HERE'S THE SKINNY ON THIS PHAT BLOG: The Good and Jay!!! enjoy regular communication via email. Through this electronic mail they've discussed the ending of LOST (which was good--haters), the Wire (which was awesome--haters), and the need for cheap Mexican robot labor (just kidding). Below are excerpts from that communication focusing on Sylvester Stallone's 1981 classic, "Nighthawks."
The Goob: I'm going to lay it out there right away: my favorite thing, retrospectively, was that the opening scene featured Sly in drag conducting a sting operation.
Jay!!!: My favorite part about the opening drag sting operation is that it actually paid off in the end. I would have never guessed that such a throwaway scene would ultimately end up helping Sly stop terror. I also love that the movie had a really dark late 70s feel, yet Sly dressed as a woman twice. Good for him. You know what else this movie made me miss? When the go to terrorists in movies were the IRA or knock offs of the IRA. Why did we ever fear the Irish or anyone from Britain?
The Goob: I think it has to do with their teeth. Or their incomprehensible accents. I do think you have to be legitimately concerned about any terrorist who, in his terrorism ruse, intentionally includes wooing an attractive perfume counter girl. Poor girl- not only was she blown up, she was blown up with a sad heart as she watched this charming suitor walk out the door. Anyhow, my favorite thing about WULFGAR was how he called in his big 'blow against British colonialism' but then called off his dogs against that cause when he got in a bit of a pinch and decides to focus his efforts against the fact that the UN is located in America, near as I can tell. So we've got a mercenary terrorist. I guess they're the most dangerous type: angered by injustice from whichever corner is most convenient to attack.
Jay!!!: I never really thought about Wulfgar's motivation. I figured he just liked exploding things. I did appreciate his very creepy, "You're going to a better place," line right before he killed someone. Bad guys need creepy catchphrases. I also enjoyed the relationship he shared with the psychotic woman character...the one who gets a very anti-climactic shot in the head at the end of the movie. The movie also did a good job of introducing stuff early that played a part later. When Wulfgar first arrives in the US, they show a shot of him with the strange air trolley thing he eventually hijacks right behind him. That was a nice touch. I suppose it's what they say: If you introduce an air trolley in the first act, someone has to hijack it by the end of the movie. This does present a few "only in the movies" logic gaps: why do so many UN delegates decide to leave some big party only to ride the air trolley? How did Wulfgar's assassin lady sneak a gun into the UN, shoot someone, and quickly leave without being noticed. I know it was the 80's but surely an international meeting of delegates from every country would have better security than the three female security guards employed by the building. Right? RIGHT?!?!
The Goob: Here's the problem with my life. I only started living it about six years ago when I finished college. Prior to that I lived, unbeknownst to me, in a very isolated bubble called Iowa, where the things that happen in the world don't usually happen, and the constructs of the world which are presented to you aren't always entirely accurate. So I have no way of saying how difficult it might have been to take a gun to the UN in the 80s. According to a friend of mine, air travel standards were so lax before 9/11 that buddies of his used to, as a gag, put any person who passed out at one of their parties on a one-way flight. Now, in the world in which I've been living for the past six years, this is logistically impossible. You would need at least two accessory persons to situate said passed out person on the plane, nevermind getting through security and so forth. I know airline travel used to be much more adventurous and fancy and less like getting a non-invasive anal examination, but I find it hard to believe that it was ever so lax that you were able to just come and go as you pleased with a passed out person. So I'm in complete agreement with you on the surface, but I've come to the realization that my construct of the 1980s might just be one big American Heartland Illusion.
Also we must consider the fact that UN delegates aren't actually as important as we're led to believe. Think about it this way: if there was some kind of job that someone from your plant had to be nominated to do, who would you nominate? It would probably either be someone who really likes to travel and wants a change of scenery, or the person you most want out of your hair so she can file her nails in someone else's office complex, right? So here's my new theory: UN delegates are actually bureaucratic outcasts, so if they get shot, their peers, while acting appropriately outraged for the media, will actually think, "Oh thank goodness. Janice's term was almost up, and I don't know how I was going to put up with her goddamn nail file for the next seven years."
Speaking of foreshadowing/details paying off later in the movie, here was my favorite setup: the head of the counter-terrorism group reporting that Wulfgar's interests include fancy clothes, expensive food, and nightlife. Because what international terrorist doesn't love to bask in the occasional disco packed with people who can verify his whereabouts?
Jay!!!: First off, I don't think it was the fact that you grew up in Iowa that caused you not to know how to bring an armed weapon into the UN. I think it was the fact you were only a three-month old developed fetus during the release of this movie. You probably had other things on your mind. Your points on air travel were interesting though. It would have been great to put Dave on airplanes in college. I fear Dave would have woken up in Seattle though and gone about his business for a few hours before realizing, "I'm not in Ames." Then he'd shrug and continue to go about his business.
Second off, good point about the UN delegates. We should probably just get rid of them now and save all the good people in other countries a lot of consternation. Is it okay to say that? I don't think it probably is. Whatever though.
Third off, I loved the foreshadowing and the Wulfgar showing up at a disco. I loved this because I thought disco had died by 1981, but it must have died in 1981, the year we were both born. This might mean that when disco died, it gave way to us. We are now the living embodiment of disco music. I bet you didn't know that. Going back to Wulfgar though, the guy who played him really didn't know how to act charming. Every time he was wooing some dumb dame, he came off as creepy. Actually, I thought he was supposed to be creepy, but he wasn't. The best part about Wulfgar hanging around New York discos was that somehow, someway Sly Stone was able to identify a recently plastic surgeried Wulfgar in a night club based on a scribble he drew in "learn about terrorists" class. That's good police work.
I'm done numbering offs, but how great was Lando in this movie? He was so nonsense and then he became no nonsense. What a character arc!
The Goob: I was pretty disappointed with Lando, mostly because instead of getting to be a major jive turkey in the final chase he walked into a slashing blade and spent the rest of the movie nursing that nasty face-cut. However, he did have a superlative jheri curl and mustache combo going on.
Back to the disco scene: the whole time Sly and Lando were walking through that crowd I was waiting for them to bust it out so they could "blend in" with the crowd. Especially considering all of the instruction they received about how Wulfgar is going to know everything about the people who are hunting him, the least they could have done was a little bob 'n weave action. In fact we probably should have had Sly doing the drag thing in that scene as well, leading to what would have been the greatest scene of 1981: Lando and drag-Sly disco dancing together, hopefully on roller skates. For the record though, I think you're right about disco being officially dead before 1981: Disco Demolition Night occured in 1979, and there's no better signal for the death of a genre than TNT and a forfeited baseball game.
I saw the sketch pad angle coming a mile away, and I loved every second of it. I almost peed my couch like an overexcited puppy when Sly took out the pad again in the disco to make that one last erasure that would reveal the new face of Wulfgar.
Was it just me or did Sly riding up to the foreshadowed cable car via the wire winch seem like it would have taken so long that the hostages might just want to kill themselves?
Jay!!!: I totally agree that Sly and Lando should have started dancing. Did you ever play any of the Grand Theft Auto games? Sometimes those characters would just start dancing awkwardly amidst tension and murderers. That should have occurred in this movie. I also loved that Wulfgar, for wanting to be a covert secret terrorist, was really kind of an idiot when it came to hiding his identity. He could have just brushed off Sly's creepy staring as, "that guy looks like he might dress in drag and also, he's staring at me." But instead, he wigs out and shoots a gun in the air. It's as if he wanted to be caught! We need to find the foremost expert on Nighthawks to see what the psychological reasoning behind Wulfang's lust for the chase is all about.
The whole cable car scene in and of itself is pretty amusing. They painted Wulfgar and his debutante as these soulless killers, yet they let Sly go? Wouldn't it make more sense to shoot Sly? Or do they think cops operate under the movie rule: "If they kill a cop they have to be caught; if they kill a French UN representative, we'll, uh, we'll I guess chase them for a bit or something." I applaud the movie for not sending Lando up the zip line and then having him killed. It's very rare for a movie not to kill off the black partner in a white/black duo.
I've been amazed during this fantastic rewatch of cheesy action movies how the movies progressed. In the early 80s, the genre really wasn't that bad. The stars seemed to try, and Sly actually seemed to want to be a decent actor. The movies were grounded a bit more in reality, and the bad guys didn't have strange, cartoony gimmicks. Then as time went on, the movies ramped up the action (presumably because test audiences of inbreds told them they liked it when them things blew up) and ramped down the need for a decent story. The movies basically became a caricature of themselves. The actors became parodies of themselves. And audiences grew tired of the entire genre. Then the actors themselves started to play even more amped up parodies of themselves in hopes to win back their fans. I guess I never realized action movies followed this pattern. Sure, Nighthawks has its moments that didn't age well--Sly in drag, a discotheque, a female love interest for Sly introduced to us solely to set up the end scene of the movie, etc, but the film really tried to feel real, something Rocky III and anything past 1987 failed to do.
The Goob: I want to mention a couple things that I enjoyed about the chase scene before we get into the philosophical discussion of the ultra-action genre. On the note of Wulfgar's rather risky maneuvers, I loved the foolishness of how his first living arrangement in America fell through: the innocent female (picked up in a night club, natch) found his enormous padded case of grenades and weapons in her closet. This is not the kind of thing a wary international terrorist should be doing. Also, how does a man get a trunk like that across the Atlantic? I shipped my belongings from Chicago to L.A. using Amtrak, but I left my explosives in a climate-controlled storage warehouse. I'm no idiot.
Then, I loved how the climatic chase scene was facilitated by the fact that Wulfgar chose to use his last bullet to shoot out a light bulb despite the fact that he had a considerable tactical advantage over Fox and DeSilva. Minor foolishness to advance a plot is a great Summer of Aciion staple.
And speaking of appropriate foolishness: I'm glad you brought up the escalating foolishness of action movies in the decade of our youth. I'd meant to discuss a similar issue which I noticed when I watched Running Man, in which Trent Link stands in for Arnold Schwarzenegger at the beginning when he's wearing a beard. The specific point I wanted to raise is this: I understand why people of approximately our age are so cynical and critical of movies. There were so many movies in the mid to late 80s that were just inexorably poorly made. In Running Man for instance, Arnold et al are able to foil the totalitarian government state by accessing the cable distribution system, critical junctions of which are located within the gladiatorial gaming area where the titular 'running' occurs. What? This is basically like putting a judge's chambers inside a prison. Eventually, the judge will get gang-raped in the hall, and he will get coerced into making bad rulings. The situation is blatantly and irrevocably fucked from the outset. And therefore there is no way it would happen. And so, thanks to such glaring ridiculousness, people became so skeptical that we now have to have IMDB pages dedicated to every time you can see a quarter inch of a boom mike in Throw Momma from the Train. Somehow I missed the movies which caused this cynicism, but after my enthusiastic foray into the Summer of Action, I get it. I still don't like it and think people should loosen their belts and enjoy the entertainment they're partaking of, or just quit partaking of it, but I get it.
Jay!!!: I think the problem you mention breeds contempt from the viewer because of how obviously lazy the writing is. People don’t like to be disrespected, and when a climactic scene in a movie seems obvious or contrived, it can be offensive. I think what happened to action movies in the 80’s is similar to what is happening with 3D movies right now…only it took longer to develop (because a new hit movie didn’t have to come out every week in the 80s). The movies started out being well made because a lot of effort was put forth…then Hollywood saw dollar signs and started churning out poorly produced copies. The first few copies still did well, even though they weren’t very good, so it caused a downward spiral effect where a lot of the action movies became cash grabs instead of actual movies. I’m not saying every action movie has to be Aliens or Terminator 2 or even First Blood but having an actual plot with consistency and character development is okay. And yes, I think Terminator 2 had character development. Edward Furlong went from hanging out with Ug in an arcade to essentially saving the entire world from an inevitable robot takeover, at least until the two shitty sequels came about. What I’m saying is our cynicism is totally justified.
The Goob: I absolutely agree that the cynicism is justified and it's been fun to get this time and soul-consuming exposure to exactly where that cynicism came from. These are bad movies. It's OK to be mad at them. However, for a long time I've been flummoxed by the tendency of critics and the general public to use any excuse to deride a movie. People will find the smallest reason to just write an entire thing off, like, say, "Magnolia is so retarded, it has frogs falling from the sky, and that's awful." This is clearly a wrong opinion. Magnolia is brilliant. Especially the frogs part. I think the cynicism imbued in people due to prior experiences with lazily written schlock unfairly influences a number of opinions.
Jay!!: Back to Nighthawks, I totally forgot about him leaving his explosives in his new girlfriend’s apartment. I couldn’t quite get over that when I initially watched it. That girl was clearly brand new to New York or had recently come out of a coma of some sort—who lets a guy she just meets that looks sort of creepy (I know the creepy was this movie’s dashing) move in literally right away? I don’t even think a day elapsed. Of course, like all women in the late 70s/early 80s the girl was a stewardess who only cared about dancing, so maybe she deserved to die? I think she deserved her comeuppance a tad more than the poor perfume girl at the beginning of the movie. If anything, that scene helped us further our realization that security in the 1980’s was flagrantly lax: we’ve covered how easy it was to sneak weapons into the UN, murder an Interpol agent, and leave…now we know how easy it is to sneak chests of explosives onto an airplane when you look similar to but not quite like the most wanted man in your country.
As a Scientist, I think it would be interesting for you to watch Sly’s entire catalog of films in order and track when he hit his stride, when he declined, and all the outlying peaks and valleys in between. You and Viceroy already covered his auspicious and most cocksure humble beginnings. He clearly rocked it for a bit, and then he made Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. I would like to watch the evolution of Sly, but it would take too much time and ultimately make me a worse person. Hence, I’ve commissioned Science to complete such a task. Don’t worry though, as a man of business, I’ll take any data you obtain and manipulate it to serve the interests of whatever I feel like proving that day. Godspeed.
The Goob: You know, I've been a little concerned about getting the DTs from Expendables withdrawal after August 13 (though I'll probably go to the movie every day for the first few weeks it's out). Charting the rise and fall of Sly, ostensibly for the munificent Summer of Action blog as well as historic posterity, sounds like a not terrible idea. I'd probably reduce it to one of my three discs at a time. I am going to watch Sly's directorial debut, "Paradise Alley," in the very near future, so Science has got at least the start of your research proposal covered. Two interesting notes on Sly, since I just IMDBd him up to see what kind of plate you were setting for Science: his middle name is Gardenzio and he wrote AND directed "Staying Alive", the sequel to "Saturday Night Fever." Huh?
Jay!!!: I think your last word pretty much sums up this entire endeavor.
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