The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai. Someone give me an objective view. I remember loving it in grad school, but I just tried to watch it with the kids, and they were distinctly unimpressed (“Daddy, Daddy, let’s go see Night at the Museum 2 instead; We hear Reynolds loved it”). In fact, they became quite abusive. Was it that bad? Why did I enjoy seeing Jeff Goldblum in chaps? Why did the lines “don’t be mean” and “no matter where you go, there you are” seem profound to me? Was it the drugs? Or is this a lost masterpiece?
I loved and love Banzai, almost (but not quite) as much as I love the even-more-insane Big Trouble in Little China — films that are too close to straight and cheesy to play well with many audience members, and too silly and cheesy to play well with many cult-audience members. Or is that vice versa? What I recall liking most about BB was the way it threw you into an imagined and densely-overplotted universe, where Banzai’s a neurosurgeon-physicist-rock-star, where Welles’ radio Wells was a real invasion but got covered up, and so on. I saw it stone sober, loved it, and bought it a couple years ago, and still loved it.
I can certainly understand not liking it. I’ve made many, many people watch Big Trouble with me over the years, and I think maybe a handful liked it. I haven’t even tried with Banzai.
That said, you should punish your children by taking them to Night of the Museum 2. Or force Tell No One on them.
Maybe as the years pass it will get harder and harder for new kids to appreciate movies like Banzai and Big Trouble, much more so than, say, early David Lynch movies like Blue Velvet or even Repo Man. There will be a handful of young people who will watch them and marvel at the freakiness of the 1980s cult-movie senibility, but the context will be lost. As much as I enjoy watching movies like G-a-s-s-s-s and Wild in the Streets I know I’m watching it in a very different sense than people did in 1968.
Just thinking out loud here, but isn’t our appreciation of these movies somewhat predicated on our firsthand experience of Reagan, the cold war, the introduction of home computers, and the first visible cracks in America’s manufacturing superiority as Japanese cars and tech began to majorly seep into our lives? The frame of reference for a 14 year-old who is already a decade into the 21st century is going to be light-years away.
Do the Right Thing may still be good fodder for discussions in the classroom, and it’s great that Reynolds is teaching it, but in 1989 people really thought this movie would cause riots, which was of course based in the racist notion of white movie producers and critics that black filmgoers couldn’t handle themselves with such a movie…
Without the context of the media hand-wringing and of course the coverage of the actual racial tensions and violence that inspired the film, it’s got to be a much different – and weaker – experience, yeah?
But I do imagine that people in the 1930s loved this just as much as I do for all the same reasons:
I tried to watch Banzai once (on video in the eighties) and was bored to tears. Well, maybe I was just indifferent. Perhaps I was too much of a child of Spielberg to appreciate it’s campy effects (I certainly had never watched “Doctor Who”). I remember it had some cult buzz so I was intrigued. If it played anywhere near me, I missed it (at its height the film only played on a couple hundred screens). Perhaps the hype was too large for the film, but when I finally got my hands on a rental, I recall being thoroughly disappointed. Haven’t seen it since. I guess I should probably own up to the fact that the film landed in my video player when I was pretentious college graduate with an abiding love for emergent indies; this could never have competed with Liquid Sky.
Re Liquid Sky: aside from the catchphrase (“I kill with my cunt”), I hated that movie.
Moving from Mark’s great point about cultural context, to the weakening of DTRT: you’re right about context, but has this really softened the blow of DTRT? Well, sort of, sort of not. Insofar as ’89 viewers–even viewers well into the ’90s–were very attentive to the specific political realities, and very mindful of the social conflagrations attendant with racial/economic inequalities, the film had an undeniable power that can’t really be captured now. (Like, I imagine, the specific paranoias of The Parallax View or The Conversation affected viewers in the Nixon era.) But the film still punches folks right in the gut; we’re engrossed by the specific realities of these characters, and we get the *general* context of racial & economic discord–even if younger viewers haven’t got the same anxiety about riots, they still (alas) get the challenges of communicating across racial and economic lines. I can imagine some future where the film might play more like Gentleman’s Agreement, where its impact as a film stands but its social critique (like the anti-anti-semitism of the earlier flick) seems quite dated.