'Lifeguard', 'Personal Best' and the Kinds of Movies that Don't Exist Anymore | Reel Reflections #1
I just finished watching Sam Elliott’s breakthrough film, 1976’s ‘Lifeguard’, a simple yet meditative movie that’s as much a sexy beach romp with speedos, bikinis and sun as it is an examination of growing up, growing older and what it means to be yourself. I was thoroughly surprised. Filmed for $900,000 in the mid 1970’s, this is the kind of movie that made me think “we just don’t make movies like this anymore”.
In fact, I’ve recently been on a run of underseen, underacknowledged films of the past 50 years that have mightily impressed me. many of these movies are imperfect, but they represent a type of craft not seen much anymore. The big budget CGI movies shot on sound stages take up a predominant amount of the spending power that would otherwise be used to fund mid-to-low budget dramas that may not make as much (or any) money but elevate the art form in some way.
But we’ve known about this for many years now. As a 27-year-old film buff, I’ve been very much on the younger side of the ‘“film game”. I grew up at time where the MCU was what dominated the movie culture and big budget, high octane sequels, prequels, and franchise films were what studios were interested. For context, I was 9 (!!) years old when ‘Iron Man’ was released in 2008. These types of films that were abundant in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s are a far cry from what I grew up watching.
But enough doom-and-glooming. Let’s talk about what “Reel Reflections” is. This will be a weekly (yes weekly!) newsletter every Friday and will be a space for me to celebrate movies I’ve been watching recently, discuss what’s going on in the industry, highlight some of my favorite pieces of physical media, and anything else I’d like to discuss. Let’s now take a look back at 5 gems of years past that I’ve watched recently that I found charming, interesting our outright impressive that represent the kinds of movies we just don’t get anymore.
Lifeguard
Sam Elliott stars as Rick Carlson, a 32-year-old LA lifeguard wandering his way through life and dealing with as many beach antics as you can imagine while mentoring a much younger trainee. When he gets an invitation to his 15-year high school reunion, Carlson is suddenly faced with seeing all those people he grew up with again, most of whom have “real” careers and established lives, including old flame Cathy (Anne Archer). It’s an incredibly intriguing character study that feels thematically relevant despite being a perfect time capsule of life in the 1970’s.
Recently, ‘Lifeguard’ has been making noise through the film world thanks to The Big Picture podcast, where on recent episodes discussing physical media, Tracy Letts, Sean Fennessey, Chris Ryan and Tim Simons showed off the Fun City Editions Blu-ray release of the film.
As I finished the movie, I found myself yearning for more stories like this. Stories of simple people living their lives and learning who they are. Gone are the days of regular looking people living regular lives. Now, every star in every film looks as if they were pulled right off the factory floor to be as ripped as possible and put into big budget action films where the entire world is at stake. These types of low-budget slice of life’s are hardly present anymore and they’re consistently a refreshing and somehow nostalgic watch.
Personal Best
I’ve never quite seen the human body represented on screen like I did when I watched ‘Personal Best’, the famed screenwriter Robert Towne’s directorial debut in a film he also wrote and produced about two track and field Olympic hopefuls (Mariel Hemingway and actual athlete Patrice Donnelly) competing for a spot at the games and also managing to fall in love. It’s quite a beautiful movie, both in the way that it shows athletic performance on screen and the lesbian relationship away from the track. Now I won’t pretend to know the inner working of these kinds of relationships, but what I can say is that for 1982, it’s surprisingly progressive in depiction. It’s not made to be a big deal. The other athletes hardly acknowledge it and the head coach, played by Scott Glenn, doesn’t take issue with their relationship either, only their competitive natures. It’s surprising and refreshing to see.
On the flip side, one of the hardest things to nail in movies about sports is the actual competitions themselves. Having actors act athletic can be a total mixed bag with mostly negative results. See any number of these examples. But here, Towne uses all real track athletes, including former world #4 hurdler Donnelly in the film whose excellent as Tory Skinner, and while Hemingway wasn’t a real athlete, she trained for 9 months to nail the competitions depicted in the movie. I don’t know why more people don’t do this. We just discussed ‘Moneyball’ on The Film Box Podcast last week and we noticed largely the same issue except for Casey Bond, who plays relief pitcher Chad Bradford and nails the funky release Bradford used. Can you guess which sport Bond played?
But what impressed me most about ‘Personal Best’ is it displays the human body in action. Close ups of sweat-coated body parts doing the high jump, hurdles or throwing shot put almost feel perverse. Tracking shots of these women and men running along the track get you front and center for the extended racing depictions. And outside of the athletic performance, the human body is used incredibly effectively to move the story along through the interpersonal relationships of the characters. That’s a testament to the level of excellent performances throughout.
Simply put, ‘Personal Best’ is one of the best sports movies of all time, and it’s a shame it only has an old DVD release from Warner Archives.
Secret Admirer
Another type of movie we don’t see any more is the teen focused rom-com. This used to be a huge market, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s with movies like ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, ‘10 Things I Hate About You’, Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘She’s All That’ permeating the culture in that era. 1985’s ‘Secret Admirer’, the rom-com starring C. Thomas Howell, Kelly Preston and Lori Laughlin is oft forgotten but may be one of the earliest trailblazers of this type of movie.
The film stars Howell as Michael, a teenager who gets a mysterious love letter that he attributes to the popular Debbie (Preston) and pursues her with the help of his friend Toni (Laughlin), who is secretly the writer of the note. It’s a fun premise that blends some coming-of-age elements seen typically in the John Hughes films of that era with standard rom-com tropes (including an incredible ending chase for the girl’s love) and even hints of films like ‘Stand by Me’ or ‘The Outsiders’ in its portrayal of the group of friends.
The drawback, and why I think it never permeated the mainstream, is that it introduces ideas that truly are interesting, i.e. “who are Michael’s friends and why are they this mysterious but iron-clad group?” and trades them off for extended mistaken identity gags that run through both the main core and their parents. It’s rather repetitive by the end, but this movie holds up on the back of the three leads. Preston and Laughlin are both gorgeous and play their parts well and Howell is one fire. It’s surprising he didn’t have an even bigger leading man career a la John Cusack after this one. Pick this one up on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber.
Sea of Love
Al Pacino in a murder mystery in which he falls in love with the potential killer, played by Ellen Barkin? Also starring John Goodman as Pacino’s police partner? AND IT TAKES PLACE IN NEW YORK CITY? Sign me up!
How ‘Sea of Love’, Pacino’s 1989 effort that comes one year before both ‘Dick Tracy’ and ‘Godfather Part III’ hasn’t become a larger part of the lexicon of neo-noir cop movies is beyond me. For all intents and purposes, it was a success at the time, making over 110 million dollars on a budget of just $19 million. ‘Sea of Love’ should be in the same conversations today as films like Michael Mann’s ‘Thief’ or ‘Heat’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’, any number of early Coen Brothers films, or De Palma’s 1980’s double shot of ‘Blow Out’ and ‘Body Heat’.
The film itself follows Pacino’s police detective Frank Keller, a burnt-out alcoholic whose wife left him for a former colleague. When people start turning up dead after placing want-ads in the singles section of the paper he, alongside John Goodman’s Detective Sherman Touhey, begin investigating the folks who respond to the ads, including Barkin’s Helen Cruger. As the investigation unfolds, Keller finds himself falling for Helen, a real issue as more singles are getting killed.
It’s an awesome premise performed to perfection by the leads who are equal parts sexy, disillusioned and at times downright hilarious. Pacino especially is throwing 110mph in classic Pacino fashion, alternating between despondence and explosivity in what is the start of a serious career resurgence in the 90s.
I watched this one in a cool Blu-ray double feature with ‘Scent of a Woman’, but it’s also available on 4k from Kino Lorber.
One False Move
Another recent neo-noir first time watch, 1992’s ‘One False Move’ directed by Carl Franklin, maybe best known for directing Denzel Washington in ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ and ‘Out of Time’ alongside extensive tv work in the 2000’s. The film was written by Billy Bob Thornton while also starring Thornton, Cynda Williams and Michael Beach as three criminals in LA who kill drug runners for money and cocaine and skip town towards the south to sell it.
The real engine of the movie, though, is Bill Paxton as Dale “Hurricane” Dixon, the local police chief of Star City, Arkansas, where the criminals are seemingly headed. Why is Dixon called the Hurricane? Well, we don’t know. But what we do know is that Paxton is absolutely electric as the eccentric, fast-talking Hurricane. He whips in and out of scenes while displaying a shocking amount of aptitude for police work to out of town LAPD detectives John McFeely and Dud Cole. How Paxton doesn’t get nominated for an Academy Award is beyond me. It’s one of the best performances I’ve seen in a film in a long time.
In fact, it’s those scenes in Star City that really make the movie go for me personally. I was less intrigued in following the three nervous criminals as they venture across the country towards their seemingly inevitable capture. But the work in Star City, which essentially boils down to figuring out who the criminals are and setting a trap for them is captivating. It’s in these scenes where we get to see the sort of small-town police work Hurricane deals with - domestic disputes, local drunks and the like - alongside some real commentary on race relations in the south (McFeely is black and so are two of the criminals).
It’s worth watching alone for Paxton’s work, but there’s a lot to love about ‘One False Move’, which you can purchase from the Criterion Collection in 4k or Blu-Ray.
Physical Media Highlight
On each edition of Reel Reflections, I want to take a few moments to highlight a piece of physical media I own. This week, I’m showing off not 1, but 3 different editions of John Boorman’s “Excalibur”. Just this week I finally acquired the brand-new Arrow 4k Limited Edition Box of the epic Arthurian tale. Before then, I owned the Blu-Ray which was just released a few months ago with a fun new slipcase from Wal-Mart as well as the original snap case DVD (contrary to public opinion, I LOVE the snap cases and have a pretty sizable collection growing).
Funny part of this, though, is I have not seen ‘Excalibur’ yet! It’s been on my watch list for ages, and I’ve started it many times but always found the streaming quality or DVD quality lacking. That changes soon. We finish out Medieval May with ‘Excalibur’ on The Film Box Podcast later this month so I will finally see it on glorious 4k!
The Film Box
Speaking of The Film Box Podcast, this past week we revisited ‘Moneyball’, the 2011 baseball movie starring Brad Pitt to celebrate my wonderful co-host and co-founder of The First Picture House Connor Jameson’s birthday. It was his choice and as a self-proclaimed baseball and analytics nerd, this is a match made in heaven. It’s a great episode and I’ve already mentioned it once this newsletter so check it out!
And that’s going to do it for this first edition of Reel Reflections! See you next week to talk more movies and in the meantime, watch something great!