On our latest edition of oh my god has it really been that long since that came out, we have “Risky Business.” It was just released in a 25th Anniversary standard and Blu-Ray DVD edition with a bunch of special features many of us have been waiting years for. I can remember watching the trailer for this movie in a movie theater so many years ago and that Porsche crashing in the lake. I even remember watching it with my brother (part of it anyway) when it was first out on VHS (our parents were not home). Watching it freaked me out actually, and I couldn’t believe a lot of the things going on. It seemed cruel what Lana was doing to Joel Goodson. Then again, I was 8 or 9 when I saw this, so what did I know about call girls? Not a whole lot, but that was probably just as well.

Years later, I was able to actually understand what was going on in “Risky Business,” and it remains one of my favorite Tom Cruise movies. The amazing thing about this movie being as old as it now is, it is actually timeless when you look at the themes. Parents overly encouraging their kids to retake the SAT’s and wanting them to get into the best schools, the excitement of having the family home all to yourself, taking out your dad’s car which you could never hope to be insured to drive as a teenager, none of this ever gets old. The movie was made in the age of capitalism, and that age is still with us while it is enduring some nasty speed bumps (the stock market crashing). It was “The Graduate” for the 80’s generation, and I think it’s safe to say that it will has the same staying power as that movie. Roger Ebert has gone out of his way to compare this movie to “The Graduate.” Can you blame him?

The movie is a teen comedy, but it actually has a much more serious tone to it. This is made clear as we open up from the view of being on a train overlooking Chicago. All this is done to the score of Tangerine Dream, and this is one of my all time favorite scores ever. I never get sick of listening to it ever. We see Joel talking about this dream he has of when he goes over to the neighbor’s house to find a woman taking a shower. Joel of course goes over to her, but like all great wet dreams, it ends just when you get to first base. Joel’s dream suddenly takes him to a classroom where everyone is taking their college boards, and he is three hours late. This gets at his fear of everything going wrong with his future and of never getting into college, but the movie will have him going through a very real version of Murphy’s Law where everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

The thing about the comedy in this movie is that it doesn’t come out of jokes, but out of situations and the way people act around one another. Some of these things you need to laugh at because they would be too painful otherwise. Joel seems to have the most trusting parents on the planet, especially when you consider the fact that his dad doesn’t even bother to hide the keys to his Porsche. Believe me, I would have loved to have driven my dad’s Infiniti when he was away, but the keys were nowhere to be found (he obviously saw this movie before I did). Before they go, his parents advise their teenage son to use his best judgment because he knows they trust him. The trust lasts through most of the movie, and it leads later on to one of my all time favorite movie quotes:

“It seems to me that if there were any logic to our language, trust would be a four letter word.”

Of course, Joel goes off the wall as soon as his parents are gone filling his glass with Chivas Regal whiskey and adds a little coke to it (I wouldn’t have the nerve to mix my drink the way he does). This leads to one of the all time classic scenes where Cruise dances in his shirt and underwear and lip syncs to “Old Time Rock and Roll” by Bob Seger. Don’t tell me you have never ever done this yourself! I have more than I care to admit, except I usually had my pants or shorts on. But that is harmless compared to what happens next.

When his friend Miles (Curtis Armstrong) ends up setting Joel up with Jackie whose ad he finds in a local paper. Before Joel has a chance to call Jackie back to say that it was a joke, Miles (a prick of a friend) eats up the number. Damn! All this happening in a movie made long before the advent of caller ID! Of course, if Joel’s parents had Caller ID, then there wouldn’t have been a movie. Jackie ends up coming around, and it turns out she is really a he. Jackie however does give her the number for Lana whom she describes as what every white guy from the lake wants. From there on out, things really do get risky.

“Risky Business” is really a great movie about the loss of innocence, and how things will never be the same again for Joel. There is a great scene where as Joel is having sex with Lana (Rebecca De Mornay), the camera pans across the wall to reveal pictures of Joel as a baby and as a child. This is the Joel of the past, and he ain’t coming back. The Joel of the future is gonna have to grow up a lot more quickly to the real world he is about to enter. When he finds that he owes Lana $300 for their night together, he has to go to the bank and cash out a bond. It’s a sad moment that he knows he will never escape from. By the end of the movie, when Joel is reunited with his parents, there is a trust between them that is forever broken. The world becomes a lonely place for Joel, and he comes to realize that he won’t be able to tell his parents anything and everything (at least, not for a long time).

It is also a look at a generation that is first introduced to a world of greed and capitalism that they want to be a part of without really realizing or maybe even caring about the consequences. There’s one scene where Joel and his friends are talking about how a friend of theirs just got into Harvard, and of how much an MBA makes after they graduate. Joel at one point asks everyone if they care about making money or if they really care about doing good. Everyone pretty much says they are all about money, and they chide Joel for sarcastically going in the opposite direction. This is still going on today with kids doing overtime to get the best scores possible on those college exams which are less about your intelligence than they are about how well you take tests. The pressure parents put on their kids to get into the best schools possible is never ending, and its like parents are pimping out their kids to show how theirs is better. We have gone from dueling banjos to dueling SAT’s!

But what I really loved about “Risky Business” is how it never ever condescends to its characters. Most other teen comedies did that at the time, and it drove me nuts after a while. Kids are not always as dumb as we like to make them out to be. They can be smarter than us adults sometimes (scary thought actually), and they get in trouble not so much out of stupidity as much as boredom. To challenge this nice image everyone has of you is always tempting whether you’re a kid, a teenager, or even an adult. To break out from the norm is usually a necessity when things become too routine and boring to be special anymore. I love it when movies treat teenagers like people instead of just clichéd idiots.

But yeah, let’s not forget that this movie is indeed a comedy. There are moments that are as funny as they are horrifying. The scene where Joel desperately tries to keep his dad’s Porsche from going into Lake Michigan always gets to me. Usually, situations like this end with the car getting smashed in some accident, so give the filmmakers some credit for giving us something more original. That Joel ends up turning the family home into a brothel is ridiculously funny. You have to wonder if the neighbors had any idea of what was going on. It almost seems impossible that Joel can get away with this completely, especially with Bill Rutherford (John Masur), the man doing his interview for Princeton, coming in during the festivities. Also, you have to get a kick out of the absurdity of the situation Joel and his friends are in:

“I’ve got a trig midterm tomorrow and I’m being chased by Guido the killer pimp!”

Like I said, you need to laugh at a lot of this stuff because we were lucky to escape from our teenage years in one piece. Looking at this movie now, not a whole lot has changed. Kids today are directionless and are entering an increasingly shallow and corrupt world after graduation. What we are taught to believe in is almost rendered completely useless as the real world comes at us in its unrelenting fashion.

While “Top Gun” shot Tom Cruise into the stratosphere of stardom, “Risky Business” was the movie that made him a star. And that’s not just because we got to see him dancing around the living room in his underwear. There is no one else who could have played this role as well as he does here. Tom gives us a seemingly innocent kid dealing with conflicting emotions and fears, and he has great moments where he shows this without saying a word. I know I say that a lot in my reviews, of how people do the best acting with their face and no dialogue, but Tom’s performance here is a great example of that. By the end of the movie, he succeeds in taking Joel Goodson from an innocent kid to a stronger if corrupted young man with the world ahead of him.

Rebecca DeMornay is also great as Lana and shows her at times to be as tough as steel while at the same time showing her vulnerabilities. In her eyes, you can see a very sad person. You are never sure whether or not you can fully trust her, but you cannot resist being around her even if she can be very bad for you. And like everything else in this movie, she compliments the music score by Tangerine Dream very well. This movie got her career off to a great start.

Speaking of that, this movie got a lot of careers up and running as well as it did Tom’s and Rebecca’s. It’s hard to believe that this is one of Joe Pantoliano’s very first movies, and he plays Lana’s pimp, Guido. Joe is at times tough and intimidating, and there are other great moments where he humorously offers to sell Joel Goodson his life back. What other movies can you think of where you see someone so excited to sell furniture back to its intended owner?

The Blu-Ray disc of the 25th Anniversary edition features the audio/video commentary with writer/director Marshall Brickman, Tom Cruise who almost never does commentaries, and “Righteous Kill” hack… Ahem, excuse me, director Jon Avnet. Don’t get too excited though, there is no couch jumping by any pf the participants let alone Tom Cruise. There is also the requisite documentary on the making of the movie with all its participants looking back on the movie years later. This one is very good and it also features some other perspectives on it from Amy Heckerling, Cameron Crowe, and film critic Peter Travers among others. We also get to see the original screen tests with Tom Cruise and Rebecca DeMornay. The movie itself looks great in Blu-Ray regardless of the grain that you see here and there. That seems to be the case with a lot of older movies when they go to Blu-Ray.

Many people can’t stand Tom Cruise today (I’m not sure I can either to be honest), but that doesn’t take away from his work in “Risky Business” which remains one of the great teen comedies (let alone teen movies) ever made. Catching up with it again was worth it, and I appreciated it a lot more now than when I was eight years old. Things have changed a little since then.

Ok mom and dad, I’ll go to my room, but my brother said I could watch it!

**** out of ****

This is both a brilliant and baffling movie. I spent much time after this movie trying to figure out what it was all about. This is not one of the movies that is easy to explain or understand initially. But for those who are not easily offended, it is worth a viewing to discover brave artists working at the peak of their talents, Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci. Their collaboration together on the 1972 classic “Last Tango In Paris” produced a shocking portrait of sexual excesses and overwhelming emotional needs. Many may have been put off by the sex and probably would consider this a porno more than anything else, but to dismiss it as such would be insulting to the director and actors who were insanely brave to do this type of movie.

Apparently, the idea for this movie rose out of Bertolucci’s sexual fantasies, and he stated that he “dreamed of seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was.” I wonder if his fantasies included sex and emotions that are as raw as they are displayed here in the movie. There’s certainly no holding back Brando here, and this may stand as the last truly brilliant performance he ever gave in a movie before he passed away. Then again, I guess you can count his performance in “The Freshman” as his brilliant one. It’s up to you.

“Last Tango In Paris” stars Brando as Paul, an American whose has been living with his wife in a decrepit hotel in Paris for 5 years. As the movie begins, we find that his wife has committed suicide, and we see him looking as morose as a human can get. Paul is in a wilderness of pain, and it has completely numbed him to any sort of enjoyment he can get out of life. We then meet up with Jeanne who is played by Maria Schneider in a part that no one has ever let her live down. She is currently enduring the passions of her boyfriend who wants to make a film of her life, and it gets to where she is not sure what is real and what is not. Both Paul and Maria end up meeting by chance in an apartment that Maria is thinking of renting, and the both of them end up having sex right there with no real explanation. It is said that Paul rapes Maria in this scene, but Maria never does say no or stop and doesn’t appear to resist his sudden advances.

From then on, the two of them agree to meet in that same apartment that Paul ends up renting on a regular basis. Paul sets up rules that define their relationship; they will not tell each other their real names, and that nothing outside of that apartment is real compared to what is going in this room right hear and right now. Inexplicably, Jeanne agrees to this even while trying to maintain a relationship with her filmmaker boyfriend who continues to drive her crazy. What goes on between these two people cannot easily be described as love, but more of a longing to feel something real, or something to take them away from the suffocating world they feel stuck in.

What drives this movie is not so much the sex in it, but the raw emotion that powers it from start to finish. What Paul is doing is not only degrading Jeanne, but really is degrading himself. Paul has such a hatred of himself that in the end, he is punishing himself more than he is punishing the women in his life. The sexual release he has with Jeanne represents the only sort of feeling he can generate for himself, and as a result, each encounter they have takes their sexual escapades to another level that is more dangerous than before. By the last half of the movie, they start to break the rules and want to get to know each other more intimately. They have spent their time before this having sex and then telling things about themselves to each other which may or may not be true.

With this movie, Bernardo Bertolucci bravely took a sexual fantasy of his and turned it into a movie which looked at relationships with and without complications. The result is an unforgettable movie dealing with naked emotions that becoming more and more apparent as the movie goes on. This relationship changes both of the main characters, and they later find themselves breaking the confines of it either to escape it, or to get more personal with each other. It is impossible to not have a passive reaction to this movie as it will enthrall and maybe even anger you. These two people are not involved in the healthiest of relationships.

I’m serious when I say that this is probably the last truly brilliant performance that Marlon Brando ever gave on film. His character of Paul is not exactly a likable person, and he does end up doing vicious things to both Jeanne and to himself, but Brando never hides away from any of those aspects. There are scenes where the camera lingers on Brando’s face for a couple of minutes as he tells a story to Jeanne that may or may not be true. You can visualize everything that he says so vividly, and that makes his performance all the more amazing. Brando paints pictures with the words that he says, and I can’t think of another actor that did that so effectively.

There is also an astonishing scene in the film where Brando looks over the body of his dead wife whose body is surrounded by flowers. He says so hateful things to her, but then he cries over her body with apologies she will never be able to hear. It is a scene of great emotional power, and it is further proof that he is one of the brilliant (not to mention one of the bravest) actors who has ever been onscreen. A lot of things have been said about him as a person, but you can never take away from his stature as an actor.

Maria Schneider is also great, although her performance is based more on her reactions to what Brando and Bertolucci do to her. Maria’s reactions to what she goes through onscreen are very real, and it does make for an uncomfortable experience at times. She bares all both physically and emotionally, and while it may never seem totally understandable why she would be consummating with Brando’s character, she seems to have justified it in her own mind.

The really interesting dynamic of their relationship in the film is that Brando’s character has had a long life and has been deeply wounded by it in many ways to the point where it seems like he can’t feel anything at all. The only way he can is if he hurts himself or hurts somebody else. Schneider’s character on the other hand is still young, and she has yet to fully understand how much life can hurt. These two are so different from each other, and they come from different stages in life, and yet somehow they are drawn to each other.

When I think of this movie, I immediately think of that Nine Inch Nails song that Johnny Cash did a brilliant cover of. The first set of lyrics of the song “Hurt” have always stayed in my mind:

“I hurt myself today to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.”

I guess that’s what these two characters have in common; they feel more alive when they hurt. It shakes them out of their normal lives outside of that apartment they stay in, and nothing else seems to exist when the two of them are there.

Bertolucci dealt with this sexual fantasy of people in an apartment and locked off from the rest of the world several decades later in “The Dreamers,” so this seems to be a strong theme for him. This is probably a common theme in a lot of his other movies as well. I’m not sure if any of them are as brilliant and as emotionally affecting as “Last Tango In Paris.” It is another in a long line of movies that prove that the 1970’s was one of the greatest decades for films ever.

**** out of ****

Director: Jonathan Yudis

Writer: Mike Davis

Star: Mary Carey

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