Awesome ’80s in April: Dune (1984)

duen movie poster

I’ve had a copy of Dune, the Frank Herbert novel, on my bookshelves for years. I’ve never managed to read it. I’ve tried a couple of times but I can’t get past the first few paragraphs. It is so dense, so full of new words that I feel immediately lost and that it isn’t worth my time to dig in.

I’ve had a DVD copy of Dune, the movie directed by David Lynch on my shelves for years as well. Until recently I had never managed to watch it. I tried once, many months ago, but didn’t get past the first few minutes. It was so full of exposition and new ideas that I was almost immediately lost and it didn’t feel worth my time to try and dig in.

Last year I did watch Dune, the movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and quite liked it. I’m a big fan of his films in general, and he somehow made this dense world full of numerous people and clans and ideas seem understandable and manageable. So, I figured now was the time to give Lynch’s adaptation another shot.

It was a notoriously expensive bomb. Lynch’s original cut ran about four hours and the studio made him cut it down to just over two. Critics hated it, audiences mostly stayed away, and Lynch has since disavowed it and refuses to speak of it in interviews.

It continues to be reevaluated by new audiences, and the general consensus of it is an ambitious failure.

It was David Lych’s third film. His first was Eraserhead (1977), a really weird, surrealistic body horror flick that became a cult hit. Mel Brooks of all people loved it and hired Lynch to direct his next film, The Elephant Man. That was a much more straightforward film, and it became a big hit and an award-winner. This is how Lynch came to direct Dune, a big-budget sci-fi epic.

I love it. With caveats. The plot is near incomprehensible even with multiple characters explaining what they are doing and with our ability to hear their thoughts.

Most of it takes place on a desert planet, the only place where the people of this universe can get something called spice. Which is a mind-altering drug, it can extend a person’s life and it allows people to bend space so they can travel across the universe in seconds. Or something. There are various warring clans who all are fighting over this planet. But it all seems to be covert. Outwardly the Emperor of the Universe has given control of the planet to one family. Their son is named Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) and he’s apparently some kind of messiah figure.

Everyone has weird hairstyles, one guy can float, and Sting spends a lot of the time practicing fighting with his shirt off. There are cool electronic shields of some kind, people have to wear these weird nose pieces on the spice planet and, oh yea, the planet is full of giant sandworms.

There is so much going on in this film that it is impossible to explain and even more impossible to understand. But it looks really cool. And it is populated by loads of great actors including Patrick Stewart, Brad Dourif, Linda Hunt, José Ferrer, Dean Stockwell, Max Von Sydow, and Sean Young.

The style and look of the film are completely Lynchian. So even while I wasn’t always sure as to what was happening on screen, I sure enjoyed watching it.

Awesome ’80s in April: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

mad max beyond thunderdome poster <

Memory is a strange thing. If you have asked me last year if I’d seen all of the Mad Max movies I would have told you that I had. I might have hesitated for a moment before I answered and admitted that I wasn’t real sure about Mad Max (1979), but I had almost certainly seen Mad Max 2 (1981) and had 100% watched Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. I have real memories of watching that one several times on cable TV as a kid.

The thing is while watching Beyond Thunderdome I remembered absolutely nothing of what appeared on the screen, and the few memories I did have of the film didn’t actually happen. So, have I watched this movie before? Or did I just dream it? Or maybe I was so young my memories of it have been supplanted. Who knows? But after watching this and Mad Max 2 recently I definitely need to watch the first one and then I’ll probably hit up Fury Road before long as well.

Beyond Thunderdome takes place sometime after the events of Mad Max 2. Max (Mel Gibson) now rides in a camel-driven vehicle. It is stolen by an airborne bandit (who is played by Bruce Spence who played a pilot in the previous film, but is apparently a different character in this one). Max follows the thief to Bartertown, which is run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). She’s attempting to recreate a civilized society but it is a long, difficult process.

Bartertown is fueled by pig poop burned into methane in a series of underground caverns. This area is run by a resourceful dwarf called Master (Angelo Rossitto) who rides around on top of a giant called Blaster (Paul Larsson). Master Blaster had designs to run Bartertown himself. Aunty Entity fixes things so that Max has to take him down so Aunty can stay on top. This concludes in a battle inside the Thunderdome (a big, circular cage where our two opponents jump around on bungee cords and try to kill each other).

Things don’t go as planned and Max finds himself exiled from Bartertown. Soon enough he stumbles upon some kids who have formed their own Lost Boys-esque community. Wouldn’t you know it Max and these lost kids eventually have to go to Bartertown and battle it out with Aunty and her minions. It all concludes with a big action scene with our heroes on a train being followed by the villains in various autos.

The general consensus is that Beyond Thunderdome is a lesser film than Mad Max 2 and that the scenes with the kids are an out-of-left-field oddity that takes the film down a notch. I get that, but also I kind of dug it. It isn’t nearly as exciting as Mad Max 2, but it isn’t trying to be. I do love the world-building in these films and this one really attempts to dig a little into how the people would try to rebuild their society after absolute devastation.

At the time Tina Turner was a huge star. She’s fine but she definitely dates this film within a very specific time frame. I actually like the kids, too. More or less. They created a goofy language for them which is kind of fun and kind of annoying. But their story is interesting. They basically don’t understand what happened to the world and have invented a myth about a pilot returning (they are the survivors of a crashed plane) and saving everybody. I dig the idea of people building new myths in the aftermath of an apocalypse.

The final chase sequence is good, but it is hard not to feel a little let down after watching the much better sequence in Mad Max 2. It makes sense to me that Fury Road is essentially one long, epic chase sequence. I mean why not take the best parts of all these movies and turn that into your new film?

Awesome ’80s in April: Purple Rain (1984)

purple rain poster

In my review of Desperately Seeking Susan, I talked a little about how Madonna and Michael Jackson were the biggest stars of the 1980s. One could argue that Prince was up there, too. He had numerous hit songs and his style was very much a part of that decade.

I liked some of his songs, but if I’m behind honest, I wasn’t really that into him. I’ve never really ventured beyond his hits and it was decades after its release before I had even heard the song “Purple Rain” much less seen the movie.

I’ve learned to appreciate more of his music over the last few years and was happy to use the Awesome ’80s in April as an excuse to finally watch this film.

As a piece of cinema, as a narrative story, Purple Rain is not great. As a time capsule, as a snapshot of Prince in this particular stage of his career it is pretty fascinating. As a music video, it is freaking fantastic.

They say the story is more or less autobiographical with Prince pretty much playing himself. Here he’s called The Kid and he’s an up-and-coming musician in Minneapolis along with his band The Revolution. They have a regular gig at the First Avenue nightclub (an actual Prince haunt) but the headliners are Morris Day and The Time. The two groups have a less-than-friendly rivalry.

The Kid has a lot of talent, but his personal life is a mess. His father (Clarence Williams III) was a musician as well, but he never made it big and is now an alcoholic and abusive husband. Two of the women in The Revolution hand him the music to “Purple Rain” a song that they wrote, but he refuses to listen to it. He wants to be the star.

He starts a relationship with Apollonia (Apollonia Kotero) but when her own musical career starts to take off the Kid suddenly makes those lyrics from “When Doves Cry” become reality (“Maybe I’m just too demanding/Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold”). He becomes jealous and abusive. He also plays a brutal rendition of “Darling Nikki” at the club while staring directly at her.

If this movie is autobiographical then Prince does not come off as a good guy. The weird thing is the film doesn’t really give him much of a redemption arc. He does come to realize that he’s becoming more like his father, but he doesn’t really apologize to Apollonia or the band. His only real action is to finally perform “Purple Rain” and even then he doesn’t acknowledge that it was written by his bandmates.

It is, however, a brilliant performance of that song and at that moment I can forgive him, too. All the songs and performances are terrific. They really are the reason to watch the film. And for that, it is well worth watching. Just don’t come expecting a great story or any real insight into Prince, the character, or the person.

Awesome ’80s in April: Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987)

slave girls beyond infinity poster

The 1980s brought unto us the Video Cassette Recorder, also known as the VCR, and the Video Home System, also known as the VHS tape. Well, technically, these things were available way before the 1980s, but that decade made them popular, and it was then most people experienced home video. And technically Betamax came before the VCR, but it lost the Video Format War and so most people only ever had a VCR.

They say it was the porn industry that won the war for the VCR but that’s another story for another time.

My family was early adapters of the home video industry. We actually had a Betamax for a little while but eventually switched to VCR and never looked back.

Once the VCR took off it exploded onto the scene. Almost everybody had one. Video stores seemed to spring up almost overnight. The big sellers (or renters I should say for it would be many years before you could really buy a movie – I still remember seeing a price sheet once and the cheapest tapes were over $100, clearly they were meant to be purchased by stores and rented out) had a lot of shelf space to fill and while the big blockbusters and new releases were the reason most folks came into the store, they needed to fill those shelves to give the customers at least some semblance of major choices. Loads of small studios and big dreamers (or big pockets and a good sense that the home video market was a boon) started churning out low-budget movies to help fill those shelves.

Naturally, if you didn’t have a budget to make your movie then you had even less to market it, so you needed some reason for folks to buy your films and rent them. Exploitation cinema was nothing new, people had been making exploitative films for nearly as long as film existed. But the 1980s saw an explosion in the market. Sex sells, of course, as do naked boobs, blood-soaked violence, and big action. If you can make your audience laugh on top of that, then all the better.

I love that stuff. I especially loved it in the 1980s and early 1990s when I was coming of age as they say. There used to be a late-night cable show called USA Up All Night. It was hosted by Gilbert Godfried on Saturday nights and Rhonda Shear on Fridays. Godfried was very funny but it was Shear who always got my attention. She played a bubbly, innuendo-laden, hot blonde type and this pubescent boy watched her every weekend. Both introduced a series of films and then did various skits during the commercial breaks. The films were the types of films I’ve been talking about. My love for bad cinema can be traced back to watching Up All Night.

This (finally) brings us to Slave Girls From Beyond. I don’t remember if that film aired on Up All Night, but it could have. I felt I would be remiss if I didn’t have at least one film of this nature in my Awesome ’80s in April feature and here we are.

Slave Girls From Beyond is basically a retelling of The Most Dangerous Game, but in space with scantily clad babes. Daria (Elizabeth Kaitan) and Tisa (Cindy Beal) are captured by some mutant-looking dudes. Clad in rabbit-skin bikinis they escape their prison and flee in a rocket ship. Before long a mysterious force causes them to crash land on a jungle planet and they soon find themselves in the fortress of a strange man named Zed (Dan Scribner). He seems to be the only sentient inhabitant of the planet, though he has two robot guards.

A couple of other folks also recently crash-landed on the planet. The dude (Carl Horner) warns the girls that there were more of them, but one by one they’ve all disappeared. Soon enough he disappears and, yeah, I mentioned this is based on The Most Dangerous Game, so soon enough the three girls find themselves being hunted by Zed.

Before that though there is some naked frolicking, lots of running about the castle in their underwear, and a bit of comedy. Later, they will run into some mutants, zombies, and a hunch-backed alien with a laser rifle for an arm.

It is all very ridiculous and silly and kind of fun. There is nobody, and I mean absolutely no one who thinks this is a good movie, not even the people who made it. I do appreciate that the two leads aren’t the typical dumb bimbos. They are both rather intelligent and one of them often rambles off a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo to indicate she knows what she’s doing. They are both quite able to get out of scrapes as well.

If you can get into silly, low-budget, girls in outer space flicks, then you might find this one to be enjoyable.

Awesome ’80s in April: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1983)

2010 the year we make contact poster

2001: A Space Odyssey is arguably one of the greatest movies ever made. Certainly, it is one of the greatest science fiction films ever put on celluloid. It was made by the visionary auteur Stanley Kubrick. One of the many astounding things about the film is that it is almost entirely told through visual language. Great swaths of the movie contain no dialogue whatsoever. This is also one of the reasons the film is endlessly discussed – it never tells you what’s happening, it shows you.

A sequel was made in 1984. Directed by Peter Hyams 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a pale imitation of the original. As a sequel, it is not great. Where Kubrick’s film is mysterious, asking big questions and giving no answers, 2010 is all answers.

But if you can separate it from the original, and take it on by itself, it’s actually pretty good. Admittedly, that is a difficult task, as this film is basically an answer to the questions asked by the original. Its plot takes place right after 2001 ended and its characters spend their time hunting down what happened in that movie. But if you can get the original out of your mind and just let this one do what it’s doing, then I think you can find it enjoyable.

I said it begins right after the events of 2001, but really it begins 9 years after that movie (hence 2010 in the title.) At the end of the first film, the crew from the Discovery One spaceship which was on a mission to Jupiter are lost. The HAL-9000 computer, which controlled pretty much everything on board went a little crazy and killed most of the crew. Dave (Keir Dullea) the only survivor disappeared. As an audience, we know that he discovered a giant black monolith orbiting Jupiter and was sucked inside it. A long, psychedelic trip then turns him into a cosmic space baby. But in-film, the people of Earth have no idea what happened to him.

The Americans and the Russians are both planning missions to Jupiter to find out. There is a time rush as the Discovery One is slowly losing orbit and will soon crash. The Russians will have their ship ready faster than the Americans, but it is the Americans who have knowledge of the Discovery One and are the only ones who can reboot HAL. So, three Americans Heywood Floyd (Roy Scheider) who feels responsible for the entire Discovery One mishap, Walter Curnow (John Lithgow) who designed the Discovery One, and R. Chandra (Bob Babalan) who created the HAL-9000 computer, jump aboard the Russian ship.

All of this occurs during the height of the Cold War. During the mission relations between the two countries deteriorate with a Cuban Missile Crisis-type situation pulling them toward the brink of war.

The astronauts try to ignore the ongoing politics back home and instead concentrate on the mission. The film does explain what happened to HAL in 2001, but I won’t spoil that here. It explains further what the monolith is and what the aliens want, but again no spoilers. None of that is particularly thrilling or all that interesting. And if you want it to it can destroy all the mystery of 2001.

However, the design of everything is really quite good. I especially enjoyed the matte paintings and the various images of space, Jupiter and its moons and the placements of the ships within all of that. All of the space stuff is really interesting. I also enjoyed the relationships that develop between the various scientists (Helen Mirren plays one of the Russians and she’s always fun to watch, especially when attempting a Russian accent).

If this movie existed on its own, if 2001 had never been made I think 2010 would have been well-regarded. It might not be a classic, but It would definitely have a good following. I’d argue it should definitely be reconsidered, despite the Kubrick film always overshadowing it.

I wrote a different review of this film back in 2004. You can click here and read it if you like (spoiler alert, I hated it).

Awesome ’80s in April: Monkey Shines (1988)

monkey shines poster

For some reason, I assumed this movie was based on a Stephen King novel. I think that was because the poster features one of those toy monkeys with cymbals in its hands. King wrote a short story featuring the same toy (which I’ve read part of, but didn’t finish because the audiobook had to be returned to the library). It is based upon a book, but not anything by King, but rather a British author named Michael Stewart. The film has nothing to do with a toy monkey either. But its plot does run into Stephen King territory.

At the beginning of the film we know something is going to happen to law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) because he is out running on a beautiful morning and all seems to be right with the world (and films don’t begin that way unless something bad is going to happen.) Since it features him running athletically and focuses on his muscular legs, he’s naturally hit by a truck which renders him a paraplegic.

He has a tough go of it in the beginning and tries to kill himself. But fails. His kooky scientist friend, Geoffrey (John Pankow) hooks him up with a helper monkey. Geoffrey doesn’t tell Allan that he’s been secretly injecting the monkey, named Ella, with a human brain cell-laden serum.

At first, things seem great. Ella is super helpful and seems to anticipate Allan’s every need. But because this is a horror movie, one directed by George A. Romero no less, things go sideways quickly. Actually, quickly isn’t the right word here, because the film takes its time to get to the psychotic monkey killing people. But they do eventually get there.

Basically, the monkey forms a psychic connection with Allan and it especially attaches to Allan’s anger, and unlike people who might think they’d like to kill someone in a fit of anger, the monkey translates things literally and does some bad, bad things.

There are a few too many side plots involving, among other things, Geoffrey’s boss (who doesn’t like his experiments, and is played by Stephen Root in his first film role), Allan’s Nurse Ratched-like healthcare worker, and Allan’s wife having an affair with his surgeon (Stanley Tucci in his third film role – the wife is played by Janine Turner). There is also a romance with the monkey’s trainer that includes a very interesting sex scene (one of the few on-screen sex scenes involving a paraplegic.)

Romero handles the material well, but this is definitely one of his lesser films. It isn’t exactly boring, but I was very much ready for the monkey to turn psycho much earlier than it did.

Awesome ’80s in April: The Presidio (1988)

the presidio poster

It is funny what you remember from your childhood. Until this week I’d never seen The Presidio, but I remember that my cousin Clifton has. I remember him telling me how awesome it was and that James Bond beat a guy up using just his thumb. That was enough to make me want to watch it, but I wasn’t even a teenager in 1988 and my mother was much more strict about what she let us watch than Aunt Sandi was for Clifton. When I was old enough to watch it I had already moved on to other movies. But I still remember wondering how a guy could beat another guy up with just a thumb.

That guy is Colonel Alan Caldwell (Sean Connery) the provost marshall of the Presidio Army Base in San Francisco, California. He’s a hard-nosed guy who doesn’t take too kindly when Jay Austin (Mark Harmon), a police detective shows up at his door trying to solve two murders. One murder was committed on the base, but another, seemingly by the same criminal, was committed in the city. That means it is SFPD jurisdiction.

Turns out Austin used to be an Army man, stationed at the Presidio, under the command of Caldwell. They didn’t get along too well, but are forced to team up to solve these murders. This sets up our buddy cop film with one tough, old, by-the-books officer and a younger do whatever-it-takes to get the job done detective.

It is all pretty standard 1980s cop flick fare. Connery is great and the mystery is pretty good. The action is mostly average although I did enjoy one scene inside a warehouse full of giant water bottles that get shot up pretty good. Meg Ryan plays the love interest who is also Caldwell’s daughter. She’s basically a Meg Ryan type but not given much to do.

All in all a pretty good way to spend a Saturday afternoon at the movies.

Oh and that scene where Connery takes down a dude with his thumb? That’s worth the price of admission all on its own.

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I almost forgot to mention, there is a scene in which Mark Harmon’s character meets a woman with a bunch of Grateful Dead posters on her office wall. He needs something from her so they have a hilarious chat about the Dead and which shows they’ve seen. It ends with him promising to send her a Dylan bootleg.

Awesome ’80s in April: Flash Gordon (1980)

flash gordon movie poster

After moving away for college and staying away for some twenty years, I moved back to my hometown a while back and started working in the family business with my father and brother. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with either of those things. Still aren’t if I’m being honest.

However, it has been really nice to get to know my brother better. We’ve always gotten along, but he’s four years older than me. He left home just about the time I was getting interested and by the time he moved back I was gone. So it has been wonderful forming a relationship with him as an adult.

We are both movie nerds so we spend a lot of our time talking about the various films we’ve recently watched. Since moving back he has told me many times of his undying love for Flash Gordon. This usually happens when a Queen song plays over the radio (and we tend to listen to the classic rock station so a Queen song often plays over the radio.) Queen, of course, wrote the soundtrack to the film.

Flash Gordon is one of those films that I was too young to have seen in the theaters, and have never really cared to catch at home. It bombed at the box office and the general consensus was that it was a stinker. That general consensus has stuck with me which is why I never bothered with it. But my brother’s love for it finally got me to track down a copy and I recently watched it.

I kind of loved it.

It is very silly and all kinds of cheesy, but intentionally so. His has more in common with the 1960s Batman television series than anything in the MCU. Of course, 1980 was a long way from the MCU or Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, or even Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. Christopher Reeve played Superman in 1978 but that was really the first big blockbuster superhero movie of the modern era.

At the time Comic Books were mostly kids’ stuff. Later in the 1980s, they would turn darker and grittier, but in 1980 they were still primarily for children. Flash Gordon was a newspaper comic strip that lent itself toward ridiculous situations, over-the-top villains, and general nonsense.

The movie follows in that same vein. It is bright and colorful, filled with outlandish sets, even more outlandish characters, and a plot that doesn’t pretend to be anything more than silly.

Sam J. Jones plays Flash Gordon, not a superhero but a football star. He boards his private jet and finds travel agent Dale Gordon (Melody Anderson) has snuck aboard. She’s pretty so he allows her to stay. Not long after they are in the air the plane is hit by a meteor and they crash land near mad scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov’s (Topol) laboratory.

He believes that the crazy weather they’ve been having (including massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and hurricanes) is part of an extra-terrestrial plot to destroy the Earth. He’s not wrong as it is Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow – and I really would like to hear the story of how they talked him into starring in this film) who has wreaked this havoc on the planet – he gets bored easily and likes to destroy planets just to see how they react.

Zarkov has a space jet at his disposal and the three humans take off hoping to save the day (well Zarkov hopes to save the day, he pretty much kidnaps the other two). They fly through a time warp, or a wormhole, or something or other and wind up on Ming’s planet.

There they meet some men with wings, a young Timothy Dalton in a mustache, a dude in a golden Destro-looking mask, Ming’s very attractive daughter (Ornella Muti), and an assortment of other oddballs. Flash beats off Ming’s men by basically playing football with a metal ball against them. He plays a deadly game of don’t-get-bit by a deadly scorpion thingy with Timothy Dalton. He flies some cool-looking ships, gets lost in a swamp, and has all sorts of adventures.

Again, the whole thing is ridiculously silly but a whole lot of fun. And yes, that score from Queen is pretty darn great.

Awesome ’80s In April: Mad Max 2 (1981)

mad max 2 poster

While watching Mad Max Fury Road (2015) in the theater, just about the time when the guy strapped to a truck loaded up with speakers started playing his guitar that spits fire, I turned to my wife and said, “you have to look past the utter ridiculousness and enjoy the ride.”

That remains a helpful hint when your watching The Road Warrior, also known as Mad Max 2. In these two films (and presumably the other two in the series, though I’ve never seen Mad Max (1979) and barely remember Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)) writer/director George Miller has created a fascinating post-apocalyptic world in which souped up cars are the currency and gasoline is worth more than gold.

After the exploits of Mad Max, Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) has become a mythic figure (and there is a reading of Fury Road in which the Max in that movie (played by Tom Hardy) is not the same Max in the other films but has just carried on the name, or is a part of a larger mythology). An opening narration both sums up what happened in Mad Max, and gives us insight into the legend that has become Mad Max.

Our film begins proper with Max once again on the road. He is a loner. He is haunted by the death of his family in the first film. He cruises the streets in a super charged black car. He fights off a group of marauders and outsmarts a strange gyrocopter pilot (Bruce Spence). To keep from getting killed or left behind the pilot tells Max of a place that has fuel. Lots of it. It is an old oil refinery and a group of people have made it work again.

Max tricks his way inside but then finds himself captured. Before anything can be done with him the group of marauders that attacked Max in the beginning is laying siege to the refinery. They are way outnumbered and there is no way they can keep the enemy out forever. Max declares he can scavenge a large truck that can drive a tanker full of gasoline out of the compound and into safety.

What follows is a nearly twenty minute action sequence that feels like a dry run for most of Fury Road. Director George Miller is completely at home with the action. It isn’t quite as fluid here as it is in Fury Road but it is just as thrilling. The stunts are all practical as well, there was no CGI back then. One wonders just how dangerous it was all to perform. One marvels at the technical skill involved. It is one of the great action sequences in all of cinema.

Getting to that sequence isn’t quite as thrilling, but its still pretty darn great. The world Miller has created is an interesting one. I’m a big fan of post-apocalyptic cinema and they’ve done a great job of creating this world. Filmed in the deserts of Australia it looks like a world gone to hell. Mel Gibson is great as Max, I know he’s fallen out of favor of late (and with good reason) but there was a reason he was one of the biggest stars in the 1980s and into the 1990s and you can certainly see that here.

Mad Max 2 has certainly whetted my appetite to be back in this world. I’ll probably give the other films a spin this month even though I’m fully aware their reputations aren’t nearly as good.

Awesome ’80s in April: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)

the french lieutenants woman movie poster

The opening scene of The French Lieutenant’s Woman has Meryl Streep dressed in period garb standing on the street of an old village near a great bay. The shot is from far away so the details are difficult to see. A makeup woman touches up Meryl’s face and someone snaps a clapperboard.

Thinking this was supposed to be a period movie I turned to my wife and asked if I had maybe accidentally pressed play on a behind-the-scenes featurette. She hit the menu key on the remote control, but no, I had played the correct thing. This was the movie.

Streep is playing Anna, an actress who is starring in a movie called The French Lieutenant’s Woman. In that film, she plays Sara Woodruff a fallen woman in Victorian times who had an affair with a French Lieutenant and was left by him without marrying her. Anna is having an on-set affair with Mike (Jeremy Irons) who plays Charles Smithson in the movie-within-a-movie. In that movie, he falls in love with Anna.

If that wasn’t confusing enough the movie (I mean the one I watched not the movie-within-a-movie) presents both of these stories – Mike and Anna two actors making The French Lieutenant’s Woman – and Sara and Charles existing within The French Lieutenant’s Woman’s story – as real. Or at least they are filmed realistically. When we are watching the events of the story-within-the-story we don’t catch glimpses of cameramen, the actors never flub a line, etc.

But the film does play with the two timelines. At one point Anna and Mike are rehearsing a scene for their movie. They are dressed in street clothes and are inside a modern house. They go over the scene a couple of times and then suddenly we are transformed into the older storyline – Sara and Charles live out the scene we just watched Mike and Anna rehearse. This type of thing happens several times where one event is doubled in the other timeline.

Based on a book by John Fowles the movie completely makes up the Anna and Mike story. Apparently (for I haven’t read it) the book offers multiple endings and includes a narrator who often intervenes with a personality of his own. The modern story is then the film’s attempt at making that bit of metafiction work cinematically.

It worked for me. Though it took me a little bit to figure out exactly what was happening, once I got into the groove I found it to be a fascinating way to make a film. I enjoyed both stories and the way the enveloped each other.

Both are love stories with the two characters falling for each other though in both cases their love is socially unacceptable (Charles is engaged to another woman and Sara is disgraced/both Anna and Mike are married to other people). The differences in social norms for their time periods make their stories go in different directions and conclude in ways you might not expect.

Streep and Irons are wonderful as you would expect. I could watch Meryl Streep’s face all day long and never grow tired. After watching the film I immediately took the book off my shelf and put it in my “to read” stack.