Hanks celebrates the movies
Fans of CNN’s celebrations of the decade series (The Sixties, The Seventies) might have spotted a significant omission. Episodes were devoted to television and music of the era, but cinema was notably absent. Apparently that was because of the prohibitive costs of licensing clips.
Well, executive producer Tom Hanks has obviously pulled some strings, or worked some magic, because we now have a six-part series devoted exclusively to chronicling America’s motion picture industry.
The Movies (debuting on TVNZ OnDemand on October 22) is a star-studded, clip-heavy, enlightening, entertaining and nostalgic trawl through Hollywood’s finest moments, from its Golden Age to the present day.
Things kick off, appropriately (if not chronologically accurately) enough with the 1980s (especially given Hanks’ involvement).
It was a decade that delivered some of the most beloved blockbusters (Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Back to the Future), took the action genre mainstream (Aliens, Commando, Rambo: First Blood), produced a wave of teenoriented comedies (from Caddyshack to Sixteen Candles), and set the tone for today’s superheroobsessed movie culture (thanks largely to the success of 1989’s Batman).
Over the course of 11⁄2 hours split between two episodes, you’ll see some of the magic movie moments from that period and hear behind-thescenes titbits, and how these flicks have influenced today’s film-makers.
It’s a true delight to listen to Steven Spielberg describe Raging Bull as ‘‘a boxing movie for people who don’t like boxing movies’’, Paul Thomas Anderson describe the kids as the ‘‘secret sauce’’ of E.T., and Hanks himself come up with an unusual choice for the ‘‘most complicated movie ever made’’. Hanks didn’t even feature in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but he rightly points out that its mix of live-action and traditional animation was an undertaking that, thanks to the rise of computers, will almost certainly never be repeated. As director Robert Zemeckis so elegantly puts it, it was a movie ‘‘no sane person would ever make’’.
Meanwhile, an iconic 1980s movie has also inspired a modern-day spinoff.
Cobra Kai (the first of its two YouTube Premium seasons has just been released on DVD) picks up the Karate Kid saga 30 years after the 1984 All Valley Under-18 Karate Tournament.
While the victorious Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) now owns a successful series of car yards, his vanquished opponent Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) is stuck in a time warp.
Struggling to make ends meet, he makes a living cleaning gutters and septic tanks. Fired for an angry outburst, he’s berated by his stepfather (Ed Asner) as being ‘‘like the meat in your fridge – spoiled and expired’’, before being offered money to stay out of his life. Initially, Johnny angrily rips up the cheque, but after witnessing the bullying of a young Hispanic teen in his apartment block, he decides to put the money to ‘‘good use’’ by reopening the Cobra Kai dojo.
By focusing on one of the original movies’ bad guys and the fallout from the franchise’s climactic moment, this smartly written and poignant drama is a surprisingly compelling watch. It becomes a nuanced story of success, survival and rising violence in contemporary America.