Literally: Over the Top and Sly's Howl

In all my mid-'80s, HBO/Cinemax-watching glory, I never managed to catch a viewing of Sylvester Stallone's cheesy arm wrestling drama Over the Top. It looked like a combo action-adventure meets family melodrama...with semi trucks. I was...semi-interested.

Like another mid/late '80s cheeseball macho epic, Road House, I assumed at the time that it was not for me. I was wrong. I viewed Road House's ridiculous glory a few months ago. I had to check out this arm wrestling flick.

Because Over the Top is almost too stupid for words, how about we go with images?

He has pulley weightlifting gear....IN HIS TRUCK.

Stallone in full sideways mouth grunt/yell/scream. You'll get to see it a few times in the film.

You know Stallone's character Lincoln Hawk (not his porn name) means business when he moves his baseball hat backwards. He's ready to fight.

Arm wrestling competition contestants with chest-baring skank tanks and "awesome" shark t-shirts.

"Crazy" greasy bearded wild man wrestler drinking from a can of Valvoline motor oil (coz...reasons?) while Stallone and a hot bear referee look on in....disgust(?)

Bug-eyed, not subtle, loudmouth, main wrestler villain in his (not cool) 'BLASTER' t-shirt.

BLASTER possibly trying to pick up Stallone in a bar. Sylvester is stand-offish, aloof, and not into it.

Kenny Loggins teamed up with Giorgio Moroder (on the edge of his mid-'80s downturn) for the schlocky power ballad 'Meet Me Halfway.' It could not save the melted Velveeta cheese score.

Explain this look.

Action figures for your own fan fiction moments.

Lincoln Hawk's creepy, uptight tween son Mike Hawk is the other main character of the film. The character is supposed to be maybe 12-years-old but was played by a tiny, pre-pubescent 16-year-old actor.

Hey Mike, don't wear pristine white jeans to a grimy arm wrestling meet.

Real talk.

One more sideways howl for ya. Thanks Sly!

Back in the Tank: 'Altered States' and Where '70s Experimentation Meets '80s Sci-fi Pop

As we all know, the '70s in Hollywood is seen as a second Golden Era, where scrappy film school grads came into their own, using big money from eager studios to rope in a youth generation raised on a druggy counterculture vibe.

Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, they all went big ideas and bigger budgets by the time 1980 rolled around. Ken Russell, the iconoclastic British director was a bit older than this crew and spent the '70s breaking down boundaries with films like the controversial anti-religious bombast of The Devils and the more user-friendly, rock opera psychedelia of The Who's Tommy. Russell was also edging toward the mainstream by the end of the '70s, looking for a pop hit that mixed his opulent weirdness and some kind of sci-fi angle that Hollywood was gaga for, post Star Wars.

[Back in an era when movie posters were allowed to have paragraphs of copy on them for movie-goers to read. We'd be lucky for a full sentence nowadays.]

Russell adapted the sole novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (the genius behind Network) to the screen with his usual psychedelic aplomb. This is the story of Edward Jessup, a research psychologist (a striking William Hurt in his screen debut) studying schizophrenia by using sensory deprivation in an isolation water tank.

This deprivation isn't enough to get the out of body experiences he desires, so he travels to remote Mexico to experience a sacred drug ceremony. There, the natives use a special hallucinogenic natural potion to open up their consciousness. Jessup tries it and is hooked on the mind trip hallucinations.

Back in Boston, Jessup mixes the isolation tank experience with some of the mind-altering drug mixture from Mexico. This is when the film gets truly silly and Hurt's hallucinations manifest themselves physically. He starts to morph into a caveman/animal state, escaping the tank and running amok through the nighttime city streets.

Altered States is a whole lot of mumbo jumbo, psuedo-science but makes for a fun, dated ride through theories about "biological devolution," energy waves, and bad primitive caveman bodysuits. It's the dead serious, existential questions about the origin of man and men becoming godlike through drug and mind-expansion tools that all seems very '70s self-help meets heavy drug experimentation. Russell puts this through a filter of a glossy, FX-heavy sheen of the upcoming '80s wave of sci-fi, horror, and action films about to barrel through Hollywood and become the norm.

Altered States rides the tightrope between the two decades and between exciting boundary-pushing and schlocky fun. It's too silly to even get mad at. C'mon, we're all just energy, man! Enjoy the ride.

Dessert Anyone? 'Beatriz at Dinner'

Sorry for a blog vacay, but we had guests in town but nothing that would constitute a dinner party like the one in Miguel Arteta's new film Beatriz at Dinner.

Arteta, director of dark comedy slices of life like Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, once again teams up with his writing partner, the wry and dry Mike White, for Beatriz.

Car trouble strands masseur/alternative medicine therapist Beatriz (the dressed-down, stunning Salma Hayek) at the oceanside mansion of one of her clients, Kathy (Connie Britten) post-session. She's invited to stay for a small dinner party. The guests include Kathy's stuffy, uptight husband, and his business associates, including the uber-wealthy CEO of a chain of hotels and resorts Doug Strutt (John Lithgow, playing creepy jerk again).

Beatriz's calm, open persona gets battered as she listens to the stories of greed, inanity, and selfishness from the wealthy white people sitting next to her at this lavish dinner table.

As the night moves on, the drinks are consumed, and Lithgow's character reveals himself to be a Trump-like classless, arrogant mogul who has leveled small towns, like the ones that Hayek's character comes from in Mexico, to make way for his luxury resorts. Beatriz moves from apologetic and gracious to silently, and then not so silently, seething.

Many critics have complained that the satire and comedy elements are not scathing enough in the film, while also complaining that the "villains" in the film are too one-dimensional.

I disagree. On reflection, the layers of this film are subtle when they could have turned into the over-the-top dark comedy of something like the liberal vs. conservative battles of the '90s indie The Last Supper . Beatriz approaches a vaguely similar "us vs. them" set-up, but adds the weight of race, class, and environmentalism, to take the idea of the story to a sadly accurate spot in 2017 America.

Although the ending is a bit pessimistic, it's also reflective and powerful and doesn't give anyone an easy out. Beatriz, mainly due to the haunted and silently commanding presence of Hayek, jumps over the danger of sermonizing, to focus on one single person and her small life affected by a wave of greed and narcissism that has flooded over this country in an era of corruption in the highest offices of the land.