Silver Streak (1976)
My mother, nostalgic for the late Gene Wilder, wanted to revisit this fondly remembered adventure from her youth. Turns out some things are better remembered fondly than revisited. This is a movie that tries to do be several things - a sexy adult romance, a Hitchcockian mystery, an action farce, a buddy movie, and finally a straight-up actioner - and only really succeeds at that last one, with a shoot-'em-up climax as protracted as that of almost any comic book movie today. Wilder was no doubt a swell guy, but there's nothing to his character, and Pryor's makes almost no sense. And the treatment of the woman and minor black characters is... not the best.
In forty years, will
The Avengers still be cool? Cooler than this, surely? Still, the window into the past is odd enough to make a viewing more than a complete waste of time.
C
Flashdance (1983)
A young woman (Jennifer Beals, who was 19 at the time and I think plays a 19-year old) welds in a Pittsburgh factory by day, and does clothed erotic dances in a seedy bar full of her coworkers at night. (When she sleeps or walks her dog, or where her family or non-dancer friends are, is a mystery.) When her considerably older (at least late 30s) lame-o boss pesters her for a date, she finally gives in, has him order take-out pizza, and brings him back to her place, where, to his befuddlement, she shags him, after which point she's pretty much in love with him. (
I don't get it, either.) Both these movies have romantic entanglements that make zero sense. Say what you like about Jane Foster in
Thor, at least that Aussie's
hot - money or not, this boss guy (and Wilder in
Silver Streak) are just plain
schlubs! Anyhow, despite having no apparent formal training, our Alex yearns to be a ballet dancer. That's about it for plot.
A reasonably brisky 98 minutes, with a number of extended dance scenes, make this feel like a chopped-down abridgement. Maybe it was. The key to this film is its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer: this is basically the low-budget, female-aimed test run for
Top Gun, with all the arbitrary plotting, style over substance that implies. Is it good? Lord, no, but there's
something to it. Its run-down steel town in fall look is kind of beautiful, in its own way, and Beals lights up the screen. It's easy to see how a generation of adolescent girls too young to see through the story's BS or care about the dude's utter lack of sex appeal could look up to this older teenager as the ultimate in (then) modern womanhood, completely with a rich, besotted boyfriend who's about as sexually intimidating as a Ken doll. Amazon is currently selling blu-rays of this not-good yet iconic flick for $5. Even at such a bargain price, I'm not gonna be suckered into that... I
think.
C+