Revisitation Rights - Re-Watching Childhood Movie Favourites As An Old Film Nerd

    (First up, a brief note. This is my first entry since January. This has been due to a number of factors, most notably, moving house. As I am now almost fully re-settled, I should be able to start doing this again, so hurrah for that. Now with that out of the way, on with the feature presentation...)

     Several years ago, I watched a bunch of stuff I hadn't seen since I was a kid and had avoided for fear they would have aged badly, and all of them were awesome, mainly because of the stuff I could see that my brain just absorbed and skipped over as a kid who just wanted to 'get to the good stuff'.

    'Tron' (1982) was a film that blew my mind as a kid*. The sheer imagination at work really blew my 11 year old wig right to the back of the cinema, but I'd been avoiding re-watching it for over two decades. As a kid, I remember being blown away by the gloriously-realized special effects, but is there anything that dates a film, especially a science fiction film, as much as its vision of  'cutting-edge computer technology'. In this regard, I was pleasantly surprised. There's a reason this particular aesthetic or variants on it are still used to depict 'cyberspace' (and it's uncanny how much 'The Matrix' owes to it!), so full kudos to the concept designers and special effects techs.

    However, even beyond that, the main thing that really impressed me about the film was how long it took for the characters to enter the computer world. The script really took its time establishing the characters, their motivations and their relationships so that by the time the 'good stuff' happened, it all had emotional weight. Modern audiences have been trained to expect a constant stream of serotonin and adrenaline hits in their movies, which is a shame, because it means that a lot of the stuff that should be genuinely astounding comes across as empty spectacle. It's all well and good to deliver special effects marvels and CGI wonders, but unless we care about why they're happening and who they're happening to, they're just noise.

    'Ghostbusters' (1984)  takes an interesting approach to this. Like 'Tron', there's a lot of time taken in building to 'the good stuff', sure, we get the library ghost off the bat, but that's there to grab people's interest. Between then and when the main storyline starts in earnest, there's a lot of exposition to get through, and the way Ghostbusters delivers exposition is amazing. There are a couple of massive info dumps in here, but due to the deftness of the script and the skill of the actors, they don't slow the pace of the film one iota, and the end result is a film which makes the spectacular elements of the story work by planting them firmly within a solid, believable and utterly realized world.

(Most people don't even recall this scene. It just
seamlessly dumps a pile of information on the audience
and vanished without a trace, its work done)

   'Condorman' (1981) does something similar in a different way. The real world of 'Condorman' is painted in far more broad strokes and is much less granular than 'Ghostbusters' New York City, but it presents a world that feels and behaves in the way its target audience expects it to. The way it does this isn't with big exposition dumps, but delivering its exposition incrementally, justifying each step as it goes, until it feels totally comfortable throwing something utterly absurd at you, knowing you've been primed to go with it. This allows for seamless suspension of belief, which makes it an almost perfect kids' empowerment fantasy. 

    The other realization I had re-watching this was that not only is it an almost perfect "baby's first James Bond", it possibly also works as "baby's first Eurocrime". I should also give major kudos to Barbara Carrera and Oliver Reed, and, speaking of amazing performances from European actors...

    We come to 'Flash Gordon' (1980).

    I had put off re-watching this for decades, because every time I thought of it, I remember the weird football fight with Dale cheerleading and thought, "Gods, it's not ALL like that, is it?" But I could not have been more wrong.

    Yes, Sam Jones and Melody Anderson are about as good as they need to be, but holy crap! Everyone else is acting themselves shitless! It's an absolute cavalcade of great actors and none of them are phoning it in. Max Von Sydow is chewing the scenery like it's his last meal. Brian Blessed is turned up to 11. Timothy Dalton has his louche charm settings on full. Ornella Muti is sex-kittening at 3000. Peter Wyngarde's reptilian villainy cannot be contained beneath a bulky mask and robes. Richard O'Brien is at least twice as arch and catty as his limited time onscreen should allow.
    But Topol! Holy shitballs! Topol is acting like someone told him there was no way you could win an Oscar for 'Flash Gordon' and he's decided to go for it out of spite. At the beginning of the film, he's switching gears from avuncular to sinister to comic like a Formula 1 racer, and just when you think that's all he's got, he flips up a button marked 'Turbo Boost' and goes to this earnest, emotionally raw place and you have to imagine the director watching this and thinking, "He knows this is 'Flash Gordon', right? He doesn't have to do ANY of this!" But that's what makes it amazing. Like a Monet painted on black velvet, or Michelangelo sculpture of a sad kitten. That whole sense of "Fuck it! I'm doing this like my life depends on it!" It really elevates this film above so many others that appeared in the wake of 'Star Wars' and just went through the motions.

    And I haven't even mentioned the colour, the costumes, the set designs. Having watched both films recently, I'm positive that 'Flash Gordon' left a far greater impression on my kid brain than 'Star Wars' did. Yes, it's camp as hell, but the fact that it takes itself seriously is what makes it so much damned fun.

    Next up, 'Clash of the Titans' (1981). Wish me luck!

(* - It was also my first introduction to the sublime David Warner, who's still one of my favourite actors.)