Using fifties melodrama as a back ground, director James (Reckless) Foley returns to familiar blue-collar territory to refute the old adage that blood is thicker than water. At Close Range (Roadshow) reprises the theme of poor bad boy meets rich good girl, but turns the romantic aspect into a sub-plot, focusing instead on the father/son relation ship. Based on a true story, with a screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, Elia’s son, the film is a moody character-study of a small-town Pennsylvania youth (Sean Penn), son of the leader of a burglary and S m u g g lin g rin g (C h ris to p h e r Walken). Trying to survive in hopeless poverty and inebriated by his own heady desires, Brad Jnr. becomes fascinated by his father’s lifestyle, and is slowly entangled in his need for an emotional connection, whose inexorable expression is violence and murder. As in Reckless, emotions spring to the fore, and Foley composes a cogent and intense study of disillu sio n e d y o u th and e m o tio n a l turbulence tinged with Freudian undertones. With a remarkable economy of mise en scene and wellhoned cinematography by Juan Ruiz Anchia, the film is a refreshing variant on the current Flollywood obsession with family ties, reassert ing the fifties theme of the rebel with out a cause, but placing it in a more relentlessly honest milieu. Norbert Noyaux
Lumbered with a father fixation: Sean Penn in At Close Range. Beer commercials seem to breed a special type of joker: ruddy-faced, anti-intellectual, sexist — the kind of guy who is in tune with the 'real world’. Rodney Dangerfield, star of the huge US box-office success, Back to School (Roadshow), fits the mould, but he has also won popu larity with American audiences — particularly the college crowd — in clubs, on talk shows and through his other comedies, Caddyshack and Easy Money. Like the beer he advertizes on American TV, Back to School is very light; and, with four writers credited for the screenplay and three for the story, there is a lot of froth. Dangerfield plays Thornton Melon, a busi ness tycoon who has made his fortune in ‘Tall and Fat’ stores. In an attempt to stop his very serious, un yuppie son, Jason (Keith Gordon),
from dropping out of college, he decides to enrol and give him ‘immoral’ support. A touch of romance (the gushing Sally Kellerman is unbearable as the seductive English teacher), mad music, raucous humour (too many easy one-liners), and the formula for true success is set. Kathy Bail
In flagrante at fresco: Sally Keller man, Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. Unfortunately, the recent spate of American teen films has given birth to little that is memorable — unfor tunately, that is, because there seems to be no end in sight. Like so many before it, B etter o ff Dead (Hoyts) tells the story of a virginal young man (John Cusack) who has crazy parents who don’t understand him; a brother who’s a weird genius; a girlfriend who dumps him; a buddy who’s a nerd; a tough, older bloke at school who rubbishes him; a beautiful girl across the road with whom he eventually falls in love; a musical instrument which he can play; a Chevy Camaro to do wheelies in; and, of course, a sport he’s good at so that he can become a triumphant winner in the end. Written and directed by Savage Steve Holland (his name is more interesting than his film), Better off Dead is littered with standard sequences and standard character motivations. Worse, it has an aimless direction that slugs its way towards the inevitable. Even the humour is on the level of the nerd sucking jelly up a straw into his nose. Or how about the scene where the fat boy falls over, on top of his mum? Tony Cavanaugh
Out o f the ball game: John Cusack in Better Off Dead.
A self-made stylist, John Carpenter has had such creative control in the past that it has been easy to see him as the Howard Hawks of the seventies. But, with Big Trouble in Little China (Fox-Columbia), the signs of surrendering to the Spielbe rg ia n school of M essianic Success are all too evident, despite the film having most of the earmarks of a Carpenter picture. The premise is pretty much that of Escape from New York: a lone figure struggles against time to steal some body away from the clutches of a vil lainous clan. But this time, it’s set in a fantasy land of ghost and monster myths beneath San Francisco’s Chinatown. The peculiarity of Carpenter’s vision, from Dark Star (a beach-ball space monster) to Starman (an alien who is hip on Sinatra), has been his assured, low-budget acuity. In Big Trouble in Little China, however, it’s become Raiders rip-off, with a bigbudget demand for special effects and kung-fu stunts. Carpenter isn’t really a state-ofthe-arts special effects man, at least to the point where it dominates the picture. He is at his best in his Lewtonesque use of space, light and shadow, and in his minimal, cryptic incarnations of villainy. Neither of these things happens in Big Trouble in Little China. Raffaele Caputo
Beer ’n guts: Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Based on an unproduced screen play by Dylan Thomas (adapted here by Ronald Harwood), T he Doctor and the Devils (CEL) emerges as a clumsily artificial exercise. The source material, often filmed in the past, is the true story of a pair of nineteenth-century Edinburgh grave-robbers, Burke and Hare (Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea), and their client, Dr Knox (Timothy Dalton). Knox (here called 'Dr Rock’) was a haughty and self-righteous anatomy professor, who chose to ignore the laws limiting medical research to the cadavers of executed criminals, and sought supplies of fresh corpses via the back door. The leading characters are all saddled with unnecessary pseu donyms, and .Harwood has added a vacuous love-interest between the doctor’s assistant (Julian Sands) and a cardboard-caricature Cockney whore (Twiggy), presumably to
bring Thom as’s highly literate screenplay .into line with supposedly contemporary tastes. To add to the confusion, the incidents that inspired the narrative are depicted as happening in an un specified English city in the eighteen-forties, whereas they actu ally took place in Edinburgh some 20 years earlier. Horror specialist Freddie Francis, better known as a cinematographer (The Elephant Man), makes heavy going of potentially Interesting material in what is a cramped, studio-bound drama reminiscent of Hammer on an off-day. Paul Harris
Spare parts? Julian Sands and Twiggy in The Doctor and the Devils. It wasn’t hard to see, with Return of the Jedi, that the cuddly, teddybear like Ewoks deserved their own series of kiddie fantasy films. Ew oks and the M arauders of Endor (Hoyts) is the second, and there are bound to be more. Although Jim and Ken Wheat, who wrote and directed the film from a story by papa George Lucas, hold onto the short attention spans of four- and five-year-olds by moving things along with a mixture of wellstaged action, new characters and p a la ta b le sch m a ltz, th e y do occasionally stretch things a bit. The scenes, for instance, where the young heroine (Aubree Miller), having lost her family early in the film, befriends Noa (Wilford Brimley), a grumpy surrogate father-figure, go on for far too long. As with last year’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewoks Adventure, however, the modest production is boosted by some nice special effects from Industrial Light and Magic; there are some wonderful stop-motion beasties; and there is a good set-piece where a hang-gliding Ewok chases a winged dragon. Jim Schembri
Aubree Miller, Wilford Brimley in Ewoks and the Marauders of Endor.
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