25 Year Ago...This Weekend

(Posted by Aaron Aradillas)

Since it is damn near impossible to remem­ber a time when people wer­en’t obsessed with The Numbers, I thought we might take a look back at what the Top 10 looked like 25 years ago this weekend. 

TW  LW    TITLE                                                       WEEKEND GROSS       THEATERS        TOTAL GROSS WEEK #

1   N     Easy Money                             $5,844,974     1,130       $5,844,974            1

2   3     Risky Business                        $5,252,090      891          $20,322,398          3

3   13   Mr. Mom                                 $4,279,384      734          $11,199,896          5

4   1     National Lampoon’s Vacation  $4,028,780      1,252       $38,365,442          4

5   2     Cujo                                       $3,592,620      1,293       $12,693,430          2

6   4     Return of the Jedi                  $3,033,669      1,284       $222,489,243        13

7   N     Yor: Hunter from the Futore  $2,810,199      1,425       $2,810,199           1

8   N     Metalstorm                             $2,019,000      549          $2,019,000           1

9   6     Tradiong Places                      $1,877,435      785          $75,420,736         11

10  5    Staying Alive                           $1,836,786      818          $53,455,638         6 

So, bring back any memor­ies? When was the last time a movie was in tis 13^th week of release and still almost being in the Top 5? Does any­one remem­ber either Yor or Metalstorm? Follow me after the break and we’ll take a more crit­ic­al look at this week’s offerings.

1. Easy Money was Rodney Dangerfield’s follow-up to Caddyshack. It was pretty obvi­ous that Rodney could carry a movie. The only prob­lem was cre­at­ing a vehicle where he could do his thing. Easy Money was­n’t it. (It would be 3 years before the right story could be con­struc­ted for Rodney’s tal­ents. 1986’s Back to School is a beau­ti­fully real­ized col­lege com­edy that can stand along­side the Marx Brothers movies.) 

Easy Money finds Rodney play­ing more or less him­self in that seem­ingly reliabe story of a cheer­ful vul­gari­an being forced to change his ways in order to receive a big reward. In this case it is Rodney’s Monster-In-Law who is leav­ing him $10 mil­lion if he prom­ises to stop drink­ing, smoking, gambling, and doing all the things we love Rodney for. For some reas­on film­makers think this story is a per­fect fit for high-wire com­ic act­ors. It isn’t. It neu­ters them from doing what we go to see them do. Richard Pryor and John Candy in Walter Hill’s lackluster (and PG-rated) Brewster’s Millions is anoth­er example.

I think the fact that Easy Money had 4 screen­writers might explain its stop-and-start pacing. One of the writers was P.J. O’Rourke (!), and this most cer­tainly doomed the movie. P.J.‘s look-at-me-ma smart-assedness does­n’t jibe with Rodney’s stay-loose humor. Director James Signorelli is best known for mul­tiple epsis­odes of Satuday Night Live (and least known for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark). The movie is also note­wrothy for show­cas­ing a post-Raging Bull Joe Pesci. It would take Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker before Pesci could show off his full com­ic potential. 

2. Risky Business made Tom Cruise a star, gave Bob Seger a moment of cool­ness (more so than American Pop), and dared to have the audi­ence be on the side of a guy whose mor­al com­pass was well on its way to not work­ing prop­erly. Actually, writer-director Paul Brickman’s sav­age cri­tique of a youth gen­er­a­tion dis­card­ing any les­sons learned from pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions was com­prom­ised by the very audi­ence it was cri­tiquing. (How very meta) 

As Joel Goodson (gotta love that last name), Tom Cruise embod­ied a more cun­ning ver­sion of the All-American kid want­ing to get ahead without really try­ing. The movie basic­ally shows us a kid learn­ing that the only way to not suf­fer from guilt is to do whatever it takes to achieve your goals. The movie’s catch­phrase (“What the Fuck?”) isn’t so much a cry of rebel­lion, but an announce­ment that leav­ing a mark at whatever the cost is what counts in this world. WTF? 

This is not to say that Risky Business isn’t a finely craf­ted satire. In fact, the movie’s crit­ic­al suc­cess pretty much guar­an­teed it would endure. Risky Business might be the only movie (with the pos­sible excep­tion of Top Gun) where the movie came before Cruise. Of course, now Cruise comes before everything and he deserves cred­it for know­ing almost from the begin­ning that the key to a suc­cess­ful career was find­ing a bal­ance between work­ing with “A” tal­ent and pro­tect­ing one’s image. 

What the fuck. 

3. Mr. Mom might be the most mis­un­der­stood (and under­rated) movie on this list. A feature-length sit­com (one of the pro­du­cers was Aaron Spelling) about fam­ily life at the  Dawn of Downsizing, Mr. Mom was a sleep­er hit because audi­ences recog­nized an emo­tion­al truth that crit­ics too eas­ily dis­missed. Mr. Mom is really the oppos­ite of Risky Business. The screen­play by John Hughes has a sin­cer­ity that flies in the face of Brickman’s hip cyn­icism. Yes, the dir­ec­tion by Steve Dragoti is barely func­tion­al. The cine­ma­to­graphy by Victor J. Kemper (Vacation, Cloak & Dagger, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure) is just a notch above a Very Special Episode of Family Ties. But there are com­ic bits (like when Michael Keaton’s Jack goes gro­cery shop­ping for the first time) that work because they show a working-class man attempt­ing to adapt to a reversal of what he thought he was sup­posed to be. Unlike the kids in Risky Business, Jack and his wife Caroline (Teri Garr) are try­ing to instll in their kids a val­ues sys­tem that is quickly being chal­lenged by the cor­por­at­iz­a­tion of America. 

While Risky Business only infers its alle­gi­ance to the Reagan admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Mom is pretty upfront when address­ing its socio-economic polit­ics. When Caroline goes back to work in advert­ising, we get a sur­pris­ingly sharp look at ’80s mar­ket­ing and com­sumer­ism. (There’s an inter­est­ing shot of a cor­por­ate board­room table where we see the vari­ous take-out pack­ages from a working-lunch brain­storm­ing ses­sion. Each per­son has their own pre­ferred brand of take-out.) Caroline’s big break is a mjaor tuna fish com­pany that is going through a down cycle in sales. Caroline’s solu­tion? Have the CEO of the com­pany do a mock PSA stat­ing that he’ll be lower­ing the price of cans of tuna fish to 75 cents until America’s eco­nomy bounces back. The final shot is of a restored fam­ily unit watch­ing the debut of the spot. (The over­ture from Patton plays on the soundtrack.) It’s a happy end­ing with a little sting. The American fam­ily unit has to learn to make due. 

4. National Lampoon’s Vacation is a pretty easy movie to review. With the excep­tion of Animal House, it’s the only National Lampoon movie worth remem­ber­ing. Some people prefer Chevy Chase in Fletch. Not me. 

5. Cujo is a sol­id Lewis Teague-directed shock­er. It’s good, but it does­n’t com­pare to the great­nest that is Alligator. I con­fess, like a lot of young males of a cer­tain matur­ity level, I went through a Stephen King phase that las­ted roughly 1 1/2 books. Cujo was the book I read in its entirety. I stopped halfway through Misery. (Did King actu­ally think we wanted to read one of Paul Sheldon’s books?) I quickly real­ized that King’s bloated prose was not for me. (His short stor­ies are bet­ter.) I can still remem­ber Brian DePalma, in a 2001 Première art­icle about the mak­ing of Carrie, say­ing, “He’s the Edgar Allen Poe of our time.” Has DePalma read any Poe? 

6. What else can be said about Revenge…I mean, Return of the Jedi? Not much. It is inter­est­ing to note that a Star Wars-related offer­ing is not doing so well at this week­end’s box office. I con­fess that the Ewoks nev­er bothered me. (I was only made aware recently of Lucas’ mus­ings on the par­al­lels between Vietnam and the Ewoks fight­ing tac­tics. I don’t think I have the energy to fully ana­lyze that one.) I will say this: Mark Hamill’s act­ing in the Star Wars movies has always been under­rated. Hamill’s abil­ity to con­vince the audi­ence that he believes in the oth­er­worldly char­ac­ters he’s inter­act­ing with is a rare gift that not just any act­or can pull off. (Just look at Robert DeNiro’s “act­ing” in Rocky & Bullwinkle and you’ll see what I mean. Granted, Mark Hamill could­n’t pull off Raging Bull or Once Upon a Time in America, but you can­’t have enreything.) 

This “dis­cus­sion” from an epis­ode of Nightline is a real howl­er. Take a look:

John Simon actu­ally sug­gests Tender Mercies as an alter­antive to the “de-humanizing” Jedi. Why any­one would want to inflict Robert Duvall’s “under­stated” Western on chil­dren is bey­ond me. 

7. Yor: Hunter from the Futre a.k.a. Il Mondo di Yor is one of those Italian space oper­as that seemed to get the­at­ric­al book­ings from time to time. I won’t even pre­tend to know my Italian Sci-Fi. The trail­er makes me almost nos­tal­gic for the dog days of August when some­thing like this or this would get a wide release. 

8. Metalstorm is a movie I don’t even think got moch rota­tion on HBO. (Maybe Showtime had the hon­ors.) The only note­worthy item seems to be it was an early show­case for Kelly Preston. This was obvi­ously before her one-two punch of Secret Admirer and the best adapt­a­tion of an Elmore Leonard nov­el (yes, even bet­ter than Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight), the under­rated 52 Pick-Up.

9. Trading Places was the bet­ter of the two John Landis offer­ings from the Summer of ’83. (The oth­er being, obvi­ously, the ill-fated Twilight Zone – The Movie.) A sort-of class-conscious movie, Trading Places got most of its miel­age from Eddie Murphy’s unbe­liev­ably sharp com­ic tim­ing and not-so-subtle anger. A some­what routine re-telling of that old story about hered­ity vs. envir­on­ment, Murphy gave stand­ard com­ic situ­ations a mod­ern spin. He ran laps around co-stars Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis without ever break­ing a sweat. It was the bril­liant cast­ing of Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche as the Duke Brothers, Randolph and Mortimer, that gave the movie an extra shot of energy. (Denholm Elliott did a nice vari­ation on John Gielgud’s Hobson from Arthur.)

Like Risky Business, Trading Places cel­eb­rates Yuppie val­ues while pre­tend­ing to mock them. It was only 5 years earli­er that Landis would’ve laughed at the down­fall of Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe III. Now, he plays it almost for poignancy. Odd.

10. Staying Alive is the pre­curs­or to Showgirls in its depic­tion of human nature, which is to say it has­n’t got a clue how hard-working dan­cers inter­act with one anoth­er. The irony is that Saturday Night Fever was very wise in its depic­tion of the ways young men and women were try­ing to relate to one anoth­er. Also, the music was better.

Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to force a Rocky-like story struc­ture on to the life of John Travolta’s Tony Manero made for one of the more heart­break­ing moviego­ing exper­i­ences of the year. I think Stallone’s ill-conceived notions of what a PG-rated (!) sequel to Saturday Night Fever should look like are best encap­su­lated in the movie’s open­ing cred­its sequence, a jacked-up “homage” to the open­ing sequence of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. Things go down­hill from there.