![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalI seem to be on an "I love the 80's" kick recently, picking up cheap copies of Real Genius and a special 25th Anniversary edition of The Last Starfighter. Both of them hold up fairly well, for different reasons.
Real Genius
Mitch: Are you saying I'm going to end up living in a steam tunnel?
Chris: Yes, if you keep up like this.
Summary: Mitch, a fifteen year old kid with a genius IQ before Wesley Crusher was a bad idea in Gene Roddenberry's brain (Gabriel Jarret, who went on to be EECOM White in Apollo 13), is plucked out of high school by the egotistical Professor Hathaway (William Atherton) to work on the professor's stalled laser project. Lonely and under pressure, he's taken under the wing of lackadaisical Chris Knight (Val Kilmer before he was annoying) who teaches him that being genius means knowing when to stop working and have fun.
Review: This film came out in the 80's, a great era of wacky teen comedies, like Meatballs, Revenge of the Nerds and One Crazy Summer. There are two major differences between the typical pranks vs. power film of the era and this one however. One, it was directed by Martha Coolidge, who was just coming off directing the classic Valley Girl bringing that film's balance of culture study and comedy to film, and it was inspired by the real world antics of Cal Tech's student culture, which valued cleverness as much as daring in the classic pranks pulled there.
So while we do end up having the wild parties and wacky high jinks, we also get on an honest to Bujold character study of the sort of people who have big ideas and the intelligence to act upon them, and what drives them to do what they do, sometimes without realizing what their actions might mean once the Real World get a hold on them.
Highly Recommended.
The Last Starfighter
Alex Rogan: Listen, Centauri. I'm not any of those guys, I'm a kid from a trailer park.
Centauri: If that's what you think, then that's all you'll ever be!
Summary: Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is eighteen and frustrated, living in his family's trailer park and looking in vain for a chance to get out, his only escape coming from playing endless rounds of the Starfighter video game that sits on the porch of the park's general store. Then one evening after he breaks the game's record, a mysterious conman named Centauri (Robert Preston, essentially playing an alien Harold Hill) drives up and offers him the chance to live out his dream of being a space hero.
Review: Basically The Last Starfighter is what you get if you mash together Star Wars with ET's nostalgic view of suburbia.[1] And it weirdly works. Alex is our Everyteen protagonist, not a child anymore but not quite a man, wanting adventure but reluctant to pursue it once he sees the danger he's in. The story is buoyed along with a gaggle of veteran character actor, most prominently Robert Preston in a brilliant bit of casting for his final film role, and Dan O'Herlihy (Robocop's The Old Man) doing a damned fine job as Alex's quirky pilot and mentor under a gawdawfully thick rubber mask.
Some parts of the movie have aged less well. This was the second major Hollywood picture after Tron to use extensive computer effects and it shows, to put it mildly [2] and Alex love interest Maggie is just kinda there. Fortunately the story and most of the other characters are strong enough to carry the story along despite them.
Also it has one of the best villainous "Death With Dignity" bits ever.
Kodan Officer: We're locked into the moon's gravitational pull! What do we do?
Commander Kril (targeting monocole locks into place): We die.
Recommended.
[1] To the point that the film's writer and producer set it in a trailer park instead of the original suburbs of the script to try and make it less Speilbergian.
[2] The effects were produced on a top of the line Cray 2 supercomputer, one of the most powerful computers available in the day. I watched it on my PS3, a machine that exceeds a Cray 2's processing capacity by several orders of magnitude.
Real Genius
Mitch: Are you saying I'm going to end up living in a steam tunnel?
Chris: Yes, if you keep up like this.
Summary: Mitch, a fifteen year old kid with a genius IQ before Wesley Crusher was a bad idea in Gene Roddenberry's brain (Gabriel Jarret, who went on to be EECOM White in Apollo 13), is plucked out of high school by the egotistical Professor Hathaway (William Atherton) to work on the professor's stalled laser project. Lonely and under pressure, he's taken under the wing of lackadaisical Chris Knight (Val Kilmer before he was annoying) who teaches him that being genius means knowing when to stop working and have fun.
Review: This film came out in the 80's, a great era of wacky teen comedies, like Meatballs, Revenge of the Nerds and One Crazy Summer. There are two major differences between the typical pranks vs. power film of the era and this one however. One, it was directed by Martha Coolidge, who was just coming off directing the classic Valley Girl bringing that film's balance of culture study and comedy to film, and it was inspired by the real world antics of Cal Tech's student culture, which valued cleverness as much as daring in the classic pranks pulled there.
So while we do end up having the wild parties and wacky high jinks, we also get on an honest to Bujold character study of the sort of people who have big ideas and the intelligence to act upon them, and what drives them to do what they do, sometimes without realizing what their actions might mean once the Real World get a hold on them.
Highly Recommended.
The Last Starfighter
Alex Rogan: Listen, Centauri. I'm not any of those guys, I'm a kid from a trailer park.
Centauri: If that's what you think, then that's all you'll ever be!
Summary: Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) is eighteen and frustrated, living in his family's trailer park and looking in vain for a chance to get out, his only escape coming from playing endless rounds of the Starfighter video game that sits on the porch of the park's general store. Then one evening after he breaks the game's record, a mysterious conman named Centauri (Robert Preston, essentially playing an alien Harold Hill) drives up and offers him the chance to live out his dream of being a space hero.
Review: Basically The Last Starfighter is what you get if you mash together Star Wars with ET's nostalgic view of suburbia.[1] And it weirdly works. Alex is our Everyteen protagonist, not a child anymore but not quite a man, wanting adventure but reluctant to pursue it once he sees the danger he's in. The story is buoyed along with a gaggle of veteran character actor, most prominently Robert Preston in a brilliant bit of casting for his final film role, and Dan O'Herlihy (Robocop's The Old Man) doing a damned fine job as Alex's quirky pilot and mentor under a gawdawfully thick rubber mask.
Some parts of the movie have aged less well. This was the second major Hollywood picture after Tron to use extensive computer effects and it shows, to put it mildly [2] and Alex love interest Maggie is just kinda there. Fortunately the story and most of the other characters are strong enough to carry the story along despite them.
Also it has one of the best villainous "Death With Dignity" bits ever.
Kodan Officer: We're locked into the moon's gravitational pull! What do we do?
Commander Kril (targeting monocole locks into place): We die.
Recommended.
[1] To the point that the film's writer and producer set it in a trailer park instead of the original suburbs of the script to try and make it less Speilbergian.
[2] The effects were produced on a top of the line Cray 2 supercomputer, one of the most powerful computers available in the day. I watched it on my PS3, a machine that exceeds a Cray 2's processing capacity by several orders of magnitude.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 02:31 pm (UTC)Still amazing that you have a TOY that has a hundred times the power of the most powerful computing machine ever built 25 years ago.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-14 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-15 02:43 am (UTC)