Turtle-20 Reviews

The Sure Thing (1985)

Stands up to time pretty well, actually...

[10/10 · 21 February 1999]

Just for the heck of it, I pulled out my copy of The Sure Thing and watched it again. It's held up well since I first saw it on video in 1986. Yeah, the music is a little old, and Jason, Alison's boyfriend, still grates on me because I looked like him, but in all other respects it has held up well. What carries it is that it's the classic John Cusack Movie, where Cusack is just being... John Cusack. Totally real, totally unpretentious. You can see it in everything else he's done, even things of totally different style, like "Eight Men Out" and "The Grifters." He just rules the screen and the production ends up recalling pictures like "His Girl Friday" and "It Happened One Night." This has stood up to nearly fifteen years of viewing pretty well. Compare and contrast other stuff of that era, like "St. Elmo's Fire," and "Fast Times At Ridgemont High." Or any Tom Hanks movie of the period.

I've now come back five years after originally posting this review (it's now May, 2007) and I say, this film STILL stands as a classic Cusack, even after I have (in the interim) loved "Pushing Tin," "Being John Malkovich" and of course the amazing "High Fidelity." And to this day, I have been known to say, in bars, "BARKEEP! Bring this man...a TROUGH... of spritzer!"

And just remember...

"Credit cards work on a completely different kind of lock!"

Zapped! (1982)

Get your remote ready

[6/10 · 13 February 1999]

Hey, it's a 1980s video-type movie. It's a one-gag picture with some amusing moments, some dumb moments, and a titillating finale. Don't pay more than a buck to rent it. Scott Baio is... well, Scott Baio. Enough said.

Beach Ball (1965)

McSixties Movie (tm)

[6/10 · 13 February 1999]

You remember that routine that they used to do on NBC'S Saturday Night, the "Sixties Movie" thing? This is it. The lighting, the music (though persuasive... the Righteous Brothers kick butt), the chicks, the cars, the comic relief. It has "1965" scrawled all over it.

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

Wave the flag and pass out the sandwiches

[8/10 · 13 February 1999]

The film is an excellent period piece... one of those Hollywood wartime spectaculars that sort of carries out that sense of wartime thrift -- use just enough plot to glue the songs lightly together, and make sure you wave the flag enough to produce some enthusiasm for the "Buy War Bonds" trailer. The plot's thin, the music's good, the dancing OK, and it's actually pretty cool to see stars being "themselves." Peter Lorre and Sidney Greenstreet are hilarious in a two-minute gag that evokes "The Maltese Falcon."

O.C. and Stiggs (1985)

Could have been better

[6/10 · 10 February 1999]

To really understand "OC and Stiggs," you need to have read and absorbed the October, 1982 edition of National Lampoon, on which the film is based. It was a bizarre pseudo-history of OC and Stiggs and they raise chaos in Arizona during their summer vacation. John Waters could have done an astonishing job translating this monster to film, but instead they gave it to Robert Altman, who turned the film into a reference-fest about his own movies (Nashville, et.al) and other films like "Apocalypse Now," to the point of mindlessly casting Dennis Hopper as Sponson, the paranoid VietNam vet. it could have been better, but then again, it could easily have slipped into "Bachelor Party" style shallow stupidity. At least the film is inscrutable. Don't try to find it on video... nobody has it. I have a bootleg from a video rental from 1986.

Zelig (1983)

I still don't know how he did it.

[9/10 · 10 February 1999]

I still don't know how he did half the visual effects in this film, sticking Zelig into all sorts of historical footage. I have to believe this was the inspiration for the "I hafta pee" scene in "Forrest Gump." Maybe the whole film.

Face/Off (1997)

Almost laughably inept

[2/10 · 8 January 1999]

Come on, why does this merit a 10 from ANYone? This film is laughable... predictable, implausible, the "science" leaves holes all over the place, and even what was supposed to be the crowning achievement, the final chase to the death, looked like a slightly-more-expensive outtake from "Miami Vice." Where to start? Wooden dialogue, shallow characterizations, way, WAY too many attempts to be "arty" in an MTV kind of way. I don't think I have enough space here to point out even the BIG flaws in this film. Leave it on the shelf.