Real Genius (1985)

Director: Martha Coolidge
Writers:  Neal Israel, Par Proft, Peter Torokvei
Cast:       Val Kilmer, Gabriel Jarett, Michelle Meyrink, William Atherton

Mitch (Jarett) is a 15-year-old Physics genius who is given a scholarship, by Professor Hathaway (Atherton), and admitted into a very research intensive university. There he assists the professor to create a LASER weapon along with several other students, with the most prominent one being Chris Knight (Val Kilmer). Students don't exactly know the purpose of what they are building while the professor is employed by the CIA to develop this weapon which could target and kill people from space. 

The film is really like a high-school/college film with the difference that all of them are nerds. Still, it does follow genre conventions and Val Kilmer is the genius rebel among them. It is like 'Interstellar' of college films but in a good way. The creators have put considerable effort into making stuff like the science in it and the behavior of nerds as accurate as possible. Martha Coolidge actually spent months researching about LASER technology and policies of the CIA, and interviewed dozens of students at Caltech. 

The story is pretty basic and I saw the first hour of the film late night in a sleepy state and was quite underwhelmed by it. But the last forty minutes was really funny and worked really well for me. Val Kilmer is absolutely the highlight of the film with some great lines and mannerisms. The professor was also great as was the cute lady nerd in it played by Michelle Meyrink. Jarett's character is the protagonist character for us and probably the weakest link in the film. Overall, it is a pretty good watch despite the predictability and 'basic' nature of the plot. I would guess that people who saw it at the time will have tremendous nostalgia associated with the film.

Rating: 3.5/5 

                                                                             

ഇരകള്‍ (Irakal) (1985)

Director: K. G. George
Writer:    K. G. George
Cast:      Ganesh Kumar, Thilakan, Sukumaran

Baby (Ganesh) is the youngest son of a rubber baron (Thilakan) from high-range Mundakkayam. His eldest brother is involved with illegal timber and ganja business while his middle brother is a drunkard who is pissed off with their controlling father. His elder sister is a loose woman whose marriage is in doldrums. Film begins with Baby injuring a junior student seriously, during a ragging session, because of which he is suspended and forced to go back to his home. From the first scene itself it is clear that he is psychologically in a precarious state and when he gets back to his home we find the reasons for him being such and the dysfunctional family got a lot to do with it.  Basically the film is an examination of Baby's psychological state when put in context with his family's state. It also works as one of the best portrayal of a Christian family setting in the Achayan mode.

Good psychological thrillers are rare in Malayalam. Manichithrathazhu is more of a mystery film and cannot be classed as a psychological thriller. Irakal, which translates as Victims in English, would remind one of Roman Polanski films like 'Repulsion' and 'The Tenant' with its use of dream/surreal imagery, even though only in limited doses. The film is told from the perspective of  its psychologically traumatized protagonist and other good film from Malayalam with such an approach that I could think of is 'Aham'. The best thing about Irakal is that there aren't any binary characters in it. Baby has a love interest in the film and she is shown to be extremely practical about it due to her poor background. She doesn't expect him to marry him and there isn't the usual melodramatic hoopla surrounding the fixing of her marriage to someone else. But in what can be considered as a cliche-bender, Baby is slighted by it and proceeds to prevent the marriage by killing the groom. In one sense, Baby is feeling cheated by everyone else and we are totally sympathetic towards him even though he is spiraling out of  control. The film reaches the predictable conclusion of putting an end to all this but that is also done in a very fresh manner.

Overall the film is a great watch and is a unique one in Malayalam film history because of the treatment of its characters. Thilakan is excellent in his role as the father character and according to wiki, he narrowly missed out on a National award for his performance. He has portrayed so many memorable father roles but many of them tended to be on the extremes (strictness being a regular trait for eg,). In this one, he plays someone who want to just get on with things. One criticism that one could make is that there is some sub-par acting involved but it doesn't bring down the quality of the film. Ganesh made his debut with this film and he is good overall in the role even though one could say it is a bit uneven in some places. It was produced by actor Sukumaran who plays middle brother in the film. It was well-received critically but bombed at the box office.

Rating: 4/5  

                                                                            

Back to the Future (1985)

Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writers:  Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale
Cast:       Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Le Thompson

A young man is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-travelling DoLorean invented by his friend, Dr. Emmett Brown, and must make sure his high-school-age parents unite in order to save his own existence.

This is one of those films that almost everyone have seen and I hadn't yet. I have caught bits of it on TV but never watched it in its entirety. Raging Bull is also another one of these. It came one year after the release of 'The Terminator', which is really the first mainstream hit with time travel as its major theme. It was also used in 'Planet of the Apes' but Time Travel aspect of the film was more of a twist rather than it being the major theme of the film. So in the 80s, you had two successive time-travel hits in two different genres-action and comedy. Both are indeed considered as all time classics even though the first Terminator is rated inferior to its sequel by many, which I don't agree with.  

As for Back to the Future, it is a very good watch but I really didn't think it was all that great. That is not because it not aging gracefully, it has, but because the whole Steven Spielberg vibe of the film is something that don't sit well with me. The film was produced by him with Zemeckis as the director and the whole redneck 'American Dream conformity' family thing is just an irritation for me. That is only a minor point and it is a film that is part of many people's childhood memories and I can totally understand why many just love it. By the by, I am also not a big fan of Indiana Jones franchise and I do think these are  films that you will appreciate to the full extent only if you were part of that time period. 

The film has McFly travelling back in time and accidentally preventing the first meeting of his parents. To his horror, his mother has a crush on him, and his whole existence depend on making sure that his parents end up together. One could actually make a really dark film having similar story line but with the crush going the other way, creating a Freudian Oedipus complex nightmare. There is a film idea for you and the guys who did 'Predestination' might be interested I guess. 

I am not a big fan of Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Cast Away) but I did enjoy 'Flight', which was a proper R-Rated film with adult subject matter. Most of his early films are for children and that is precisely the demography that will love it. There are really small nuggets of historical anachronism in the films like skateboarding in 1955, Ronald Reagan as a political figure etc but none of them have the same impact as Hula Hoops in 'Hudsucker Proxy'. There are three films in the franchise with Zemeckis directing all of them. First one was the highest grossing film in 1985 and other two, which were back to back productions, didn't quite achieve the same level of success. 

Rating: 3.5/5

                                                                        

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Director: George Miller
Writers:  Terry Hayes, George Miller
Cast:       Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Bruce Spence

A former Australian policeman is rescued by a tribe of children when he is banished from a desert town and sent into the desert by the desert town's evil queen (Tina Turner). This is the third installment in the Mad Max trilogy featuring Mel Gibson as the title character. Unlike in the earlier films, there is a semblance of order with the desert queen having brought a justice system in the town she had established. But the energy with which it is run is based on pig-shit and is handled by MasterBlaster. She kills Blaster with the help of Max and aims to control the Master. Max aims to help the tribe who rescued him by rescuing Master from the desert town.

The films begins with a bang and has great humor in the 'Hans Solo' mode. The middle third of it is attritional with George Miller having some fun with the idea of a backward tribe waiting for their messiah based on what they have deduced from things from the past. The last third film of the film features the obligatory kickass chase sequence and this time it involves a train. It is the only film out of the three that has a PG-13 rating while the other two are R-Rated. The fourth one that is coming out this year starring Tom Hardy, Fury Road, is also rated R. From the trailer I have seen of it, the story part seems fine with a very good cast but the action sequences seems very CGIed. What makes action sequences great in the Mel Gibson Mad Max films are their grittiness and the realism of the chase sequences and CGI won't make it exciting in any way whatsoever. Add to that it doesn't look any more realistic than the original ones. You are not going to be very excited if you know that they are doing is in front of a green Screen. To add insult to injury, it will be released in 3-D. Looks very much like a money-grab exercise.

As for Mad Max 3, it sits between 2 and 1 in terms of quality with second one being the best out of the three. The difference in quality between the films are quite large. Even though 'Beyond the Thunderdome', at 107 minutes, is not that longer compared to 'Road Warrior' but it does feel so which is never a good thing for a straight up action film. The standout feature of the third film is its humor compared to the other two even though it is a bit uneven. Like the second film, the antagonist characters are also very rational in their actions and not cartoonish. Overall it is a good watch without being anywhere near as good as the second one or anywhere near as bad as the first one. It was made with a budget of $12 million and grossed around $35 million, making it the least successful out of the three. Fury Road's budget is a whopping $150 million and I can see it being a disaster at the box office since many of the viewers will be coming with no knowledge about the franchise.

Rating: 3/5

                                                                      

Иди и смотри (Come and See) (1985)

Director: Elem Klimov
Writers:  Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov
Cast:       Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Luibomiras Lauciavicius
Language: Russian

After finding an old rifle, a young boy joins a Russian partisans group (Russian resistance in Nazi occupied lands) and experiences the horrors of the Eastern front during second world war. Despite his protests from his mother, he joins the partisans with boyish glee but is left behind in their camps in the woods along those who are not ready to march on. He remains unharmed, along with a girl with whom he gets friendly there, as the Germans bomb the camp. He finds out that his whole family was killed along with many villagers due to German reprisals for aiding partisans. By then he is fully aware about the horrors of war but he is still not ready to see what comes next as he witnesses a village and its inhabitants gets torched by Nazis as part of their scorched earth policy during retreat.

The films begins in a Belarusian village in 1943. So by that time Germans had faced decisive defeat in battle of Stalingrad and in effect had lost the war. The film is from the view point of a boy who is in Nazi occupied parts of Soviet Union and were among the most affected people in the war as they became victims to the brutal fight between the occupying Germans and Russian partisans. They were looked down upon by the partisans for not joining the resistance and used to loot them for their supplies. They also became victims to German reprisals for supposedly aiding and abetting partisans. When Soviet Union finally won the war and Nazis began to retreat, they suffered even more as their villages were scorched by the latter. I had been watching some documentaries on second world war and the eastern front recently and was fully aware about the horrors that happened in that front. Western Front was child's play compared to the brutalities committed in the East. The film gives a visual depiction of the same with an excellent central performance from Aleksey Kravchenko, who plays the role of the  protagonist. If you want to get the full picture regarding Eastern front you may watch: War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin. Come & See is more of a micro view but it is essentially what you want to see, through the eyes of a foot soldier, since most films want to depict a story which is of strategic significance to the outcome of war. It is a shame that we don't get more films based on Eastern Front and the films done by the Hollywood machinery will live you with a blinkered view on the war. It is laughable that some people put films like Saving Private Ryan as a candidate for the greatest war film. 

I had been meaning to watch this film for a long time but couldn't manage for some reason or the other. Am glad that I procrastinated because in the meantime I had seen those documentaries that were  refereed to earlier. I was kind of prepared to see what the film depicts and could make more sense of it. The title of the film comes from Chapter 6 of 'Revelation of St. John', in which 'Come and See' is said in the first, third, fifth and seventh verses; as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Towards the end of film, we see the boy firing at a portrait of Hitler, while the archival footage go back in reverse through the events of war, Hitler'r rise, first world war and finally to a picture of a baby Hitler in his mother's hand. At that point the boy refuses to shoot and it kind of solidify the Russian bias in the film. But you can't really fault them for it and at the end of it you do see some perverse justification for the atrocities committed in Germany by the Red Army as they marched to Berlin.

Rating: 5/5