At Hollywood and Fine, Marshall Fine dubs the plethora of recent ’80s-set films the revenge of Gen-X. “What does it mean to set a movie in the ’80s? We know what movies set in the ’50s mean: innocence and ignorance, a time of conformity and repression. It was the Eisenhower era, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the rise of suburbia and mass media. Set a movie in the ’60s and it means something else entirely: turmoil, upheaval, awakening. The rise of youth culture, civil rights, Vietnam, counterculture…What I see in movies about the ’80s, written and directed by people who were kids and teens during that period, is a certain disapproval of how their parents’ generation – the baby boom that lit the fuse on the ’60s – squandered their opportunity. Rather than build on the ideas of the civil rights and anti-war movements, they focused on themselves: on getting that great car, that great house, those designer clothes, that outrageous windfall profit.”
Bret Easton Ellis reviews the films made from his books at the AV Club. “Less Than Zero is obviously bad, and we don’t need to talk about why that didn’t work. And American Psycho—that is, I think, an impossible book to adapt. But whatever, it was the greatest hits from the book, more or less. Mary did a very good job of keeping that movie together, as did Christian Bale, and I think Roger did a terrific job. And with The Informers, I think there is really an outstanding movie floating out there somewhere, and I hope one day people might be able to see it. But it’s very interesting. I am not comparing The Informers to The Godfather on any level, but there’s that famous story where Paramount asked Coppola to cut like an hour out of the movie, because they didn’t want to release a three-hour movie. And Coppola did, and showed it to the executive, and it was terrible. It moved very slowly at two hours. And then when he put the other hour back in, it moved very quickly. And that’s all I want to say about The Informers.”
Beyond the Multiplex previews the Tribeca Film Festival, including Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench. “You start watching Damien Chazelle's directing debut and you say, OK, it's a low-budget indie in black-and-white. Then you realize it's a low-budget indie musical in black-and-white. And finally you grasp that it's a low-budget indie jazz musical in black-and-white, with original songs written in the spirit of 1940s pop, swing and bebop. And tap dancing. So Chazelle gets an A-plus for concept and effort, and the question of whether the wistful, mumblecore-style love story lives up to its framing device maybe isn't so important.”
Slate’s Mark Harris takes a look at the Warner Archive Collection. “For movie lovers, this is heaven. Anybody can adequately take the measure of a century of film by leapfrogging across decades, countries, and genres from one masterpiece to another, and this is pretty much how we all do it, Netflixing our way through the Criterion Collection (great, but not for American movies) or checking off Oscar nominees from decades past (great, but only as a barometer of what people thought was great at the time). But movie history is also written in what happened between the great movies—in the ambitious and the mundane, the half-hearted and the forgotten, the unjustly overlooked and the justly dismissed.”
Current Movies celebrated Earth Day with their four favorite green films, including…Godzilla vs. Hedorah. “Directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, the film is a hodge podge of hippie-dom when Godzilla (everyone’s favorite foil for nuclear holocaust) must step up to battle the alien Hedorah who feeds off pollution and gives off all sorts of bad things. This somehow damages everyone’s favorite nuclear monster, but the Big Green Guy wins in the end.”
