The Lost Boys (1987)
I have, over the years, had many people tell me that The Lost Boys is a fantastic movie. I must now ask those people what movie they were watching, or better yet what substances they were on while watching said movie. Actually, that’s too harsh, The Lost Boys just didn’t work for me, there’s no need for me to be snotty about it. It is a cult classic and many people do love it. I wish I could say the same, but I spent the majority of The Lost Boys wondering why I should care about what was happening on my screen and the rest of the time I was wondering just how homoerotic Joel Schumacher could get in a film without people noticing?
There are certainly elements to The Lost Boys that I feel were interesting and could have helped to form a good film with a competent guiding hand and a well written script to bolster them. The Peter Pan correlation is interesting, as is the idea of the vampires as allegories of wasted youth dealing with the cultural divide that existed in the 1980′s. Unfortunately Schumacher, never does anything with any of these ideas. Schumacher doesn’t do anything period, and one has to wonder what mark he meant to leave on The Lost Boys. The writing isn’t great either and the writers squander all kinds of interesting avenues, but I believe the director is most responsible for what we see on screen and thus I place much of the blame for my dislike of The Lost Boys on the shoulders of Schumacher.
My biggest complaint against The Lost Boys would have to be its inability to make me care. It’s a film that can’t decide what it wants to be, it spends a good chunk of its run time attempting to be a serious vampire film, creating a dense and foggy atmosphere. Then out of nowhere it turns into a schlocky B movie that is interested more in being a comedy than anything else, and at other times it is an ineffective family drama. And that family is what I am referencing when I talk about the inability of The Lost Boys to make me care. Schumacher tries for these dramatic beats, beats that are never earned. Michael is supposedly flying off the deep end, but we are never really shown this, we are simply expected to accept that he has been losing touch with his mother. But then we find out that it has only been a day since the beginning of the film, when he was all hunky dory with mommy. That is a leap in logic I couldn’t take and I could never quite justify it in my logic addled brain.
For those of you who do like The Lost Boys and view it as a cult classic, more power to you. I wanted to like it, and I tried, searching for things to like about the film at every turn. But, I can’t sit here and lie to you just to make you happy. Well, I could, but then how would you ever be able to trust another review I published? I can’t join you in championing this “cult classic,” in fact I’m going to do the exact opposite and warn all others off of The Lost Boys, it’s a waste of time in my estimation and a film that no one really needs to see. Even if it is running rampant with boatloads of homoeroticism, and trust me, everyone needs more of that in their lives.
Vs.Zelig (1983)
In Zelig, Woody Allen is clearly attempting a satire on the media, both past and present, and the bias they can place on any given situation. I am including the documentary filmmaker as a part of the media by the way, because you know that I view all documentaries as con-jobs for the most part, sue me if you don’t like it. Sprinkled throughout Allen’s satirical take on the media are the usual neurotic bits of humor and the standard theme of love that always populate a Woody Allen film. But when all is stripped away from Zelig I was left with one fact that stopped me from really liking it, it just didn’t engage me as much as I would have liked.
Zelig is a well made faux documentary, but I don’t consider it an interesting film. I know what Allen was going for and I actually think he succeeds, but I was pretty darn bored when he was succeeding the most. Maybe it’s just where my taste in comedy always goes back to, but I was more engaged when Woody Allen was being the typically neurotic Woody Allen. I was drawn to what was being shown on screen when it was absurd and thus absurdly funny. Those moments were enough for me to like Zelig, but they were not enough for me to really like Zelig, if you get the distinction I am making there.
One area where I will give Mr. Allen some major props is in the way he was able to make the 1920′s-1930′s footage look like footage from that era. No matter what you may think of Allen as a person or even if you don’t like his films I don’t think a person can deny his innate ability to bring a place or a period in time to life. Every time the film switches to grainy and scratched “footage” from the so called jazz era I believed that I was really seeing Leonard Zelig in that time and place. The cinematography deserves a lot of credit for this, but so does Allen, who has once again evoked a particular setting and a particular time with minimal effort.
I wish that Zelig gave me more to talk about, but truth be told it doesn’t. It is easily the most straight forward film I have ever seen from Allen. Either the idea of a faux documentary that pokes fun at media bias will engage you or it won’t. I respect the craftsmanship on display in Zelig, and I laughed more than a few times. But, I was never as engaged in Zelig as I should have been and that is why Zelig ends up a relatively average Woody Allen film in my estimation. If you are a fellow Allen completest like I am then I do suggest at the very least giving Zelig a twirl, but if you aren’t then Zelig is a film you could skip and not feel bad about doing so in the slightest.
Verdict:
It's not a great film by any means, but Zelig easily moves on.