Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

Great soundtrack? Check. Robin Williams being absolutely wild with his comedic DJ routines? Check. A standard battle of wills between the old and the new? Check. When I sat down for this long-overdue revisit of Good Morning, Vietnam, a film I believe I probably last watched on VHS, I thought I knew what I was getting. Because I still remembered it, the "highlights" anyway. Or so I thought. There was quite a bit here that I'd forgotten, and I'm here to now remind other people about some of those things.

Based on the story of Adrian Cronauer, a radio DJ who spent some time trying to raise the morale of the troops in Vietnam, this was one of only two films written by Mitch Markowitz, although some of his TV work feels like a good practice run for this kind of thing. You could also argue that a lot of the film was made up by an unleashed Williams, who Cronauer claimed made him seem a hell of a lot more fun than he was in reality, but let's give due credit to Markowitz for crafting something with a great balance of comedy, drama, and enough room for a supporting cast to move around without being thrown offscreen by the tornado tearing through many scenes.

When he is given his new job, Cronauer soon finds himself butting heads with Lt. Steven Hauk (who tries to advise him on both comedy and the permitted playlist) and Sgt. Major Dickerson (J. T. Walsh), but he also has some immediate firm friends in the shape of Edward Garlick (Forest Whitaker) and Marty Lee Dreiwitz (Robert Wuhl). When he falls for a local woman named Trinh (Chintara Sukapatan), Cronauer ends up teaching an English class just to try getting closer to her, which leads to him befriending her brother, Tuan (Tom T. Tran, credited here as Tung Thanh Tran), which leads to him getting himself in even more trouble.

Director Barry Levinson knows how to make the most of what he has here, and everything I mentioned in the opening paragraph is a strength for the film. The plotting is quite formulaic, but in an enjoyable way, Williams is on great form, and that soundtrack holds up as one of the best. There's enough scene-setting to remind everyone that we're in Vietnam, but it helps that there are only really a few main locations used throughout the majority of the runtime (the DJ area/military offices, a bar, the English class). There's also enough Williams to ensure that everyone knows this is a Williams movie, but the supporting cast are given some superb moments to help them stand out.

Whitaker is a real delight for every moment that he's onscreen, and he's the one helping to bring out the best in our lead while also reminding him of what he's really doing it all for, and Kirby, as unthinkable as it may seem, almost steals the entire movie with a comedic performance that is all the better for it not being played comedically (his character isn't funny, not intentionally, but he's constantly laughable). Sukapatan is fine, Tran is really good, and it's always a pleasure to watch Walsh onscreen, especially when he's delivering the kind of barely-controlled anger that he has here. Wuhl is good, Noble Willingham is enjoyable in his few scenes as the sympathetic Gen. Taylor, Richard Edson has the benefit of being onscreen alongside Kirby, adding to the comedy, and there's an amusingly camp turn from Cu Ba Nguyen as businessman/bar owner Jimmy Wah. I would not have believed that this was his first film acting role if I hadn't just quickly scanned through his filmography online.

Admittedly a bit tame compared to other films set during the Vietnam War, this is a nice way to shine a light on the whole debacle from a different angle. Making arbitrary rules and regulations about comedy and music is indicative of how arbitrary some (many?) of the military edicts are, especially during a conflict as chaotic and misjudged as the one in Vietnam. 

You'll probably revisit this one day while wanting to enjoy some classic Williams schtick, but you may be as pleasantly surprised as I was by all of the main supporting cast members, especially Whitaker and Kirby.

8/10

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When Harry Met Sally... (1989)

As much as I have always enjoyed When Harry Met Sally..., I would also slightly dismiss it as a film very much in the shadow of Annie Hall. I'm not wrong to mention that touchstone, I don't think so anyway, but revisiting this has reminded me of how wrong it is to dismiss it. This is a rom-com that easily delivers on both the rom and the com fronts, as well as providing some great autumn/winter atmosphere in a number of great sequences.

Billy Crystal is Harry Burns and Meg Ryan is Sally Albright. The two first meet as they ride-share to New York. It doesn't exactly seem like the start of any long-term friendship. Harry certainly doesn't help when he, unprompted, discusses his theory that men and women can never really be friends because of sex getting in the way. Anyway, time passes and Harry and Sally keep crossing paths, ultimately becoming friends, despite what Harry said during their first encounter. Or is there still a chance of sex mucking everything up for them?

Writer Nora Ephron may not have a filmography full of all-time greats, but she certainly managed an excellent hat-trick of star vehicles for Ryan between 1989 and 1998 (no, I'm not including Hanging Up from 2000 because, well, it's not in the same league). Director Rob Reiner, on the other hand, didn't really put a foot wrong throughout the 1980s, and he came to this after a quartet of features that could easily be said to include three absolute classics. With Ephron having mined material from Reiner and Crystal, as well as her own life, everything was aligned to create a film that allows everyone involved to have fun without ever losing focus of that vital central relationship.

While Crystal is a lot of fun here, and tends to get more of the witty lines as he provides commentary on human nature, and the important differences between men and women, the film belongs to Ryan. This is the film that firmly placed her, for a few years anyway, as "America's sweetheart", and it's easy to see why. She's cute, she does well with the comedy, she's someone to sympathise with at times, and the film allows everyone to fall completely in love with her in sync with her co-star. Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby are also great though, playing friends (Marie and Jess, respectively) who allow our leads to discuss their problems and differing perspectives. There are some other people who pop up here and there, particularly in a number of interludes that have people relating stories of how they fell in love, but most of them are surplus to requirements. We only really want to spend time with four people. In fact, we only really want to spend time with two people, but the two others orbiting their lives are funny and interesting enough to help avoid the leads being stuck in any kind of vacuum.

What else do you need to know? There's lovely cinematography from Barry Sonnenfeld, great work from Harry Connick Jr. throughout the soundtrack, and you get a handful of genuinely wonderful quotes to carry in your heart as you go through your own ups and downs in life (and that's not including THAT line, which caps the most memorable scene in the film). The only real criticism I have is the fact that Crystal gets carried away with his schtick a few too many times, which may be more of a problem for anyone who doesn't like him as much as I do, but there's very little else to pick at. It's a comforting, cosy, lovely, funny, rom-com that still sits within nudging distance of the very best.

8/10

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Mubi Monday: Between The Lines (1977)

I've only very recently discovered the films of director Joan Micklin Silver, having just seen both this film and Hester Street in the past week or so. While I haven't been completely won over by either film, there's something very interesting in both, helped by the fact that Silver has a knack for assembling a great cast of people who feel perfect in their roles, whether they are the leads or supporting players, or even (as is the case here) part of a large ensemble that doesn't spend too much time focusing on just one character.

What you get here is the story of a small Boston newspaper that is poised to be taken over by a big business. The writers all have various strengths and weaknesses, and various fluid relationships between one another, and some already have dreams of moving on to bigger and better things. Some have a great book waiting to be written, some have a move to another city planned, and some think that they can use their place in the paper to make themselves into a revered writer worthy of far more than the relatively meagre paycheck that the paper can afford to pay them.

Written by Fred Barron and David Helpern, two people I am even less familiar with than Silver, Between The Lines is most interested in showing newspaper work as an unglamorous and slightly shambolic. It's a lifestyle, a skewed work/life balance, that will actually feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in any industry where they made firm friendships, and substitute family units, be it a writing job, hospitality, a small boutique business, or even factory/warehouse work. The work may differ wildly, but what keeps you getting through every day is the same, it's the connections made with other people and the idea of having something else on the horizon.

Silver does well in allowing the whole thing to feel so loosely assembled and frantic, presenting the characters and story in a way that could best be described as Altman-esque (I know, I know, that's lazy, but sometimes I'm lazy . . . and you know what I mean), while always moving back to one or two characters just in time to give the feeling of a proper story arc for them. She's helped enormously by the fact that those characters are played by the likes of John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry, and Bruno Kirby.

I'm not going to single out any one performance, particularly when everyone works best while showing what they add and subtract from the group during any main sequence, but there's also room for performances from Stephen Collins, Lewis J. Stadlen (a bit of a standout as someone trying to keep an eye on the business side of things), Michael J. Pollard, Joe Morton, and Lane Smith, as well as a number of other familiar faces. As individual as each performer is, they make a wonderful addition, for better or worse, to the fluid group dynamic.

There's also now an undeniable romanticism about journalism that requires people to do more than scan social media for soundbites and write speculative pieces far removed from genuine news stories that result from hours of blood, sweat, and tears, and Between The Lines benefits from that romanticism. It's how you imagine the life of many writers to be, or to have been at one point, with these characters maintaining their erratic levels of energy thanks to bursts of creativity, numerous alcoholic drinks, and nicotine hits. 

7/10

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