Tag Archives: 1980s

Liz and Merry Noel become friends as college roommates and their friendship endures over the years. Liz becomes a respected “serious” novelist. Merry Noel marries, has a daughter and writes, too: “trash” fiction which becomes enormously successful. Their story begins in college and jumps ahead some years at a time to show their relationship with each other and those in their orbits as they grow and mature.
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The keys to freedom for citizens of Hong Kong are U.S. passports, as their city quakes with the imminent transition to Chinese Communist rule. A deadly black market for passports is thriving, controlled by Hong Kong’s warlords.
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A teenager (Adam Arkin) becomes a werewolf after a family vacation in Transylvania.
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A very beautiful film. This is a Ken Takakura vehicle, and as such follows his formula. Takakura plays to type as the laconic brooder who suffers multiple tragedies with manly stoicism. While the variety of his film varied greatly, his films with director Yasuo Furuhata were always of the highest quality, and this is no exception. Takakura is a cop training to be a sharpshooter for the Olympic games, he divorces his wife and abandons his daughter when he discovers she’s had an affair. Later his coach is gunned down by a fleeing criminal. Years later Takakura returns to his snowy hometown and starts an affair with a middle-aged bar owner. The story is a bit thick, with a number of subplots, yet it is extrordinarily melancholic, as Takakura seems to regret everything he’s done in his life and is made over and over again to relive his mistakes. There is very little “action” as such, and no yakuzas of any kind; but beyond that this is one of the most lushly beautiful and emotional films you can see (if you can see it), with an excellent score by Ryudo Uzaki.
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The exploration of the effects of an unexpected catastrophe, known as VUE (violent unknown event) through the bios of 92 survivors.
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Earth sends its first manned probe to Mars in 1999, and a jealous Martian murders the two astronauts when his wife has erotic dreams of meeting them. Members of a subsequent expedition are hypnotized into believing that they have landed in the childhood community of their leader and have been reunited with deceased family and friends, and they are poisoned by the Martians. Col. John Wilder leads a third expedition and learns that a chicken pox virus brought to Mars by the first two expeditions has almost eradicated the Martian population. A member of Wilder’s team becomes obsessed with protecting Mars from Earthman and murders some of the others in Wilder’s party, before Wilder kills him. Colonists arrive on Mars to settle, among them priests seeking God, and a lone Martian masquerades as the most desired persons of various settlers. Global war on Earth reduces man’s natal planet to radioactive waste, and most of the settlers returned there prior to the holocaust.
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This story of four working-class kids in a small industrial town–who go their separate ways after high school in the innocence of 1961 and come together again at the end of the turbulent Sixties–is as much about the coming of age of America as it is about the changes the characters go through. The four friends of the title are thoughtful Danilo, a Yugoslavian immigrant with dreams of being a writer and a scholar; Tom, good-looking and athletic, who is bound for the army; cautious David who has mixed feelings about staying in town and joining the family mortuary business; and lovely, ditzy, exasperating Georgia, who tries to inspire all of them with her longings for a life of Bohemian adventure. It is told through the eyes of Danilo, whose story is loosely based on the writer Tesich’s own life growing up in Bloomington, Indiana.
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Three ‘Bukowskian’ torrid nights in the life of a man in search of love. Harry Voss, 12, is young and naive. Love, for him, is romantic love between princes and princesses demurely kissing each other on the mouth. His father is a hero who kidnapped his mother and married her on a lonely mountain peak… Later on, he’ll do the same. But Harry has a lot to learn. He also learns that there are handsome men and ugly ones, that love can be unfair. That one can find comfort in drinking… but above all he learns that man is capable of anything – absolutely anything! – to get his fair share of love.
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A famous psychologist, Margaret Ford, decides to try to help one of her patients get out of a gambling debt. She visits the bar where Mike, to whom the debt is owed, runs poker games. He convinces her to help him in a game: her assignment is to look for “tells”, or give-away body language. What seems easy to her becomes much more complex.
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A sequel to “Vabank” (1981), introduces the same characters entangled in a duel between a former safecracker and a crooked bank manager. Imprisoned ex-banker Kramer breaks out with the help of recently released accomplice and wants to get even with his nemesis, Kwinto. Kwinto calls up the old gang to respond to this threat. In the end, Kramer seemingly victorious heads to Switzerland by a prearranged flight to Zurich. First, however, they have to cross the German border. They bribe the Nazi border guards, board the plane and land in what they think is Switzerland, only to find out that the film-team has outwitted them with sets and actors and the police is waiting for them.
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