Life and Death in Texas

Apologies for the week-long absence.

My wife's dad died, a thunderstorm last week knocked out our power for three days and then we had another big thunderstorm last night. Bumps and business and the various and sundry stresses of family matters kept us busy.

I wrote a few thousand words in notes but I didn't have anything to post on this particular blog.

I really don't have anything to post right now, at least not in terms of a long review, but I will make a few notes about one of my favorite movies.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension from 1984 is wonderful--silly and satiric and a lot of fun.

Peter Weller is great and carefully understated as the title character, a physicist/ neurosurgeon/ inventor/ musician/ comic book hero who starts the movie helping Dr. Sidney Zwybel (Jeff Goldblum) in a brain operation before Buckaroo tests his new Jet Car and breaks the dimensional barrier, briefly entering the eighth dimension. The news of Buckaroo's success triggers a series of events that threaten life on Earth and leads to Buckaroo and his assistants, the Hong Kong Kaviliers, trying to save the planet.

The cast is marvelous-- after Weller and Goldblum, we also have John Lithgow as Dr. Emilio Lizardo/ John Wharfin, a loony Italian physicist under control of the evil Red Lectroid alien from Planet 10 by way of the Eighth Dimension; Ellen Barkin is Penny Priddy, a beautiful blonde who is suicidal until Buckaroo turns her life around, Christopher Lloyd as alien John Bigboote ("It's Big-bou-tay, not Big-bootie!" he shouts), Dan Hedayi and Vincent Schiavelli as his alien assistants. On Buckaroo's side are Clancy Brown as Rawhide, Robert Ito as Professor Hikita, Bill Henderson as Blue Blazer Regular Casper Lindley, Billy Vera as Blue Blazer Pinky Carruthers . Carl Lumbly is John Parker, a Black Lectroid.

I won't post a full-tilt review right now. All I'm doing this morning is a brief comment-- I'll do more later.

The fact is that I love this movie. The casting is perfect and the performances are wonderful, the script is delightfully goofy, the pacing is excellent, the effects surprisingly good for a movie made in the early 80's and the music is (mostly) fine.

This is one of the very few movies that I can't think of any improvements to suggest-- how could you make it better?