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Working Girl (1988)
Triple Shoulder Pads
Even as Tess with the teased-up do from Staten Island transforms into Tess from the Upper East Side -- parading in a borrowed mink -- she's still got mountains of shoulder pads. No matter where a woman comes from and whatever rules she's playing by, whether she made them up or someone else did, she still cuts a figure like an art deco goddess on the mast of a ship, sailing into the New Jerusalem. All Hail!
On the other end of the body, Katharine ("Kiki's") "bony ass" in a cast, skiing that is *fabelhaft. *The wind of the Ferry whips around Tess's skinny lips after she no longer sprays it up tight, the camera circles around Lady Liberty's crown and lands on the Twin Towers. How is it that Kiki is living in a town house and Jack has to carry a girl up three flights of steps? Why isn't there an elevator? To get to the top floor, you either have to be carried up slung over an executive's shoulder in speckled tights, and/or you have to read the trashy parts of the paper, and for that you gotta have Gumption. Night school. The girls at the monitor. The nails. The green eyeshadow, green like the type on the monitor, but less jewelry, less clinking when you shake hands.
There's a lot of sea air between there and there, the servant who masquerades as the master. What is the architecture of a cubicle compared to a window-office, tequila to chardonnay? A folder with a rubber band transmutes into a leather briefcase tucked in tissue paper, a little bit of kebab-sauce on your mouth, some garters and a ruffled sky-blue tux, vacuuming naked before the boss comes home and finds out. Pack your peanut-butter-and-jelly for the first day, it's entry level at thirty, there's a beat I hear in here, tick-tock, tick-tock....!
Hackers (1995)
The Nineties-ist Movie Ev-errrr
The city as circuit board, hardware to wetware ... and you can call Venezuela for free from a payphone, just need to record that sound it makes when you deposit $5 onto a mini-cassette recorder and play it back when they ask you to deposit.
The Plague, aka Eugene the computer security guy for an oil company, has created the Da Vinci virus to overturn a bunch of computerized tankers, but it's all a ruse to cover up a worm collecting millions from the company, and he's putting it on the hackers. It's mostly undetectable to the sheeple but the hackers can see what's really going on, they are screensaver peeled eyeballs bouncing around in zipping corridors of code, green numbers and purple lightning bolts, they're rollerblading through Grand Central, making off-color jokes, swapping door-stopper books full of UNIX code and selling pirated tapes at their haunt, Cyberdelia. Zero Cool cum Crash Override, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer ... the names mix memory with desire.
I noticed the Plague had a little snake brooch, and Razor and Blade, the TV stars of "Hack the Planet," had Mona Lisa upholstery. Everyone wears miniscule sunglasses at night and have neon-colored beepers. The story is sort of mush but I thoroughly enjoyed 105 minutes with the Prodigy on plastic-bag covered headphones blading through the Matrix ... worth it just for the time travel to a nineties even the nineties could not have imagined for itself.
Pacific Heights (1990)
Kite-Eat-Kite Propaganda
Patty and Drake, a horseback-riding instructor and a kite-making business owner ("it's a kite-eat-kite world out there") respectively, decide to move in with each other -- into a three-quarter-mil Victorian in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, that they can hardly afford the down payment for. But like the scrappy yuppies they are, they figure they can fix 'er up and rent out the bottom two units, and pay off their mortgage the honest, benevolent landlord way. But then Bruce Wayne gone-bad with a leased Porsche and daddy-warbucks-issues squats the place.
The tenant manipulates the law and plays some serious white-guy privilege game (worked just as well in 1990 as 2020) and manages to get away with the scam, until Patty cakes it all up. There are a few redeeming scenes of come-uppance near the end that are almost satisfying, featuring 18 filet mignon dinners on a canceled credit card and some fun girl-friday sleuthing, but yeah, the movie still burbled like the downstairs' neighbor's clogged drain around six stars.
Is this a genre? Real estate horror? I remembered one thing about this from when I saw it as a teenager--the tenant from hell who squats and releases vermin. Right. Still gross. But, though Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith are the lovable blond couple who mean well, it's still hard to sympathize with the landlords. I mean, what is the "message" here exactly?
The lawyer for Patty and Drake -- who are wracking their brains trying to figure out WHY, WHY? Someone would do something like this -- says it's not a moral issue. If it were, they win. It's not "personal." But isn't everything that involves home "personal"? After the whole ordeal, a new naive white couple who are now shopping the place at $900,000, ask Patty and Drake why they're selling the place ... they obviously put so much heart into fixing the place up. But Patty says with a resigned smirk, "it was just an investment."
Hard not to look at this thing from the retro/perspective of an impossibly insane real estate market today, especially in the Bay Area. Why did Patty and Drake have to suffer? Because of renter's or squatter's rights, designed to defend the houseless? Because they were dumb enough to not just reno and flip the place? Because they fixed up the place and meant to be nice landlords who would respond to a renter's call? Bruce Wayne does end up dead after an altercation with a nail gun and some exposed wires ("reno horror?") but what is the "moral" here?
Summer School (1987)
California Props
Malibu at sunset, Venice Beach, electric yellow radio headphones, "Cool Dude" sunglasses in a box, SHOOP on the chalkboard with two googly eyes / eyes poked through with #2 pencils, pregnant teenager in a onesie, surfer sarongs, Hawaiian shirts, a severed dolly head doggy toy, kissing in the surf, roller skates in jail, fresh safety pin through the ear, the principal's plaid blazer, Kirstie Alley's pumps and bottom swinging in pink, a cuffed severed-hand alarm clock, a drive-through photo developer, an Italian exchange student in a bikini, Mark Harmon's baby blues, a busted convertible and a driving test, dyslexia, tattered textbooks, mom's $5 in her son's g-string, fireworks on the couch, fish oven mitts, bubble sheets, Lamaze, leis, the football field in summer, the school hallways in summer, the lockers in summer, "there's no place like home."