The year's shaking up to be a jittery one on all sorts of fronts, which I think more than justifies my new personal mantra of "at least it's not boring." I haven't had cause to rue those words yet, I don't think, despite some national political disappointments (the health care thing's messy enough, but Citizens United???? Hard to think of a less-fitting name for an organization) and certain Ann Arbor bars deciding that "fun" = "unprofitable." The writing front's all awash with ideas (a great one took shape today), and I've got another review coming out at some point, but all I can seem to do here is talk about movies.

The Last Starfighter (1984): I remember going apeshit over Nick Castle's trailer-park space opera when I was young. Presumably the idea of a kid saving the universe by being really good at video games was like crack for guys my age. Fortunately, The Last Starfighter is no mere arcade-junkie apologia, mainly due to sympathetic characters and a genuine appreciation for scifi's appeal for the young. Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) lives in a California trailer park with his mom and bratty younger brother, and has a troubled relationship with girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart). His only apparent release as he waits for college scholarships is to play the park's "Starfighter" arcade game, at which he gets very good, like Dave Nelson in NewsRadio with "Stargate Defender."* After dwarfing the game's high score, Alex is visited by the mysterious Centauri (Robert Preston), who takes him on a trip revealing that the game's premise, "defending the galaxy against the evil Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada," is real and that he's just completed a training program for fledgling "Starfighters." Can he survive his first mission and save the universe? The premise arrived at exactly the right time, and it was interesting to learn that writer Jonathan Betuel originally set it in a Spielbergian suburban setting before Castle shifted it to a trailer park. In the political and economic climate of the 1980s, when there weren't supposed to be any poor people, this unusual emphasis was striking indeed, and the contrast between Alex's mundane origins and the importance of his interstellar activities serves the story well. The Last Starfighter was historically important in that it was the first movie in which nearly all the special effects were done with the kind of computer effects that would later evolve into CGI. I have tremendous issues with the latter (although people do seem to be getting the hang of it, as with Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who), but the relatively primitive effects of The Last Starfighter work well (and certainly looked fantastic when seen in the theater, from what I can remember). The villain is rather lame, but much of the acting is excellent, from Hill Street Blues' Barbara Bosson as Alex's perpetually worried mother to Stewart's feisty Maggie to Chris Hebert as Alex's porn addict brother. Dan O'Herlihy (as Marshal Ney, one of the few featured actors in Bondarchuk's 1971 Waterloo not to appear asleep, and shortly to become famous for his role as Ronnie Cox's boss in Robocop), offers endearingly gruff support as Alex's lizard-faced navigator Grig, and screen and stage legend (particularly for The Music Man) Robert Preston capped a fifty-year career (one of his early roles was as one of the Geste brothers in Beau Geste with Gary Cooper and Ray Milland) with his performance as con man Centauri, who enables Alex's adventures with his specially designed video game. Best of all is Guest, who didn't do much else after this, and that's a shame. He convincingly portrays a lovelorn teenager who manages to be realistically witty and genuinely heroic. His performance is all the more impressive as he also plays an android (the "Beta Unit") put in his place while he's off being a Starfighter to deflect suspicion. It's almost like he's an aughties hipster trapped in the 80s, sloughing off the macho swagger of funny scifi heroes like Han Solo. The Last Starfighter doesn't qualify as one of the great sci-fi classics, but it perfectly fits into the "sleeper" category, probably the 80s' best.

White Dog (1982): Samuel Fuller spent thirty years outside the studio system making some of the most striking and uncompromising movies in America at the time. Early classics like Pickup On South Street (1953) were followed by his masterworks like Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964, with one of the greatest opening scenes ever). He became a popular face of American cinema in European circles, and a great favorite of French and German directors, making memorable cameos in Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Wenders' The American Friend (1977). White Dog was his last major film in the States, and suffered from threatened cuts by the producers due to a potentially inflammatory nature (an excellent summation of the controversy, though with unavoidable spoilers, can be found here). An aspiring actress (Kristy MacNicol) adopts a stray dog after it foils an attempted rape (between Fuller's full-blooded style and the fact that I'd seen this just the other day, the scene got a little hard to take seriously at times) and comes to discover that it's been trained to attack black people. She takes it to an animal trainer (Burl Ives--it was hard not to think of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer), who palms it off on his offbeat assistant (Paul Winfield). The latter makes it his mission to cure the dog of its training or kill it himself. There are scenes in which I can understand the producers' fears of controversy, but taking them in isolation from Fuller's rather unique record on racial matters in American film was frankly ridiculous. Fuller's films from the start were genuinely and consistently anti-racist--not just concerning anti-black racism (Shock Corridor is especially scathing) but also anti-Asian racism (1959's The Crimson Kimono is apparently a terrific example)--in a way that made more famous "pioneers" like Stanley Kramer look weak and vacillating by comparison (not all that hard, to be sure). By the early 1980s, when most directors of his age would have retired, Fuller was still as incisive as ever, and White Dog is in many ways his final take on American society.

*It's worth sitting through the commercial, even if the "minisode" loses some of the best bits, particularly Dave's impassioned correction of Lisa's ignorance of video games and maybe the greatest Phil Hartman line ever: "All this talk of luncheon meat and ghosts has made me rather peckish; I'll be at the sandwich machine if I'm needed."

Edited to add:

Yesterday was "Blog For Choice Day," and, as my feelings on the matter have probably grown stronger over the past few years, especially in the midst of the debate over healthcare, I link to my essential position.

Also, some inspiring footage of the late Dr. George Tiller.