If ever a film were the quintessence of 1980, this would be it. Cheesy synths? Check. Lots of beige? Check. Puffy hair? Check. We picked this film because it's one of those leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of February (so it'd be gone already in a non-leap-year) and most of the others were a bit intense/noirish. Bad decision. This is a
bad film. Which is a little surprising - it's written and directed by Paul Schrader, the writer of
Taxi Driver (one of the choices we declined), supposedly one of the great scripts of the golden age of recent Hollywood. But... yeesh. Even the theme, which is
Call Me by Blondie, a song I loved as a kid, seems cheesy, and basically the same tune is repeated (on what seems like progressively cheaper synths) throughout. Also, thanks to subtitles, I now know the lyrics, and they're... not great. Meanwhile, the film itself is sort of a combination of
Shampoo and
Midnight Cowboy, only far worse than either. I guess this is Richard Gere's star-making turn and I suppose he's pretty good - basically Richard Gere.
I always found him rather sleazy, which suits this film to a T. But the character is fundamentally unlikable, and I think you're supposed to sympathize with him (as he gets framed for the murder of the wife of a rich industrialist, who paid Gere to have sex with her as he watched), which is hard. You're also supposed to buy his romance with Lauren Hutton (the "older woman") as somehow a redemptive one. And to make matters worse, the film even has a happy ending, where he gets sprung from jail because she covers for him (at the cost of her marriage to an up-and-coming politician). Side characters include Bill Duke, overacting as usual, as Gere's sometime-pimp Theo
(who meets his end, someone preposterously, after Gere accidentally knocks him off his balcony but manages to catch him by his garish red cowboy boots... which of course come off, leaving him to splat on the sidewalk. This is after he has admitted framing Gere and Gere has gone from ranting "no more fag stuff!" to "I'll do fag stuff! I'll do anything!" - yes, that Oscar-winning Schrader dialogue), and
this guy as a detective who looks (and acts) disconcertingly like Billy Crystal's bald, cigar-chomping older brother:
What were we thinking in the 80s? Jami saw this on HBO when she was around 12, which is way too young to be exposed to Richard Gere's raw sexuality (and partially exposed penis!) not to mention that much beige and synth-music. Was this the first movie to use the "add the adjective 'American' to make a film sound pretentious" tactic? Not sure, but Gere's character bears an unflattering resemblance to Christian Bale's in
American Psycho, right down to the fussiness about matching ties to shirts. (There's also a confusing suggestion that maybe he
did do the murder he's accused of, but that's never explored.) Let's do better with our extra shot at films-leaving-the-channel tonight.
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