid-back room mate, providing acrid commentary on a pantomime spiralling into an unintended life experiment.

As it turns out, sometimes a man needs to walk in the heels of a woman to better understand what being a man really means.

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Movie Review: Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977)

A superlative science fiction drama, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind re-imagines in peaceful terms how the first physical contact with an alien race may unfold. Steven Spielberg's vision is grand, ground-breaking and uplifting.

Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) works for the electric utility company in Indiana. While on an emergency service call, he has an encounter with several alien spacecraft. Subsequently, Roy starts to behave erratically, obsessed with visions of an imposing monument-like mountain, and he alienates his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr). Meanwhile, single mom Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon) is terrified that her young son Barry appears to be continuously attracting the attention of light-emitting alien spaceships. Jillian also starts to uncontrollably draw sketches of an imposing mountain.

French UFO scientist Claude Lacombe (Francois Truffaut), working with a team of U.S. scientists including David Laughlin (Bob Balaban), starts connecting a series of strange global events: a long-lost squadron of World War Two-era fighter planes is found in pristine condition in the Sonoran desert, and the SS Cotopaxi, lost in the Bermuda triangle since 1925, turns up in the Gobi desert. Civilian aircraft flying over Indiana report near-misses with unidentified aircraft. Eventually, Lacombe and his team determine that aliens are making contact through actions, signals and sounds to plan a rendezvous on earth. Roy and Jillian are separately drawn by their visions to the time and place where arrangements are being made for a possible historical encounter with alien beings.

One of the great science fiction movies, on-par with 2001: A Space Odyssey in powerfully redefining what the genre could offer, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is science fiction without laser weapons, violence, threats, or even any political posturing. Fuelled by hope, Spielberg announces the maturing of humanity to the point of pursuing peaceful contact with advanced aliens.

Stylistically, the film is a simple chronicle of events. There are no attempts to spoon-feed tidy explanations or narrate the seemingly disparate episodes taking place around the world. The cameras of Spielberg and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond capture with dispassionate curiosity the encounters with aliens and their aftermath, riding on the same tide of hypnotic fascination, confusion, and elation besetting the likes of Roy, Jillian and Claude.

Gradually all the threads of the film come together to create a cohesive whole, Spielberg deftly side-stepping the need to over-explain the details. Whether willingly or not, humanity will need to come together to resolve future challenges, and in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind individuals become a group to harness the talent of many and communicate with superior alien beings.

It is no accident that the lead scientist trying to make sense of the global incidents is a Frenchman working with Americans, Francois Truffaut an inspired choice to emphasize the internationalization of efforts to better understand what lies beyond Earth's limits.

By 1977 standards, the special effects are a marvel. The team of Douglas Turmbull (visual effects), Carlo Rambaldi (aliens), and Ralph McQuarrie (mother ship) create a spectacle of shapes, lights, speed and sound, culminating in a breathtaking finale, the mother ship finally appearing and landing to start the process of aliens constructively interacting with humans. The encounters are close and personal, but the vision is audaciously monumental.

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Movie Review: Young Frankenstein (1974)

A comic parody of 1930s monster movies, Young Frankenstein combines biting satire with quality production values to deliver a constant stream of laughs. Director Mel Brooks and a perfect cast find the right balance between winking at the screen and losing themselves in faux theatrical melodrama to great comic effect.

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) is a professor of medicine in the United States, and eager to distance himself from the legacy of his grandfather, the infamous mad grave robber and re-animator of dead bodies. Frederick is engaged to Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn), but she won't as much as let him kiss her, lest her lipstick be smudged. When he receives word that he has inherited the long-abandoned family estate in Europe, Frederick travels to Transylvania, where he re-opens the family's spooky mansion on the hill.

Three assistants are ready to help him fulfil the family destiny: Inga (Teri Garr) seems to have no specific skills but plenty of curves; Igor (Marty Feldman) is a willing hunchback with beady eyes; and housekeeper Frau Blucher (Cloris Leachman) mainly looks stern and terrifies the horses, but still harbours a crush on Frederick's long-dead grandfather. Warming up to the task, Frederick steals the body of an imposing criminal and reanimates him into a Monster (Peter Boyle), but Igor's botched brain robbery means that although the Monster is none too bright, he is sensitive and capable of exhibiting human emotions in response to sad music. When the lumbering Monster predictably breaks loose and terrifies the local community, Frederick has to find a way to control the damage, safeguard his legacy, and save the Monster's life.

Mel Brooks takes aim at the monster movie brand with his sharp style of wit, and hits the target dead centre. Plundering the fertile ground of creepy eastern European towns, grave digging, experimentation in reanimation, and unnecessarily thick accents, Young Frankenstein never misses a beat in resurrecting the legendary films of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

Despite all the farcical comedy and within its efficient 105 minutes of running time, Young Frankenstein still finds the time to raise a few interesting themes. Frederick's control over his destiny is a running thread through the movie. Initially firm that he wants nothing to do with the family history (to the point of insisting that his name is pronounced Frankensteen), Frederick is gradually and irresistibly drawn to the vision and mission of his ancestors. Society's treatment of those who are a bit different is another motif born with the Monster, with the innocent child showing no fear and the blindman displaying nothing but hospitality, while all the other townsfolk default to the torches-and-pitchforks stance.

Gene Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with Brooks, and plays Frederick with the smooth confidence of an actor finding the perfect groove. Marty Feldman's hunchback with the ever shifting hump is simply a riot, and is deservedly the most memorable character from the movie. But Peter Boyle delivers the best performance, a hideous Monster who talks only in loud grunts and yet has to display a range of emotions. Boyle's eyes and gestures are outstanding, and soon the Monster becomes a full-fledged person deserving of pity and coddling.

Gene Hackman has fun with a small but hilarious role as the lonely blindman attempting to kindly serve the Monster food and drink. In comparison, Kenneth Mars' performance as Inspector Kemp with one mechanical hand has not stood the test of time as well as the rest of the film.

A large part of Young Frankenstein's enduring success resides in the film's visuals, Brooks and cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld recreating in spooky black and white the prototypical mansion on the steep mountaintop surrounded by incessant lightning; the secret laboratory filled with meaningless yet noisy and sparking switches, dials and levers; and the village of simpletons living in perpetual fog and fear of the experiments carried out by generations of Frankensteins.

A comedy masterpiece, Young Frankenstein is monstrously fun.

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Movie Review: After Hours (1985)

A relative oddity in Martin Scorsese's career, After Hours is one man's intriguing journey through a single wild night. The film may lack Scorsese's typical intensity, but the small scale quirky nightmare creates its own aura.

Paul (Griffin Dunne) has a fairly boring life as a word processing support technician at a faceless corporation in New York. After work one evening, he meets Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) at a coffee shop, and she gives him her phone number after they seem to hit it off. Later that night Paul finds the courage to call, and Marcy invites him to her apartment, all the way downtown in the relatively wild SoHo district.

The night starts off badly when during an insane taxi ride (and yes, the crazed driver looks like Robert De Niro), Paul loses all his money. He arrives at Marcy's flat to find the sculptress Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) hard at work, with Marcy arriving late after a mysterious trip to the drugstore. The more Paul discovers about Marcy, the more agitated he gets. Hints of her body being gruesomely burned and what appears to be a nasty spat with a boyfriend convince Paul to split. But he is penniless and far away from home. His night will include a sojourn into a wild nightclub, encounters with hyperactive neighbourhood burglars (Cheech and Chong), a vigilante mob of local residents, at least one dead body, and unexpected encounters with a bartender (John Heard), a waitress (Teri Garr), a prostitute, and another creepy sculptress (Verna Bloom).

Dancing throughout with black comedy, After Hours is what a nightmare feels like when everything is going wrong and waking up is impossible. Paul recognizes early that he does not belong in SoHo, but finding a way out is another matter. Fate conspires to block him at every turn, from his money flying out of the taxi window to the subway fare increasing that midnight above the value of the few coins in his possession. And every character he meets proves to be progressively weirder, demanding his attention and in some cases literally wanting a piece of him.

Interestingly, all of the mortal dangers encountered by Paul during his dreadful night stem from women, and he is initially enticed to SoHo by a woman. The women themselves are all both victims and predators, Paul realizing that SoHo at night is world of unhinged extremes, whereas he belongs in a much more mundane daylight corporate environment dealing with computers and bland professionals.

After Hours does not quite reach madcap levels that could perhaps have been anticipated, but Scorsese was unlikely to have been trying to go overboard. The film derives its creepiness from remaining almost plausible as a trip that provides persistent reminders why some forbidden places need to remain forbidden.

The large cast of actors who never quite made it as superstars is a perfect fit for the story of a suddenly side-tracked life. Dunne has the everyman looks that allow his nightmare to be adopted by anyone, while in support Arquette, Fiorentino, and Garr work hard to project dangerous hidden attributes that are quite spooky but never quite revealed.

After Hours is a stimulating quest to escape from the consequences of a wrong turn, filled with the wild yet kinky beasts that occupy the fringes of dark and unexplored pathways.

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