Klute (1971)

Directed by Alan J. Pakula, this movie has a young Donald Sutherland as a detective from Palookaville, PA (actually, Tuscarora), who investigates a missing-persons case in the Big City. Jane Fonda is a jaded prostitute/model/actress with a connection to the missing man. Sutherland and Fonda slowly form a working relationship, as she takes him into the Underworld to follow various leads. He's a total straight man - literally jug-eared, and wearing dorky jackets, he is out of place in the wild partying seventies underground dives she brings him into, but has a masculine, old-school sense of purpose that somehow forces her to yield and help him with his investigatins, and eventually to sleep with him. For fun! Not for money!

There are a couple good what-is-the-sex-industry-all-about moments in here, like when Fonda meets with her psychiatrist and talks to her about her inability to get out of the trade (she likes the sense of control that she has over events, which the film opposes quite well to the moments when she gets passed over at modeling calls and auditions). But overall, it chafes that she's the ultimate woman-on-her-own who figures out that she can't really hack it without a man for protection. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," from 1977, seems to be sort of a more violent spiritual sequel to this movie.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

This movie, directed by W.D. Richter, is about a man, played by Robocop Peter Weller, who is a genius scientist, rock guitarist, neurosurgeon, adrenaline junkie, and samurai, and who is supposedly half-Japanese and half-American but really only looks very Aryan (if I were an Asian guy I would be mad that this awesome role went to a not-half-Asian guy from Stevens Point, Wisconsin).

Banzai and his team of cool scientists (all guys, except for the love interest) travel around the world pushing the edges of knowledge and are the subject of comic bookery. In this movie, Banzai has figured out how to get into the eighth dimension; it comes to light that there are aliens living there, on a parallel plane with humanity; then there's some stuff about how the bad aliens want to take over some distant planet and Banzai's action has given them an opening, while good aliens try to help close the gate, blah blah.

Watching this movie reminded me yet again of how my media exile during the 1980s rendered my tastes irrevocably different from those of the rest of my peers. I can see how it would be appealing and nostalgic to watch this so that you could revel in the funny suits and the short-haired, wide-shouldered love interest, and the sort of cheesy production values and the funny synth music etc etc, but I just find it kind of grating. Am I still bitter that I got left out, so many years ago? Maybe.

Dude! Not only is Peter Weller weirdly an art historian (though not a PhD), but he plays in a jazz band with Jeff Goldblum sometimes! If Wikipedia is right, anyway.

Last of the Mohicans (1992)

A test: can an American Studies person find it in her heart to like a move that eviscerates James Fenimore Cooper's plot, meaning, and style as thoroughly as Magua does one of his enemies on the battlefield? My friend Josh holds that one should like this movie because Fenimore Cooper's book sucks anyway, and it's interesting that people in the 1990s like this movie for the same reason people in the 1820s liked the book (it's all about the frontier - it's just that the valences have shifted and people don't mind seeing Natty - oops, sorry, "Nathaniel" - fall in love and settle down instead of wandering restlessly).

I don't know. Believe me, I liked seeing the longhaired Daniel Day Lewis kissing the equally longhaired Madeline Stowe after they had about two conversations and "fell in love" (well, I guess maybe fighting evil Hurons together might have brought them some sort of a bonded feeling). But Cooper's Natty Bumppo was remarkable in his singularity partially because he was neither white nor Indian, neither straight nor homosexual, neither settled nor tribal - he was nothing, really, and because of that he was everything. I might be making too much of it, but I felt sort of betrayed.

I also felt betrayed to see Russell Means, ex-AIM activist, occupier of Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, as Chingachgook, making a speech about how his people would vanish into the sunset and others would come but it would all be the same, etc etc. What happened?

Twelve Monkeys (1995)

I saw this when it came out, which must mean that I was in high school, and I have to say, I didn't "get" it back then (just like I didn't "get" Moby-Dick - pearls before swine, I tell you). Nick recently made me watch "La Jetee," the short film made by Chris Marker which was the inspiration for this movie, and after seeing that I couldn't wait to revisit this longer version. There's the same basic plot and structure, but obviously this version is much more elaborate, since it's, like, seven times the length.

The conceit in both: an apocalyptic event (in "Jetee", nuclear war; in "Monkeys," a virus) has forced humanity underground. Evil scientist figures (in "Jetee," you barely see them and they're characterized mostly by their rapid-fire whispering in German - awesome; in "Monkeys," they're a fully visible council of learned evil-doers) keep people in prisons and force them to "volunteer" for fact-finding missions focused on figuring out what happened and retrieving a magic bullet to help humanity survive and be able to get aboveground again.

The human-guinea-pig-in-a-pen scenario is neatly paralleled, in "Monkeys," with the mental institution that the Willis character ends up in after being sent back in time for information-gathering. (The kind psychiatrist, Madeline Stowe, asks the Willis character whether he's been institutionalized before - the answer, of course, is far more horrific than she can imagine.)

There's something neat about imagining, hey, what if all the prophets of the apocalypse throughout history have been TIME TRAVELERS sent back to save humanity, and we're ignoring them at our peril? But the movie is also great in its visual style - the institution, the underground tunnels, even the airport are all more-beautiful versions of their actual grungy real-life selves, just like how in "Brazil" even the gross housing projects feel like pretty sets in some underlying, arranged way.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for movies in which animals take over the earth. Hey, it worked for "I Am Legend." Or did it?

Black Robe (1991)

I watched this because I just read the book Middle Ground, by Richard White, about Frenchmen and Indians in the upper Midwest in the seventeenth century, and I remembered that I had heard about this movie a while ago and never followed up. Sure enough, here we have a foresaken Jesuit lost in the Michigan frontier and trying to convert Indians who want nothing to do with him.

This movie does a good job of not idealizing the lives of the Native Americans - they are at war, they trust obviously-ridiculous sorcerers, etc - but also making it clear that the Frenchmen are no saviors. The piety of the Jesuit remains incomprehensible throughout. He often says things like, "This country is damned by the devil," when the camera is showing gorgeous river/mountains footage. Good reminder that for seventeenth-century Europeans, wilderness was not a good word yet.

This was directed by Bruce Beresford, who apparently also directed "Driving Miss Daisy," though you could have fooled me. I guess there's some sort of races-understanding-each-other theme going on, but "Black Robe" can be pretty brutal - arrows through the neck, torture, quasi-rape. Of course, there's a lovely Indian maiden, played by an actress who's actually Asian, who ends up falling in love with the younger Frenchman who accompanies the Jesuit on his mission. (She's the reason for the quasi-rape, as she uses her wiles to get the group out of captivity when they're about to be killed by the Iroquois.) Apparently some Native American groups objected to the torture scenes. I object to the fact that the movie does that thing where the actors speak to each other in French-accented English when in real life they really would have been speaking French. I hate that thing.

The Invasion (2007)

The Invasion got a real bum rap, and it might have sort of deserved it. The remake of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers was directed partially by Oliver Hirschspiegel, who directed Der Untergang (2004), the awesome movie about the interior of Hitler's bunker during the fall of Berlin. But halfway through the direction, the studio thought it wasn't big-money enough, and sent in the Matrix/Wachowski Brothers to "fix" it. This means that there are some really good, foreboding, what's-wrong-with-humanity scenes, with the texture and intent of Der Untergang, and then there are some really cheesy moments, like car chases and subway chases (with a be-heeled Kidman running like crazy) and a scene where Kidman's six-year-old son gives his mother an adrenaline shot through the sternum (which, if you watched Pulp Fiction, you happen to know is really, really difficult to do).

Nicole Kidman will just never be believable as a mother to me, even though I have few illusions about the sanctity/softness/sweetness of motherhood. It was better when she was a mean, evil mother in The Golden Compass (which also starred Daniel Craig in the sorta-romantic other lead). There are many character development issues, including the question of why Kidman's character wouldn't go for Craig's romantic propositions. Hey! I almost wrote "Clinton" when I was supposed to be writing "Kidman"! Heh.