Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM.jpg

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM (1987) Three-and-a-half stars

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM director Barry Levinson knew that Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” came out in 1967 and that his movie was set in 1965, but he overlooked that because Satchmo’s song fit the scene best.

Thus, Levinson created an anachronism or a chronological inconsistency.

Adrian Cronauer (1938-2018), played by Robin Williams (1951-2014) in GOOD MORNING, said that he liked the movie based on his time on Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam well enough, as far as it went, but that it was more about Williams and what suited him than it was about Cronauer and what actually happened. File GOOD MORNING in the “loosely based” category.

Cronauer added that Levinson did not allow Cronauer and Williams to meet each other until after filming completed, because the director did not want Williams impersonating the former disc jockey.

GOOD MORNING is the first Robin Williams movie I ever watched and it’s one of the few I watched again in the immediate aftermath of his 2014 suicide. Just this last time I watched it, though, early in 2020, I paid less attention to Williams and more to a dynamite supporting cast surrounding Williams: Bruno Kirby (1949-2006), J.T. Walsh (1943-98), Noble Willingham (1931-2004), Forest Whitaker, Robert Wuhl, and Richard Edson, as well as the various Vietnamese actors and actresses. I know Williams received most of the acclaim for his performance, a Golden Globe victory and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, but it’s the work of that deep supporting cast that makes GOOD MORNING a very good movie rather than merely a good one or at least if nothing else a one-man show.

Kirby plays some of the same notes as he did seven years before in WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM with Bill Murray’s Hunter S. Thompson his adversary in that earlier film. In GOOD MORNING, Kirby plays Lt. Steven Hauk, who fails to see the humor in Cronauer and who finally bombs on the air when he replaces Cronauer for a brief spell. We patiently wait for that failure to happen, and we are rewarded. We laugh at Hauk’s failure, and the vast disconnect between his ego and his actual ability to make people laugh is the joke.

Walsh put together a decade of memorable supporting performances and he earned that memorability because he plays characters that we love to hate. Quite frankly, he played a dick better than most anybody in show business and thus, it’s no surprise that Walsh plays a character named Sgt. Major Dickerson in GOOD MORNING, because, yes, he’s a major dick. Many of us miss Walsh, a love to hate figure even after his death with both THE NEGOTIATOR and PLEASANTVILLE posthumously released.

Williams and Whitaker especially seem like they have genuine chemistry and their byplay from early in the movie all the way until the end rewards us with both laughter and emotions.

Cronauer teaches English to South Vietnamese students during some of his spare time, initially because he sets his sights on a pretty young woman. Cronauer’s friendship with her brother earns him a flight out of Vietnam, one that’s long overdue given all his trouble from the first time Cronauer shouted “Good morning, Vietnam” on the air.

In short, the soldiers love Cronauer and the brass, especially Dickerson, hate him.

Cronauer plays by his own rules, especially on-air, as he favors that Devil’s music rock and soul over that Easy Listening jive preferred by Hauk and Dickerson. That’s his first sin of many, but it all starts with that playing by one’s own rules.

Probably about half of the movie gives itself over to Williams’ manic free-form ad-libs and Cronauer is one of the few characters played by Williams where his patented comic anarchy fits and does not break away from the fabric of the movie to the point that we forget the character and only see Robin Williams being stand-up comedian Robin Williams. Williams’ anything-for-a-laugh shtick also worked for The Genie in ALADDIN.

In all honesty, I find more humor in Williams’ scenes with the supporting actors, both his fellow military men and his Vietnamese students, than I do his solo flights of fancy on his popular radio show.

GOOD MORNING is not all comedy, though, and it does thankfully give the Vietnamese more of a voice than we normally get in Hollywood films about Vietnam and the war. Cronauer’s friend Tuan (Tung Thanh Tran) expresses it during their confrontation scene late in the movie, “ENEMY? What is enemy? You killing my own people so many miles from your home. We not the enemy! You the enemy! … My mother is dead. And my older brother, who be 29 years old, he dead! Shot by Americans! My neighbor, dead! His wife, dead. WHY? Because we’re not human to them! We’re only Vietnamese.”

The film does lay it on a little too thick with sentimentality and showing that Cronauer’s a good guy at heart performing a noble service for the troops and humanity in general through humor. Critics have accused movie comedians of that weakness for sentimentality ever since the glory days of Charlie Chaplin. Williams definitely fell prey to sentimentality often throughout his career, and it works better in some films than others.

Finally, GOOD MORNING goes on a little too long and it could have been tightened, but I doubt that Levinson and gang wanted to lose any of Williams’ improvisation. Remember that moment in ANIMAL HOUSE when Tim Matheson’s Otter looks at Peter Riegert’s Boon and asks “Germans?” after Bluto says the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. Boon quite simply and beautifully says, “Forget it, he’s rolling.” Bet that’s what they said every day on the set of GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM about Robin Williams.

Mad Max (1979)

MAD MAX

MAD MAX (1979) Four stars
12 weeks. $350,000. Guerrilla style filmmaking in and around Melbourne, Australia. A first-time feature film director and a largely unknown cast. A legitimate motorcycle gang. A refurbished 35mm camera somehow left behind from Sam Peckinpah’s THE GETAWAY.

You just read a success story.

Part of the Australian New Wave that invaded American theaters in the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Miller’s MAD MAX plays like a ripped, twisted cross between an American Western like HIGH NOON, Sergio Leone Westerns, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels,” American International biker pics, dystopian science fiction, horror films, good old-fashioned hyperkinetic action, and ultra-violent vigilante justice like DEATH WISH and TAXI DRIVER.

When good old American International Pictures released MAD MAX in America in 1980, they played up the film’s action content in promotion since lead actor Mel Gibson was not yet the international star that he would soon become and they Americanized the language with a new dub replacing the original Australian dialogue. (I own both versions, and I prefer the original Australian dub.)

After the prerequisite title card (Miller said the film’s low budget created the need for a post apocalyptic world), MAD MAX wisely jumps straight into the action with a fantastic, slam-bang chase scene that lasts 10 minutes. I rate this chase among the very best during an era that included many great chase scenes, like BULLITT and THE FRENCH CONNECTION.

In those chases, you feel like anything could happen at any given time. They look real. They feel real. Real cars, real danger.

Understatement: MAD MAX starts on a high note.

The setup for the chase: A ripped, twisted individual named “The Nightrider” kills a Main Force Patrol rookie officer and takes off in the officer’s Pursuit Special. MFP officers are in hot pursuit and the Nightrider eludes them until he meets his match in Max Rockatansky (Gibson).

Vincent Gil plays the Nightrider and his brief appearance proves to be absolutely essential in establishing the entire MAD MAX series.

He’s crazy, yeah, crazier than a shit house rat. I believe one of the officers calls him a terminal psychotic. He’s got verbal style, though, and this is one of the elements that defines MAD MAX, although words became fewer over time.

Max asks his best friend Goose (Steve Bisley) “Much damage?” over the radio and the Nightrider gives one of the great responses, helped out by a quote from Australian hard rock band AC/DC: “You should see the damage, bronze. Huh? Metal damage, brain damage. Heheheh. Are you listening, bronze? I am the Nightrider. I’m a fuel injected suicide machine. I am a rocker, I am a roller, I am a out-of-controller! I’m the Nightrider, baby!”

It’s an indelible sight as the Nightrider turns from brashness to sheer terror in his final moments.

The Nightrider’s motorcycle gang brethren, namely the Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne), Bubba Zanetti (Geoff Parry), and Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns), pursue their revenge and enact their reign of terror on the Australian countryside.

Max loses his faith in justice, his best friend, and his family, his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and his infant son.

At one point, Max tells his boss, “Any longer out on that road and I’m one of them, you know? A terminal crazy … only I got a bronze badge to say I’m one of the good guys.”

Max goes AWOL from the MFP, steals their Pursuit Special, and he stalks and kills the Toecutter, Bubba Zanetti, and finally Johnny the Boy.

Max drives off into the wasteland, a shell of his former self. We’re unsure of the future of this man.

I favor MAD MAX over both THE ROAD WARRIOR and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD because of a greater emotional investment. It shows us everything Max lost, and it’s less spectacle than the later films, obviously due to the difference in budget constraints. (FURY ROAD, for example, cost a cool $150 million. That’s 428.571428571 times the budget of the original.)

Miller, whose credits include BABE: PIG IN THE CITY and THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK in addition to the Mad Max films, is a former medical doctor and that profession informs MAD MAX.

Miller worked as an emergency room doctor to earn funds to make MAD MAX.

The surname “Rockatansky” derives from 19th century Bohemian pathologist Carl von Rokitansky, who originated a procedure that became the most common method for the removal of internal organs during an autopsy.

Miller’s experiences in the emergency room with motorcycle and automobile accidents are played out in MAD MAX.

Five great Australian New Wave films:
— PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975)
— THE LAST WAVE (1977)
— THE CHANT OF JIMMIE BLACKSMITH (1978)
— MAD MAX (1979)
— BREAKER MORANT (1980)

Jaws 2 (1978)

JAWS 2

JAWS 2 (1978) Two stars
When you watch JAWS 2, you just get the feeling that human star Roy Scheider wasn’t a happy camper during the film’s production.

Then you read more about the film and you find out that it’s true.

Scheider had a multi-picture agreement with Universal, makers of the JAWS films, and when he left THE DEER HUNTER, Universal made a deal with Scheider that if he did JAWS 2, it would be counted as the two films remaining on his contract. Fundamental problem: Scheider did not want to appear in JAWS 2.

We can feel Scheider’s resentment on the screen.

Scheider clashed with director Jeannot Szwarc to the point that it produced a physical confrontation between the men. They even carried it over into letters.

Scheider: “Working with Jeannot Szwarc is knowing he will never say he is sorry or ever admitting he overlooked something. Well, enough of that shit for me!”

Szwarc: “Time and pressure are part of my reality and priorities something I must deal with.

“You have been consulted and your suggestions made part of my scenes many times, whenever they did not contradict the overall concept of the picture.

“If you have to be offended, I deplore it, for no offense was meant. At this point in the game, your feelings or my feelings are immaterial and irrelevant, the picture is all that matters.”

When you’re watching JAWS, you don’t get the sense of a troubled production.

We do throughout JAWS 2.

Despite all that behind-the-scenes hullabaloo, also including a change of director and more technical difficulties with that damn mechanical shark, JAWS 2 became a huge financial success as it racked up nearly $78 million at the box office. Why? A hard sell advertising campaign centered around the immortal tagline “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”; “Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made,” in the words of SPACEBALLS; and, let’s face it, at that point in time, folks wanted more of the shark and JAWS 2 delivers “more shark.”

In fact, I give the shark in JAWS 2, oh, let’s see here, three stars, maybe three-and-a-half stars on a charitable day.

The people in JAWS 2, though, sink to one star.

Averaging out both numbers gives JAWS 2 two stars.

Yes, the characters in JAWS 2 (and the following sequels) suck.

The fundamental difference between JAWS and its sequels: JAWS gives audiences three great characters in Chief Brody (Scheider), Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and Quint (Robert Shaw). Amity mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), why he’s not too far behind. You care about the characters in JAWS.

Brody and Vaughn return in JAWS 2, but they’re competing against the shark and other less interesting human characters.

Instead of the core of adults in JAWS, we have an endless array of teeny boppers in JAWS 2 who just can’t hold a candle to Hooper and Quint. Dreyfuss did not return for the sequel, as he and JAWS director Steven Spielberg made CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. And it’s quite obvious why Quint’s not back for JAWS 2.

All we need to know about the plot of JAWS 2 is that it’s the namesake of “The Jaws 2 Syndrome,” or when a sequel repeats the worst element of the original movie. We all know that Chief Brody will have to take out the shark, but the ringer it runs him through en route does more than try our patience, it’s blowed up real good.