jane fonda

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Barbarella is the sort of movie that was infamous in my junior high. It was infamous everywhere, really, but I was a pubescent boy amongst many other pubescent boys and the film got a lot of talk. between us. This would have been the late 1980s. It seems strange to me now that 13-year-old boys would be talking about a movie made more than a decade prior. It must have come out on home video or been playing a lot of HBO or something.

At the time Jane Fonda was known more for her exercise videos than her movies. I didn’t get to see the movie. To be honest I don’t know if any of my friends did. But there was this buzz about it. Jane Fonda had a nude scene in it and was all kinds of sexy. That’s what we talked about.

The film was notorious outside of my junior high for those reasons as well. In 1969 Fonda was a well-established movie star. Barbarella was a sexy, cheesy sci-fi flick directed by her husband Roger Vadim. Critics didn’t know what to make of it (they mostly didn’t like it) and audiences didn’t know what to do with it (they mostly didn’t watch it). But everybody talked about it, even a decade later.

It has remained on my cinematic radar ever since. But until this week I’d stayed away from it. The film has a reputation for being notoriously bad and campy fun. Now that I’ve seen it that’s pretty much how I’d describe it.

It is not by any means good cinema. But it is deliriously entertaining. The set design is magnificent and the costumes are outrageous. It looks like psychedelic cotton candy. The story is ridiculous and everybody but Jane Fonda seems to be phoning it in, but gosh I had fun watching it.

Set in the faraway future Barbarella the film stars Jane Fonda as Barbarella the character, who is tasked by the President of the Earth to find Durand Durand, a scientist who has created a psionic ray. Now in this future violence has been eliminated and sexual hangups have gone bye-bye. Barbarella is a groovy chic who hangs out in her shag-carpeted spaceship digging on cool tunes and having a good time.

But now she has a job to do. She flies to the planet Tau Ceti to save Earth from destruction. There she has lots of crazy adventures including having sex with an angel, being locked in a cage and attacked by birds, and attached to a machine designed to make her orgasm to death.

It never takes itself too seriously, it looks amazing, and mostly it is a lot of fun. It does run a little too long (technically it is only 98 minutes in length but it feels a lot longer) and there is a very little to it. I can’t see myself returning to it often. I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t imagine it will entice me again anytime soon.

9 to 5 movie poster

I really should come up with a catchy name for this series (the one where I’m watching one movie from every year that I’ve been alive, in chronological order), but I can’t think of anything. I’ve been using a website/app called Track to help me finds movies to watch for this series. Basically, I use it to sort movies by year and then scroll down through that list until I find something that both looks interesting and that I haven’t seen. They automatically sort their movies by some sort of popularity rating so I usually have to scroll down for a bit before I find films that I haven’t seen before. After that I’ve generally been able to find something interesting, some film I’ve been meaning to watch, and plug it in.

For whatever reason, I really struggled to find something for 1980. I’ve seen a lot of films from that year and the ones I haven’t mostly looked uninteresting. It didn’t help that my wife was hanging out in the living room where I was preparing to watch a film. She wasn’t necessarily looking to watch a movie with me, she was doing some hand-sewing and that’s just where she was sitting. But that did mean she would be there with me as I watched a movie, which means that she would not be interested in me watching certain types of films, like horror.

Eventually, I landed on 9 to 5, and it turns out I rather liked it. It is a film that I was very aware of growing up, but for one reason or another, I never sat down and watched it. I was only four years old when it came out so I clearly wasn’t going to see it in the theater, or really even be aware of its existence. I’m thinking it must have played regularly on some cable TV stations throughout the 1980s because I really do have strong memories of knowing about it. Certainly, I loved the Dolly Parton song. I figure a movie about three working women fighting against their sexist boss had little appeal to me as a young teenager. Then, later, when something like that might have appealed to me a little more, the movie had lost its cultural cache. It isn’t a film you really hear about anymore.

So, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Fonda play the three working girls. They are employed at some giant conglomerate with thousands of employees. Their boss is played by Dabney Coleman. He is a sexist pig. He constantly makes advances toward his secretary (Parton) or positions himself to look down her top. He steals ideas from Tomlin’s character and presents them as his own, all the while passing her up for promotions (and giving less experienced men the jobs). Fonda is a recently divorced housewife who has just gotten a job in the secretarial pool. Coleman hardly gives her a glance.

For the first act things are played pretty straight with these women being mistreated on the job and having no real recourse to put things straight. Then things go really sideways and they find themselves back at Fonda’s house drinking themselves silly, smoking a little pot, and dreaming of what they’d really like to do to the boss.

From here the film turns into a straight-up farce. We are treated to three very silly fantasy sequences showing what the ladies would like to do to the boss. Then they kidnap him and take over the company (they pretend the boss is still working by conveniently having him step out of the office whenever anyone needs to see him and forging his signature on lots of company memos).

It is all pretty ridiculous and silly, and sometimes quite funny. My wife really seemed to enjoy herself, while I mostly just lightly chuckled. It is very much a movie of its time and it is interesting to think about how different films of different eras handle things like sexism in the workplace.

I have a hard time with big, broad comedy and that’s mostly what you get here. The three leads are very good (this was Dolly’s first big chance to show she had acting chops and she nails it). Dabney Coleman is great as the guy you love to hate. Again, my wife laughed herself silly, and I’m sure many others did as well. It was a big hit when it came out. I’m just weird when it comes to comedy.