the 80s | ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

Sean and I watched Rain Man, me for the nine hundredth time, Sean for the first. The first!Can you believe that?

I’m not going to review it because I believe and I certainly hope that he’s the only idiot to have not appreciated this film until now. And he did appreciate it. This film holds up beautifully, except maybe for the synth over the opening credits. This movie could have gone wrong in a lot of ways, so I have to give credit to the brilliant director (Barry Levinson) who treated the subject so tenderly. He doesn’t go directly for the heart strings, he doesn’t’ cloud the relationship with a lot of outside help. He creates a bond and lets his two actors shine. And they do. The movie may be a little off-kilter in some places but Dustin Hoffman never is. His performance I think is the best of his career (the Academy agreed). Tom Cruise could easily have faded into the background of such a performance but instead he also delivers one of his best, a raw and unsentimental portrayal of a man deeply layered in pain, confusion, and selfishness. Despite the inherent heaviness, this movie manages to pull us in not with easy tears, but with well-earned laughs.

And so Sean’s education continues.

What if your nightmares weren’t “only a dream”?

The late Wes Craven touched on something primal here with his horror classic that spawned way too many shitty sequels. Three high school students on Elm Street discover that they have been dreaming about the same nightmarish figure with severe burns on his face and knives for fingers. And that laugh. Oh my God, that laugh.

It seems that the now infamous Freddy Krueger was once just a regular child murderer. Now that he’s dead, he can only get to you in the world of your dreams. I’ve had nightmares before that would make me fight sleep just to avoid getting back to that place. Here, to fight for sleep is to fight for your life. Craven’s mythology surrounding the world of the dream isn’t nearly as elaborate as, say, Inception’s but he’s come up with an interesting idea here that he has a lot of fun with.

For a modern audience, the most fun part is watching Johnny Depp’s first movie looking as baby-faced as you’ve ever seen him at 20 years-old. He plays the typical teen boyfriend in a high school movie, apparently not yet having decided that he would play every part as a weirdo. Having never acted before, Depp was so nervous about every scene that he would bring an actor friend of his (who I think may have been Jackie Earle Haley, who would later play Freddy in the 2010 remake) to run lines with because he was so afraid of getting it wrong.

As humble beginnings go, Depp’s wasn’t so bad. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a Halloween guilty pleasure of the best kind.