Burl reviews The Secret of My Success! (1987)

Hi, it’s Burl here with a secret – ha ha, The Secret of My Success, that is! Yes, I’ve finally taken the leap and watched this Reagan-era Yuppie office-tower comedy, in which I previously had very little interest! I didn’t suddenly develop an interest, we should note; it was more that an opportunity to watch the picture came along, and I took it!

There were many boardroom comedies made in the 80s, as befits the business-friendly attitudes of the decade! We had Big Business, Head Office, Beer, and a few others as I recall, none of which I ever bothered to watch! Ha ha, I guess it’s just not my genre! But as Roger Ebert and others have pointed out, The Secret of My Success belongs equally to the same category as the glossy Universal boardroom comedies of the 1960s, which usually featured Tony Randall! Ha ha, this picture is a Universal product as well, so I guess it makes sense!

Michael J. Fox, perhaps best known from Teen Wolf, plays Brantley Foster, a corn-fed youth with a business degree from the local cow college! He leaves the farm for New York, where he has a genuinely soul-wrenching time of it – unexpected tribulation in a breezy genre like this, ha ha – until one day he convinces his hard-bitten third uncle twice removed, a nasty capitalist played by Richard Jordan of Dune and The Mean Season, to hire him on in the mail room of the vast company he runs! But after he espies a junior executive Princess Di simulacrum essayed by Helen Slater from Ruthless People, Brantley decides he’s got to move up in the company! He takes over an empty corner office and, through a deft  combination of memo-sending and rapid changes of clothing, assumes the role of Carleton Wisecracker, the newest grey flannel suit in the building! Ha ha!

What follows are mild variations on sex farce routines, with Carlton/Brantley beginning an affair with the boss’s lady-wife and constantly changing his clothes in the office or the elevator, while also trying to evade his tough mail room boss (played by Christopher Murney from Maximum Overdrive)!  Brantley/Carlton has a mail room pal played by John Pankow from To Live and Die in L.A., and, though I spent the entire movie waiting for him to appear, we do eventually get a touch of Fred Gwynne! There are also about a million montage sequences set to the worst songs the decade had to offer! I mean really awful, stinky songs, of which 'Walking on Sunshine' is probably the best, which should tell you something!

Montages aside, it’s entertaining enough in a mindless 80s way, and Fox, while asked to do plenty of the smirky, cocksure, ain’t-I-a-stinker fiddlefaddle typical of the young male leads of that decade, maintains his Edmonton charm! It’s a harmless movie precisely because the fulsome support it gives to its desperate ladderclimbing hero, and its prostrate fealty to the executive class (bad apple Jordan aside), are so outrageously transparent! Nothing unexpected either happens or doesn't happen in this picture, and whether or not that sounds like a recommendation depends on you! Ha ha, I give The Secret of My Success one and a half bodybuilder poses!

Burl reviews Out of Bounds! (1986)

Hi, Burl here! Sorry to start this review on a sad note, but I was just watching this movie Out of Bounds, and got to thinking about the picture’s cinematographer, Bruce Surtees! He shot Beverly Hills Cop as well, and also some very good-looking movies like Dirty Harry and Big Wednesday! Anyway, I thought to myself “Ha ha, now there’s a talented guy,” and then a few days later I read that he up and died! Too bad!

Anyway, Out of Bounds is certainly one of his minor works, and that’s the picture I thought I’d review for you today! It’s a homburg picture, just like Blue City! That’s my term for the transitional movies in the careers of Brat Pack actors - in this case Anthony Michael Hall - who want to be Taken Seriously and not cast as high schoolers any more! But so often, as is the case with Blue City and, I’m afraid, with Out of Bounds as well, the movies are bad enough to put a real crimp in the actor’s career! (And this might have been the movie Anthony Michael Hall did instead of Full Metal Jacket, which is a pretty poor trade-off if you ask me!)

Still, Out of Bounds is better than Blue City, and better than distaff homburg pictures like Fresh Horses and For Keeps as well! It tells the story of Daryl, a corn-fed Iowa farmboy who travels to Los Angeles to stay with his football-hero brother! Unfortunately, a confusion at the airport results in Daryl walking off with a bag belonging to a murderous drug dealer, who, we’ll have to agree, was a bit of a dummy for flying to L.A. when he could have driven!

Once Daryl is set up in his new digs, an outbuilding behind his brother’s house that’s hidden behind a fake camouflage hedge for some reason, he finds “some kind of crazy stuff” in his bag! Next morning his brother and sister-in-law have been murderized, and Daryl’s on the run, with only a goofy gal named Dizz for company! Dizz is played by Jenny Wright from The Wild Life, and is that sort of crazy L.A. lady we see in all sorts of movies, from The Vals to L.A. Story! She works as a waitress at Barney’s Beanery, yet drives a fancy convertible car and lives in an over-decorated house that would be way beyond any waitress’s salary to own or even rent! Ha ha!

The cops, perhaps to demonstrate their total dedication to solving the crime, make incredibly detailed tape outlines of Daryl’s relatives and then immediately decide he must be the murderer! Under Dizz’s supervision, to the aluminum whine of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now,” Daryl undergoes an L.A. makeover, donning an all-new lifestyle outfit complete with fingerless leather gloves! Every action Daryl takes seems to dig him in ever-deepening poo with the police, and soon the cop on the case, played by Glynn Turman from Super 8, tells Daryl that he’s “gone way out of bounds!” Ha ha, oh for the days when a movie’s title would be awkwardly inserted into the dialogue!

Well, this forgotten picture is no classic, but it’s a fine artifact of the era! As a tour of 1980s Los Angeles, it rivals such players as Into the Night and Miracle Mile, and it even features a surprise appearance by Siouxsie Sioux, whom we find singing in a rock n’ roll club! Anthony Michael Hall’s performance is okay I guess, but Daryl is so reserved and taciturn that at times it seems like Rainman has been made the star of an action picture! Instead of counting toothpicks, his special talent is for throwing knives, which we see him do at the beginning of the picture! From there it’s just a matter of counting time until he bookends that by throwing a knife into the drug dealer too!

In memory of the talented Bruce Surtees, and for its marginal qualities rather than any fundamental merit, I give Out of Bounds two large penguin posters!

Burl reviews Blue City! (1985)

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!