‘80s Action Week: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)

Although the series would define what so many viewers now think of as “post-apocalyptic,” the first Mad Max was not really a sci-fi film at all. Rather, it was a low-budget gearhead thriller about a loose-cannon Aussie cop who takes on some violent motorcycle gangs. Its director, George Miller, a doctor, had been inspired to make it after spending a little too much time around the emergency room – hence all the random cutaways to eyeballs and the film’s almost clinical fascination with realistic violence.

It was with this second film, known to most of the world simply as Mad Max 2, that director Miller and star Mel Gibson took Max (who lost his wife and child in the earlier film’s shattering finale) and projected him into a post-WWIII future. Now, society had fully crumbled and small, ragged bands of ruthless warriors fought desperately for oil across a bleak desertscape. It was an epic gesture, to be sure, but it wasn’t a particularly grandiose one. I don’t know what kind of budget he was actually working with, but Miller craftily used the natural terrain of Australia to create his science-fiction wasteland. In effect, he did with The Road Warrior what Jean-Luc Godard did with Alphaville, creating a faux-futuristic prism through which to see the present.

'80s Action Week: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

Yes, it’s still good. Steven Spielberg’s 1981 masterpiece hasn’t dated one bit, in part because it was already something of a throwback – a blend of cutting-edge effects and technique with a defiantly old-fashioned sensibility. Spielberg took the template of the action serial – those corny, disposable, cliff-hangery pieces of escapist pulp from the ‘30s and ‘40s – and crafted something whose speed, narrative shorthand, and element of surprise were very much of the moment. Its hero, wisecracking archeologist adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) was a combination of Buster Crabbe, Clark Gable, and, well, Harrison Ford himself, whose cynical cool had just made Han Solo one of the most iconic heroes in movie history. In a sense, this is what Spielberg has always done. (Heck, he did something similar in Lincoln – mixing a post-Nixonian study of the infernal American political machine with an earnest, Capraesque belief that men of good will can still accomplish great things.)

‘80s Action Week: Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

So I took an unintended break from this blog for the past few months. Not because I didn’t have anything to write about, but because I had too much to write about, most of it for other places. One of the big things I worked on over this time was a list for Vulture of the 25 Best Action Movies Since Die Hard, a piece that got a lot of people reading and thinking and calling me names, as intended. One of the best things about writing it was revisiting the great action films of the 1990s – kind of a banner decade, what with films like Speed, The Rock, Point Break, Hard-Boiled, Terminator 2, etc. But one of my regrets about the list was that, because we pegged it to Die Hard, I had to ignore a lot of the great action films of the 1980s – an altogether more complicated and darker lot, I think, than most of the ones that came later.

So, I’ve decided to dedicate the first week of my return to the blog to ‘80s Action. For the next five days, each day I will highlight one great, seminal action film from this decade. Here’s the first one.

An Economic Recovery Plan for the Land of Oz

In his excellent BFI Classics book on The Wizard of Oz, Salman Rushdie comments on the odd fact that everybody in Oz always seems so happy, despite the fact that they’ve apparently been enslaved by the powers of evil. Indeed, the Ozites’ joyous demeanor in the face of political and social catastrophe suggests that they may be ignoring the true desperation of their circumstances. We’ve seen this before – in Greece, most recently, but also in lots of other economies whose “zest for life” was much praised even as those nations were inching towards demographic and fiscal catastrophe. Luckily, in the case of Oz, disaster can still be averted. Here’s a four-point economic recovery plan for the Land of Oz.

Forgotten Films: High Tide (Gillian Armstrong, 1987)

It pains me to no end to call Gillian Armstrong's High Tide a "forgotten" film. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, it was anything but. It was the film people pointed to when talking about Judy Davis's greatness as an actress. It was also the film people pointed to when talking about the brilliance of its director, a woman who would go on to make a number of other masterpieces and near-masterpieces, including Little Women, Last Days of Chez Nous, and Oscar & Lucinda. (Armstrong and Davis had also collaborated on the excellent My Brilliant Career earlier in their careers, a film that put both of them on the map.) But slowly, this staggering, heartbreaking tale of a mother and daughter reuniting started to vanish from viewers' radars. It has never had a proper DVD release in the U.S. -- even in Australia, it was released in a crappy pan & scan edition that is now out of print -- so maybe there were some rights issues that prevented its gaining a wider audience. (It's a gorgeous film, so presentation matters a great deal.) The good news, however, is that it's currently available on Netflix streaming, in a pretty good-looking version, so you could watch it right this very minute if you so wanted.

Two by Frank Perry: Man on a Swing (1975) and Dummy (1979)

I’ve written about the work of Frank Perry before, both on this blog and elsewhere. He’s one of the great unsung American filmmakers of the 1960s and 70s, though he’s now known primarily for the ill-fated Mommy Dearest (and, to a lesser extent, The Swimmer). During the 1960s, he and his then-wife Eleanor, who wrote his scripts, had a remarkable run of magnificent films, many of which are still hard to find: Last Summer, Trilogy, and Diary of a Mad Housewife among them. After their divorce, Frank continued to create work of genuine interest – even if it couldn’t quite match what he did with Eleanor. Recently, two of his films from the 1970s made their way to home video, through Olive Films’ lovely Blu-ray/DVD of 1975’s Man on a Swing, and Warner Archive’s excellent DVD of 1979’s Dummy. This came as a shock to me: While both films were well-known at the time (the latter in particular was an award-winning TV movie written by Ernest Tidyman, screenwriter of The French Connection and the novelist who gave us Shaft), I didn’t think they’d ever be properly released.

In a Moving Image Source piece I did on the Perrys some years ago, I discussed the clinical aspect of their films, brought about perhaps (I speculated) by Eleanor’s work as a psychologist. All the films they did together have the quality of scientific inquiries, as if their subjects were under a microscope. Indeed, this is partly what makes the films so compelling: Eleanor’s psychological precision crossbred with Frank’s sensitivity to performance results in something both Olympian and very human.

Abbas Kiarostami on Japan, Actors, and His Use of Sound in Like Someone in Love

Abbas Kiarostami’s Like Someone in Love is a genuinely beguiling work of art. It furthers the director’s recent project of portraying relationships that are constantly in flux -- a theme that reached its pinnacle in his 2010 masterpiece Certified Copy. But the mysteries of that earlier film were more overt – percolating out into the very atmosphere of the film, so that its setting became as mutable as its human interactions – while the new film has a greater precision to it, and a cleaner, even more suspenseful, narrative arc. The story of the odd relationship between an older Japanese man and a young female student, Like Someone in Love seems concerned with internal and external space. Its early scenes are riddled with phone calls, and therefore with spoken words that seem like incomplete thoughts (since most of the time we’re only ever hearing one half of a conversation). But as the film progresses, offscreen space, and the sounds of what’s happening beyond the frame, gather devastating importance.

Anyway, it’s a lovely movie, and you should see it if you haven't. And if you have seen it, you should probably see it again; I know I need to. Its director needs no introduction: He is, quite simply, among the small handful of directors who continue to be of seismic importance to world culture. From his early masterpieces -- both documentaries and fictions -- much of them made with Iranian schoolchildren, to his later experiments with narrative form and technology, he’s been at the cutting edge of everything we know as cinema. I sat down with him for a bit during the New York Film Festival last year. Here’s our chat.