"Risky Business," so much to answer for...

No Comments

• Brian says:

  August 25, 2009 at 6:32 pm

  Thanks for the great link, and thanks to Matt and Aaron for the great film– I can­’t wait to see future installments!

• Aaron Aradillas says:

  August 25, 2009 at 7:13 pm

  Part 2 is already up. It just gets dark­er and dark­er from here on out.

• Sean says:

  August 25, 2009 at 11:04 pm

  Very inter­est­ing. I can­’t wait to see how it gets dark­er from part 2.

• otherbill says:

  August 25, 2009 at 11:14 pm

  I’m really look­ing for­ward to the rest of this series. I was 9 years old in 84. An aver­age after­noon at that age fre­quently involved play­ing Star Wars or Matchbox or whatever for a while and then retir­ing to someone’s rum­pus room to watch a video. The video would be whatever we could man­age to afford that month or some­thing taped off that one kid’s HBO subscription/ the Sunday Night Movie. So we’d watch “Superman II” pretty much every day for a month. And then “Empire Strikes Back” for a month. And then “Gremlins” and “Ghostbusters” and “Temple of Doom” and so on. The res­ult being that I’ll be able to men­tally frame by frame these films til I’m on my death bed (the bed that eats!!) but haven’t ever really stopped to exam­ine them the way I would an Ozu or Tarkovsky. Watching that video brought me back to read­ing Thomas Disch’s “The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of” and examin­ing the under­ly­ing ideas of all the sci­ence fic­tion paper­backs I was devour­ing dur­ing this same period.
  I’d write more but I have to go watch “Streets of Fire” now. I’m very much not kid­ding. Look- I know the film is… less than per­fect but you can feel Hill’s love for it in every frame. Also: Diane Lane.

• markj says:

  August 26, 2009 at 3:59 am

  Great work Aaron. As a 10 year old in 1984 i’m get­ting a huge kick out of this.
  Interesting com­ment about Temple of Doom being the pro­gen­it­or of the ‘too much stuff’ block­buster, I had­n’t really looked at it that way before. I still feel Doom was the last block­buster that Spielberg was 100% inves­ted in, com­pare the energy and love of cinema evid­ent in Doom to the slightly embar­rassed air that per­meates Last Crusade. You can almost see Spielberg mop­ing around on set won­der­ing why Empire of the Sun tanked.
  I’m hop­ing The Abyss gets some cov­er­age in the 1989 sec­tion, i’m always at a loss as to why this won­der­ful film is ignored. Michael Bay has spent his entire career remak­ing that film on dry land.

• Nelson says:

  August 26, 2009 at 4:28 am

  http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/07/25/was-1984-the-greatest-year-in-movies-ever/

• Aaron Aradillas says:

  August 26, 2009 at 4:31 am

  @otherbill: I’ve nev­er read Disch’s “The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of,” but you have me inter­ested. Much the way Glenn and his gen­er­a­tion of crit­ics were shaped by the New Hollywood, I feel our generation–the Internetters as one crit­ic labels us–was shaped by the second half of the 1980s. With Matt’s bril­liant edit­ing, I’m just try­ing to make sense of it all. I mean, what does it say that both Temple of Doom and Do the Right Thing take up equal space in our minds?
  @markj: I think you’ll be happy with the 1989 sec­tion of the series.
  And, yes, Streets of Fire is geni­us. Any film that fea­tures The Blasters AND Willem Dafoe is aces in my book.

• Christian says:

  August 26, 2009 at 12:53 pm

  STREETS OF FIRE is awful. But I see what Hill was going for and wish he would have ignored the MTV esthet­ics that failed to sell the film. SOF suf­fers from Hill’s total lack of humor and there­fore the film nev­er feels fun or takes off. Harlan Ellison reviewed it best in “Watching.”

• Christian says:

  August 26, 2009 at 3:59 pm

  But there are some admit­tedly cool things in there like Dafoe, and espe­cially Amy Madigan. I liked see­ing Rick Moranis too. And I’d like to see the 70mm ver­sion too…

• Brian says:

  August 27, 2009 at 2:47 pm

  Aaron, just wanted to say I emailed Glenn’s link to a friend of mine who teaches film at Salisbury, and we’ve been talk­ing about what a use­ful tool it would be for teach­ing the form of the video essay. Thanks again for the great work.
  I had a ques­tion about pro­cess: you men­tioned, “With Matt’s bril­liant edit­ing, I’m just try­ing to make sense of it all.” I’m won­der­ing about your col­lab­or­a­tion, and how it unfol­ded. Did you and Matt kind of sketch things out gen­er­ally, then he star­ted edit­ing clips, and you wrote your script based on those pat­terns? Or did you write the script, and he edited off that? Or…?

• Aaron Aradillas says:

  August 29, 2009 at 6:01 am

  @Brian: I wrote a script–about 15 or so pages–that had both sug­ges­tions for clips and the nar­ra­tion. The piece was ori­gin­ally going to be broken up into 2 parts, but we quickly real­ized this was big­ger than we thought.
  I gave the green­light to add or sub­tract from my script. (This is my first video essay. (Like almost everything I attempt, it became big­ger than I inten­ded.) I would say 60–70 per cent of my script is pre­served. Some clips were replaced with oth­ers. Sometimes we dropped clips because nar­ra­tion or a scene said all that needed to be said.
  A good example is Part 4. I only wrote a couple of lines regard­ing Lethal Weapon 2 and The Abyss. It was Matt who fleshed that sec­tion out. In ret­ro­spect, I can­’t believe I did­n’t write more about those films. The same is true of Field of Dreams. I did­n’t even have that in my ori­gin­al script.
  On the oth­er hand, the con­nect­ing mont­age that opens Part 3–1985–1988–was some­thing I came up with in one long late night rush. I sug­ges­ted the clips and music cues. That little piece is almost as I wrote it.
  Seeing as I don’t live in NYC (yet), I had to trust Matt and his edit­or­i­al decisions. The fact that we have sim­il­ar tastes cre­ates a beau­ti­ful short­hand when we’re talk­ing about ideas at 3:00 A.M.
  I can­’t wait for our next collaboration.

• Shawn Stone says:

  August 29, 2009 at 5:35 pm

  I remem­ber feel­ing hor­ri­fied by TEMPLE OF DOOM when it came out, as I had loved the first Indy and was appalled by DOOM. (Where was Karen Allen, I wondered.) Those clips reminded me WHY I hated it.
  Loved GREMLINS, though. And GREMLINS 2, with Tony Randall as the voice of William F. Gremlin (so to speak), is genius–but that’s for anoth­er day.