Ha ha, now here’s a movie nobody ever thinks about too much! I’ll bet most people don’t even remember it exists, and since I don't think it's on DVD or anything, it practically doesn’t! It was one of those movies where the so-called Brat Pack started trying to play adult-ish roles, and in most cases came off like those homburg-wearing kids in Bugsy Malone! Another good example is Anthony Michael Hall in Out of Bounds, and maybe I'll review that one soon! I have dubbed this sub-sub-genre "homburg movies!"
Blue City is a real homburg movie, that's for sure! Judd Nelson, who was in The Breakfast Club, teams up with Ally Sheedy, who was also in The Breakfast Club, to find out who has killed his father, who was the mayor of a small Florida town and from whom Nelson has been estranged for five years! David "Without Warning" Caruso helps out, and there’s a fine supporting role for Paul Winfield, from The Horror at 37,000 Feet, as the chowhound police chief! Nelson runs afoul of a lot of people in this movie, and most of them are beefy football players who rough him up pretty vigorously! Eventually the murderer is identified, but not because of Nelson’s clever detective work! No, it’s because the killer just outright confesses, saying “Ha ha, I killed your father! I killed everybody!” before Nelson blows him away!
Well, this movie has a pretty bad reputation! Nobody liked it when it first came out, and I think even fewer people went to see it, if that’s possible! Judd Nelson is kind of annoying for most of it, and Ally Sheedy is weird in the wrong kind of way! It’s true that, like so many of the movies I review, it was shot by the talented, fog-filter happy Steven Poster, but that doesn’t help much! Also there’s a musical score by Ry Cooder, which usually is a good thing! And indeed, the end credits theme is really good, but for the rest of the movie he seems to be trying too hard and not getting anywhere much!
And the movie is really choppy and poorly put together, with scenes sometimes ending abruptly with a dumb fade to black! This is what you call poor mise en scene, and likely explains why the director, who normally worked as a producer, never made another movie! She just wasn’t too good at it, but hopefully at least she got to understand what producers sometimes don’t: that it’s pretty hard to make a good movie! Ha ha!
I’m glad I finally saw the movie though! I can’t really explain why this is so, but the fact is that I’ve been curious about it for years, in the same way I was curious about Out of Bounds before seeing that particular homburg picture recently! I finally bought myself a VHS copy of this pensacola just the other day, and it wasn’t cheap I can tell you; but although I may never watch the darn thing again, I consider it a sound investment! It would probably make a good double feature with Out of Bounds, or else a strange one with Violets Are Blue, the Sissy Spacek/Kevin Kline love story picture! I have that one on VHS also, so I may just review it here! In the meantime, I give Blue City one single irritating prop basketball!
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