Road House (1989)
Picked up the DVD of this movie in the wake of Patrick Swayze's death. I had previously seen most of it a couple of times on commercial TV, which means that I had also missed a lot of it, especially at the beginning.
This really is an amazing work of strange trash brilliance. There's a fair bit of great writing about it on the web already (for example Scott Tobias' "The New Cult Canon: Road House"), so I'm not going to go on at much length. I will say that as I watched the whole thing last night the thing that struck me is how much it's like a Hong Kong kung fu film in the way that it melds heartfelt melodrama, bizarre shtick, offensive stereotypes, revenge themes, macho posturing, homophilia -- oh yeah, and martial arts. My other profound observation is that Swayze actually has a kind of odd-looking face, and he's much cuter in Point Break. However, this is a perfect role for him, as everybody says.
One of the odd things about the puff-piece "looking back" extra on the DVD I got is that Kelly Lynch, who has a pretty thankless role in the movie as Swayze's plastic-perfect blonde love interest, comes off as one of the more intelligent and least-bullshitty commenters on the movie. (And she looks much more beautiful than she did in the movie, too.) I had forgotten that she was in The Jacket (2005), playing Keira Knightley's mother. I should watch that again sometime.
This really is an amazing work of strange trash brilliance. There's a fair bit of great writing about it on the web already (for example Scott Tobias' "The New Cult Canon: Road House"), so I'm not going to go on at much length. I will say that as I watched the whole thing last night the thing that struck me is how much it's like a Hong Kong kung fu film in the way that it melds heartfelt melodrama, bizarre shtick, offensive stereotypes, revenge themes, macho posturing, homophilia -- oh yeah, and martial arts. My other profound observation is that Swayze actually has a kind of odd-looking face, and he's much cuter in Point Break. However, this is a perfect role for him, as everybody says.
One of the odd things about the puff-piece "looking back" extra on the DVD I got is that Kelly Lynch, who has a pretty thankless role in the movie as Swayze's plastic-perfect blonde love interest, comes off as one of the more intelligent and least-bullshitty commenters on the movie. (And she looks much more beautiful than she did in the movie, too.) I had forgotten that she was in The Jacket (2005), playing Keira Knightley's mother. I should watch that again sometime.