Mike’s Murder. James Bridges. 1984.

I’ve had the soundtrack album (by Joe Jackson (not one of the Jackson siblings)) since I was a teenager:

It’s pretty odd as soundtrack albums go: It’s got three vocal songs on the first side, and then instrumentals on the reverse. I kinda sorta assumed that perhaps only the instrumentals were in the actual movie, but then Jackson had embellished them into vocal versions for the album?

I guess I’ll find out tonight!

Hm… Jackson is credited with “additional music” in the opening credits… not a good sign…

This movie is by a director I know nothing about, but he’s done stuff like Urban Cowboy and The China Syndrome… which are, I guess, well-received big-budget movies? This seems distinctly low-budget.

Hm, not, $6.3M in 1984 isn’t that bad. But it totally, utterly bombed at the box office.

Still, he went on to direct Perfect, the vehicle for Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta (which also failed commercially and critically), and then did Bright Lights, Big City with Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and the rest of that crowd, which, again, wasn’t a success.

This isn’t a good movie. All the tension depends on us caring about these characters a lot, but we’re given no reason to do so. If the actors had been charming, that might have helped, but they’re pretty useless; Debra Winger is by far the best of them. The cinematography is relentlessly blah, so there’s not even that.

The structure is also way … strange. It’s basically about a guy running from the mob, but we mainly follow the guy’s girlfriend. And everything takes so long. She goes to visit his former boss/boyf and they’re in that garden, talking, for what seems like eons.

They do use some of the vocal Jackson songs, though: As background music playing on the stereo in some scenes. Makes sense.

Sleeper. Woody Allen. 1973.

Hey! Woody slapstick. One of his earlier, funnier movies.

I was indeed amused by the slapstick (it’s very Lucille Ball) and the one-liners, but I do think that he could have used something other than improv versions of Yakety Sax as the soundtrack.

That stuff gets on your tits after a while.

There’s some hilarious scenes in here, like when Diane Keaton does Marlon Brando. All the Keaton/Allen scenes have great comedy timing; as a pair they are impeccable.

I guess you could make the case that it’s a bit scattered, but I think it works a lot better than it should.

Naked Lunch. David Cronenberg. 1991.

It’s been a long long while since I read Naked Lunch… and I’ve seen this movie before, but can’t remember anything about it other than the typewriter.

But… all the autobiographical bits (Burroughs killing his wife, for instance) weren’t in the book? Were they?

This film is kinda restoring my faith in Cronenberg. Many of his 80s movies weren’t nearly as interesting as I thought they were, but he really leans into the material here. There’s a lot of straightening out (in all senses) of the source material, but otherwise it would have been an experimental movie, I guess. I mean, it’s a pretty straightforward film now, but one that retains a lot of the flavour of the novel, which is pretty impressive.

I kinda wonder how he convinced anybody to give him the money required for this pretty lavish movie after Dead Ringers had totally bombed a few years before.

This was another bomb, but not as bombey (that a word) as that movie.

I mean… I don’t think anybody could have imagined this doing as well as it even did, but perhaps there’s just some Burroughs fans at the studio that wanted to throw some money around?

The best bit in this movie is the scene in the car where they just read a Burroughs bit.