There are a few funny bits, but not nearly enough. One amusing scene has Whoopi trying to make out the words to the title song by the Rolling Stones and not being able to make sense of Mick Jagger’s phrasing.
The most interesting aspect is seeing what state-of-the-art office computing looked like in 1986.
Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons star.
The jungle setting is visually stunning.
It's powerful and moving, especially given that it's based on true events.
The stirring music is by Ennio Morricone.
Eastwood plays a US Marine who served in Korea and Vietnam. It’s now 1984 and he’s reaching the end of his career. He’s tasked with training a platoon of seemingly useless young marines who he will eventually end up leading into battle in Grenada.
It’s quite uneven but there’s lots to enjoy. There’s a wry sense of humour. And the thread dealing with Eastwood and his estranged wife (Marsha Mason) adds a welcome dose of human drama. I like the way the tough-as-nails exterior slowly reveals the vulnerability within, even if his croaky voice is difficult to hear.
Mario Van Peebles is good as the cocky young singer who eventually develops a begrudging respect for his leader.
This is the best of the John Hughes teen films, probably because it’s much funnier than the others. But I find it fascinating that even his comedy film has to have some serious “self-discovery” drama. This is played out as Ferris’s best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) learns to face up to his fears after trashing his father’s sports car.
The fourth-wall device works well – especially since it’s only Ferris, the narrator, who talks to camera.
The music is prominent, as always. You get songs by Yello, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Big Audio Dynamite. There’s also an especially memorable sequence in which Bueller mines "Twist and Shout" by The Beatles from a carnival float.
Like all Hughes’ films, adults are represented as one-dimensional authority figures to be scorned. And like The Breakfast Club, it mourns the passing of youth as the kids simultaneously want to join the adult world yet view that world with mistrust and contempt.
There's some intriguing casting. Stockard Channing seems underused as a friend (she's too charismatic to be given such a minor part). Jeff Daniels is credible as Rachel’s editor. In his first film role, Kevin Spacey plays a thief on the subway.
Split between New York and Washington, D.C., the bittersweet narrative has comic moments but isn’t a comedy as such – despite what’s presented on the DVD box.
Carly Simon provides the theme song in “Coming Around Again”, which also recurs as “Itsy Bitsy Spider”.
It’s not quite as engaging as you might hope. Streep and Nicholson are always excellent, but it could have been sharper, more poignant and more funny.
The sets are often inspired – in particular, the camera trickery that brings to life a series of impossible Escher-like staircases – and some of the puppets are highly inventive. But the aesthetics are ugly and parts of the plot seem stilted or disjointed. It’s less than a sum of its parts. The script went through multiple rewrites and it’s fascinating to see glimpses of plot threads that were either cut or left undeveloped.
Bowie seems uncomfortably miscast, lost in the labyrinth of his mid-1980s career. Even when he gets to sing, he’s performing some of his weakest material – so Labyrinth doesn’t work as a musical either. He should have been more extreme – nastier and funnier, hamming it up like a pantomime villain. Instead, it’s an oddly tepid performance.
Beyond those points it’s difficult to say why it ends up being a bit of an awkward mess – albeit an enjoyable mess. Indeed, it’s nearly brilliant, but the difference between nearly brilliant and actually brilliant turns out to be a huge one.
It’s an endearingly simple story that really hinges upon the appealing character created by Paul Hogan. He’s oddly believable as the unreconstructed bushman who can wrestle with or tame wild beasts.
The film would never be made now because of various un-PC lines about race and gender.
Like Splash, it works as both a fish-out-of-water comedy and as a sweet romance. Linda Kozlowski is charming as Sue Charlton, who falls for the subject she researches. And Mark Blum is appropriately unlikeable as the man she thought she was in love with. There are enough laughs to keep you watching.
The plot is thin indeed – a quest for the mystical Ajanti Dagger, which can defeat evil – but that’s not really the point. It’s a good-natured romp with a few (but not enough) laughs. As with Coming to America, the scenes featuring Eddie Murphy are dynamite. He’s incredibly watchable. All the rest is a daft contrivance that you tolerate to get to the next scene he appears in.
An American scholar named Dr. Slaughter (Sigourney Weaver) works for a pro-Arab think tank in London. To supplement her meagre pay, she takes on work as an escort. Even more improbably, she only starts doing this because someone anonymously sends her a videotape about the escort industry. Incredibly, she doesn’t even adopt a fake name. (She might not have minded people knowing about her dual career, but the sexist snobs at her institute surely would have done.) Through this new line of work she meets Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine), a diplomat brokering a peace deal in the Middle East and a man with dangerous enemies.
The disjointed, badly plotted narrative lurches from scene to scene. It hints at a complex web of interconnected threads, but the “big reveal” – when it finally arrives – turns out to be disappointingly simplistic.
Many of the scenes seem to have been invented as an excuse to get Sigourney Weaver to take her clothes off – such as her sitting in the bath and calling in the landlord to tell him that the shower doesn’t work. Yet the film tries to have its cake and eat it by giving her lines about gender equality and being “in control”. You wonder how the iconic star of Alien, Ghostbusters, Working Girl and Gorillas in the Mist could possibly have been happy accepting this role.
On the plus side, there’s a certain chemistry between Weaver and Caine. Most of the acting is reasonably strong, and the script avoids cliché. But Half Moon Street falls flat because director Bob Swaim seems unable to handle basic storytelling or plot logic. Instead, he creates a muddled mess that feels both half-baked and exploitative.
The plot can be complex and difficult to follow. Still not sure why the Russian spy was held in a fake hotel constructed in an aircraft hangar, but all of this probably makes more sense in the original novel by John Hale.
Caine is absolutely excellent, showing more diversity and range in his acting than he’s often credited for. Havers is likeable, too, despite his years of TV overexposure. There are also parts for James Fox and John Gielgud.
It’s a consistently engrossing low-budget English drama that’s worth seeing if only for the scene in which Michael Caine gets his friend (Barry Foster) drunk on vodka while concealing his own sobriety.
Trying to come to terms with her bizarre new reality, she spends a few days in her childhood world, with her family and school friends, and faces some fundamental dilemmas. Can she change her life and avoid the mistakes she knows she is destined to make? Should she break up with Charlie, who seems to love her so much but who will later betray her? What can she do differently now that she has all the knowledge and wisdom of her 1985 self and perspective on what really matters? The film explores these questions in a way that’s always humorous and often profound.
The 1980s-to-1950s/60s time-travel plot gives this plenty in common with Back to the Future (1985), but I like the fact that this film doesn’t bother with the technical “rules” about changing the future by interfering with the past. Quite the opposite: at one point, Peggy Sue gives Charlie the lyrics to a song she says she wrote. It turns out to be “She Loves You” by The Beatles (which would be a hit in 1963).
Given such a warm and intelligent script, Kathleen Turner gives the performance of a lifetime, perfectly conveying all the excitement and confusion of what she’s going through. Nicolas Cage is extremely charming, as the role demands, and he has a strange, goofy appeal that’s a result of his huge charisma.
It’s incredibly romantic, but that romance is all the deeper and more affecting because of the interwoven threads of hope and regret that run through it.
Robert Redford and Debra Winger are New York lawyers investigating the case of an artist’s work that may or may not have been destroyed in a fire. Terence Stamp is the shifty art dealer mixed up in a fraudulent insurance scheme. And Daryl Hannah is the artist’s daughter who wants the painting her dad dedicated to her – if indeed it even survived.
There’s something remarkable about the way the film sprawls all over the place and yet still works. Redford and Winger have real chemistry and build up a lot of good-natured warmth as their relationship develops. Both are hugely appealing. The former never seems to age. The latter has a lovely voice and an irresistible smile. Maybe they should have made more films together.
Daryl Hannah is a little troubling. She’s meant to be an edgy performance artist, but she’s so sleepy and noncommittal that she seems barely present. You’d expect some dynamism or passion in someone who’s trying to push boundaries. But when you see her “performing” her “art”, it’s a ludicrous and unintentionally amusing affair involving light projections, photos of herself, objects bursting into flame and tape recordings of her voice. A clunky mess. Laurie Anderson she is not. The film would have worked better if this character was just a regular person wanting what was rightfully hers rather than an “enigma”. Or maybe they just had the wrong actor for the part.
Another oddity is the chirpy music, which sometimes seems misjudged for certain scenes. But because the mood and tone keep changing as we race from one genre to another, it’s possibly just struggling to keep up. At the very least, you can see that the soundtrack had to be varied.
But these are minor flaws. I really liked the fact that it’s so unusual. Plus, the climax is genuinely exciting and the comedy never eclipses the drama. Quirky, rewarding and somehow fascinating.
