Film

Rip It Up, Issue 83, 1 June 1984, Page 8

Film

William Dart

AGAINST ALL ODDS Director: Taylor Hackford It is ironic that so many films which tackle themes of great significance should so often fall rather short of their aim. The Day After was one recent example, the current Against All Odds is another.

Against All Odds sets out to expose the links between the world of professional sport and the machinations of politics. It's a fascinating subject, to be sure, and one that has a relevance far beyond the film's Los Angeles setting.

When he was filming An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, director Taylor Hackford stated categorically that "the bottom-line of the film is the script." Two years on, it's primarily an unfocused script that lets his latest movie down.

Against All Odds starts promisingly enough as injured footballer Jeff Bridges gets railroaded from the team and is then coaxed into finding Rachel Ward, a runaway Deb who is playing the bohemian in the Caribbean. Even if one can overlook Ward's extremely flat performance, the whole Caribbean episode manages to dissipate all the tension that the movie had built up to this point. Only when the film returns to its LA setting, with a veritable kaleidoscope of intrigue being revealed, does Against All Odds regain some of its lost ground. There are some fine performances here most notably Bridges' resolute hero and it’s good to see Richard Widmark back playing the smoothest of villains. Yet, as a whole, the film represents a lost opportunity. An Officer and a Gentleman, for all its sentimentality and questionable attitudes, was undeniably a slick piece of craftsmanship Against

All Odds takes much more intriguing material and fails to make it all come together.

VALLEY GIRL Director: Martha Coolidge Superficially, Valley Girl might seem to be yet another comedy from the same stable that gave the world such masterpieces of the acne set as Porkys and Meatballs. Yet what distinguishes this rather amiable comedy is its ambition, attempting as it does to offer some satirical insight into those ultra-bourgeois souls who inhabit the San Fernando Valley. The plot revolves around Valley Girl Deborah Foreman who falls desperately in love with a stray LA punk (played with gangling charm by Nicholas Cage) and the problems it causes in her social set. The movie is so enthusiastic in its satire that it does not restrict itself to the young ladies of the title, their dialogue laced with all the same jargon that Frank Zappa aired in his 'Valley Girl' single a few years back. Its view of the LA punk set is a fairly jaundiced one, and the sharpest satire can be seen in

Frederic Forrest as Foreman’s laissez-faire father, running his health food shop, dreaming of the glory that was Woodstock, and surreptitiously smoking joints in the bathroom before his daughter's Prom.

It may not be the "bitchenist" movie in town but it’s fun "like totally, fer sure.”

THE OUTSIDERS Director: Francis Coppola Susie Hinton's novel The Outsiders is a tale in the vein of such great sagas of misunderstood youth as Rebel Without a Cause ; her tough little anti-heroes have chips on their shoulders the size of the Empire State Building, they’re ignored by their parents, forever slipping into the much more comfortable option of daydreams, and occasionally proving their machismo by getting into endless rumbles.

Coppola’s filming catches both the essential social commentary and the magical fantasy of Hinton’s novel, and the director himself described the movie as "the type of film that I really like.

a melodrama with a romantic tone." All is firmly on the side of the young protagonists and the whole affair is imbued with a romantic glow. If One from the Heart caught the never-never garish world of Las Vegas with all its bitter-sweet ironies, then The Outsiders does the same these young refugees creating their own territory in an adult world that wants nothing to do with them.

Just after finishing The Outsiders, Coppola filmed another of Hinton’s novels as the film Rumblefish. This is fascinating, if indeed not essential viewing alongside the earlier movie. It explores the same social millieu with many of the same cast (Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Tom Waits) but it is a more surrealistic vision, shot in a dream-like black-and-white (apart from the hand-tinted rumblefish of the title) and a brilliantly nervy score by Stewart Copeland that is miles away from Carmine Coppola’s lush, romanticised orchestrations for The Outsiders.