Tom Berenger

  • Hugh Wilson – Rustlers’ Rhapsody (1985)

    1981-1990ComedyHugh WilsonUSAWestern

    From All Movie Guide:
    While the audience watches a black and white horse opera, a narrator’s voice wonders what such a movie would be like today…

    An amusing spoof of the good ‘ole westerns back in the halcyon days when all the cliches were held up as icons, this parody by Hugh Wilson works best for savvy audiences. Rex O’Herlihan (Tom Berenger) is a singing cowboy with a wardrobe straight out of the Hollywood westerns of the ’40s – he worships his horse, amend has a trusty sidekick too. Every town he wanders into has a sheriff on the dole, a shady cattle rancher, a prostitute with a heart of gold, an innocent young damsel, a town drunk, and the standard bad guys in black hats and long coats (Spaghetti-western style) who brutalize the poor sheep ranchers. After setting things straight in each identical town as goes, Rex is beginning to feel like a re-run junky, when he saunters into a town that is slightly different – and the parodies continue.Read More »

  • Liliana Cavani – Oltre la porta aka Beyond Obsession aka Beyond The Door (1982)

    1981-1990DramaEroticaItalyLiliana Cavani

    From Time Out Film Guide
    There is something to be said for Liliana Cavani, but it is difficult to remember what it is. The cruelty of her Night Porter was ruined by sentimentality, and Beyond Good and Evil managed to conflate Nietzsche and Robert Powell in a ménage à trois. Beyond the Door is the usual mix of cheapjack sentiment, cutprice Freudian familial relations, and a baffled cast running way over boiling point. Giorgi (a madonna face) keeps her stepfather Mastroianni (or maybe he’s her father) in a Moroccan prison after faking evidence against him over her mother’s death, so that she can keep her claws on his body, which she desires far more than the American oilman (Berenger, looking like a young Paul Newman) who desires her like mad but can’t understand what’s going on here. Un peu tortueuse, hein? There are some dinky touristique scenes in the brothels of Marrakesh, that mosaic city which caters to the devices and desires of your heart; but it should all have been made in hardcore by Gerard Damiano (Behind the Green Door). CPea.Read More »

  • Lawrence Kasdan – The Big Chill (1983)

    1981-1990ComedyDramaLawrence KasdanUSA

    Plot Synopsis from Allmovie
    Embraced by the Baby Boomer generation and spawning countless imitators, the sophomore film of writer-director Lawrence Kasdan was a successful comedy-drama with a best selling soundtrack of Motown hits. Kevin Kline and Glenn Close star as Harold and Sarah Cooper, a couple whose marital troubles are put on hold while they host an unhappy reunion of former college pals gathered for the funeral of one of their own, a suicide victim named Alex. As the weekend unfolds, the friends catch up with each other, play the music of their youth, reminisce, smoke marijuana, and pair off with each other in unexpected combinations. Read More »

  • Hector Babenco – At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991)

    Drama1991-2000BrazilEthnographic CinemaHector Babenco

    Two American mercenaries and a missionary couple arrive in a remote outpost, the Amazonian backwater town Mae de Deus. The local comandante tries to coerce the mercenaries into bombing the local tribe of Niaruna Indians so that their land can be annexed for gold mining.Read More »

  • Abel Ferrara – Fear City (1984)

    1981-1990Abel FerraraCrimeThrillerUSA

    Quote:
    Brass-balled, Bronx-born auteur Abel Ferrara is one of those two-fisted screen bards that always follows through on each sucker punch, his heart beating with Sam Fuller’s blood. His scorching morality plays and tainted-psyche humanizations are raw nerves exposed and chewed through, like a naked tornado called Hyde to Scorsese’s more calculated risk-taker Jekyll. However, what makes an Abel Ferrara film for me isn’t plot or casts of meaty, dilemma-torn characters. It’s in the gritty city itself, a filmmaking toybox for tones, textures, sounds, music and aesthetic. When Ferrara looks at New York City, he knows its tourist-trap beauty is bullshit and the lurid truth is in the blackened gum on the bottom of the postcard rack. He’s the director who would probably kick my pasty ass all the way to Chinatown if he heard this flowery praise.Read More »

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