Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Clue (Jonathan Lynn, 1985)

Cast: Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, Colleen Camp, Lee Ving, Bill Henderson, Jane Wiedlin, Jeffrey Kramer, Kellye Nakahara, Howard Hesseman. Screenplay: John Landis, Jonathan Lynn. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Production design: John Robert Lloyd. Film editing: David Bretherton, Richard Haines. Music: John Morris.

Clue was something of a dud with critics and audiences when it premiered, but it has developed a following over the years. The idea was a daffy one: Make a movie based on a board game. But the game's roots are themselves cinematic: the murder mystery that takes place in a mysterious mansion, with an array of suspects and murder weapons. So all the movie version needs to do is provide backstories for the various characters -- Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, et al. -- and some way of staging the murder so that the killer's identity remains unknown until the final reveal. Of course, the charm of the game is that the players are the detectives and the killer, weapon, and location of the crime vary every time it's played. Unfortunately, the screenwriters -- and there were many other hands in the script beyond the credited ones -- decided to go crazy and provide a multitude of victims, as well as three potential endings. The gimmick of showing a different ending each time was one reason the film flopped in theaters, and only really made sense when it was released on video and all three solutions to the mystery could be sampled. What the film has going for it is mainly a cast of comic actors familiar from Mel Brooks movies, Saturday Night Live, and other TV shows. There are a few bright lines but also a lot of unfunny running around, and any comedy that opens with a gag about stepping in dog shit has to work awfully hard to overcome that.  

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Track 29 (Nicolas Roeg, 1988)

Cast: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Colleen Camp, Sandra Bernhard, Seymour Cassel, Leon Rippy. Screenplay: Dennis Potter. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: David Brockhurst, Curtis A. Schnell. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers.

With directors like Luis Buñuel and David Lynch, whose films regularly stray along the boundaries between logic and the irrational, between the waking world and dreams, between sanity and madness, you can always sense a central consciousness, a coherent vision, holding the film together. This isn't the case with Nicolas Roeg's Track 29, which falls apart as it drifts into weirdness for weirdness's sake. It centers on Linda, a neglected housewife, whose physician husband, Henry, spends most of his free time in the attic playing with his model trains, and at work is having an affair with his nurse, who spanks him while wearing rubber gloves. The doctor and nurse are played by one of the odder couples ever to be seen in a movie, Christopher Lloyd and Sandra Bernhard. One day, when Linda (Theresa Russell) is having lunch with her friend Arlanda (Colleen Camp), they're joined by a young man named Martin (Gary Oldman), whom we see at the start of the film hitchhiking along a country road and later being picked up by a trucker (Leon Rippy). Martin creepily admires the trucker's "Mom" tattoo, which sets us up for the even creepier assertion that he will make to Linda that he's really the son she gave up for adoption at birth. That Oldman and Russell are almost the same age should clue you in to the fact that nothing is going to make conventional sense in Track 29. Martin arouses more than maternal passion in Linda, but he may not even exist: Although Arlanda sees him in the cafe where he makes his acquaintance with Linda, in a later restaurant scene in which Martin plays on Linda's erotic obsession, we cut from the table where they're sitting to behind the bar and share the point of view of a waiter and bartender who see her sitting alone. Oh, there's much more, including a scene in which Henry addresses the attendees at a model train collectors' convention and stirs them to a frenzy with his speech. But you get the point: Track 29 is mostly an elaborate psychosexual fantasy, but it lacks a central vision to hold it together or carry it to any kind of satisfactory conclusion. It's never daring enough to explore sexual frustration and obsession in the many imaginative ways Buñuel does in Belle de Jour (1967). It could pass as satire if there were any larger point to its fleeting moments of insight or surprise, the way Lynch's Blue Velvet, made two years earlier, uncovered the seamier side of Reagan-era complacency. As it is, it's just, well, weird. 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is beginning to show its age, as any 41-year-old movie must. It no longer exhibits the freshness that won it acclaim as a masterpiece and raked in the five "major" Academy Awards: picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay -- only the second picture in history to do that: The first was It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), and only one other picture, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), has subsequently accomplished that feat. Today, however, One Flew has the look of a skillfully directed but somewhat predictable melodrama; its tragic edge has been blunted by familiarity. In treating the material, director Forman goes for straightforward storytelling, without showing us something new or personal as an auteur. And as time has passed, some of the elements of the source, Ken Kesey's novel, that screenwriters Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman took pains to mitigate -- namely the countercultural glibness and antifeminism -- have begun to show through. It's harder today to wholeheartedly cheer on the raw, anarchic antiauthoritarianism of McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) or to accept as a given the unmitigated villainy of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). We want our protagonists and antagonists to be a little more complicated than the film allows them to be. There are still many who think it a great film, but if it is, I think it's largely because it's the perfect showcase for a great talent -- Nicholson's -- supported by an extraordinary ensemble that includes a shockingly young-looking Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Sidney Lassick, Christopher Lloyd, Will Sampson, and a touchingly vulnerable Brad Dourif.