Footy for freedom: Rooftop Movies World Cup edition!

We're putting the third movie in our planned trilogy of movies from the 80s being remade or sequelled this year in favor of something a little more timely, given the current tournament in South Africa.

Anyone who played any kind of organized soccer in the 80s probably watched Victory multiple times, being one of the few American films about the sport. Despite starring Sylvester Stallone, the film tanked in the U.S., not surprising given our general ambivalence about soccer when it was released in 1981. Still, youth soccer leagues of the decade formed a sort of a natural cult for the film, and everyone I've ever known who played as a kid has a love for the film, even if it is more than a little ridiculous.

I'm not sure how it did internationally, and whether the bizarre sight of Stallone as a footballer was outweighed for the rest of the world by a cast that included a host of international soccer stars, most notably Pelé, along with Michael Caine and Max von Sydow.

Stallone, Pelé, Caine, and all those soccer stars are a group of POWs in a German prison camp in WWII, and they play games of soccer, as a group of foreigners (excluding the one American in the group, of course) might be expected to do with time on their hands in the camp. The Germans decide it'll be a great propaganda opportunity to pit the prisoners against a German team in a massive stadium event, and the prisoners figure this will be a golden opportunity to escape.

Yeah, it's riddled with sports and war movie clichés, but it's still huge fun, directed with a sure hand by John Huston near the end of his career, and featuring some great footage on the field, with all the real players getting to show off their signature moves.

That's this Wednesday, June 30th, up on the roof. We'll get started around 9pm or so.

EDIT! We had to cancel this screening at the last minute. Make up date is now Thursday, July 8. See you there!

Governors ain't got time to bleed.

We've decided that after Tron, we're going to keep the theme going for a trilogy of 80s titles that are being either remade, rebooted, or sequeled here in 2010.

In 1988, John McTiernan revolutionized the action movie, making what is still, 22 years later, the gold standard for high-octane explosion-heavy thrillers, and a movie that is, as far as I'm concerned, as important a Christmas tradition as watching A Charlie Brown Christmas after trimming the tree. For years afterwards, no one could make a movie even remotely similar to his '88 opus without some critic declaring it "Die Hard on a _____" (fill in the blank with the appropriate setting: plane, train, bus, island, dentist's office, hot air balloon...the possibilities are endless).

Yeah, so now that I've set all that up, I should mention that we're not showing that movie.

What we are showing is the movie that McTiernan did immediately prior to that, which would improbably feature two future governors shooting invisible aliens with neon green blood. That would be Predator, which has inspired its own decendents, just as surely as the director's next film would. First up was Predator 2, which had a socially conscious agenda dealing with drugs and gang violence in Los Angeles, starring Bill Paxton (probably wishing he was in another James Cameron alien flick rather than this one), Gary Busey (just on the cusp of the coming insanity), and Danny Glover (who most certainly was too old for this shit when it came to battling bloodthirsty, trophy-seeking aliens alongside gangbangers). Then things got even worse with a pair of infuriatingly bad Alien vs. Predator flicks, which they really should have found a part for Bill Paxton in, given that he's the only actor to have been killed onscreen by both alien species.

Despite the failings of those movies, producers are going back to the well this summer for Predators, in which the titular beasties kidnap a group of the roughest, toughest hombres that Earth has to offer in order to hunt them on a game preserve on their own planet; their judgement has to be seriously called into question given that Adrien Brody and Topher Grace are among those supposed badasses. At least Danny Trejo is along for the ride.

In any case, there's really no room for improvement on the original. You've got future Minnesota head honcho Jesse "The Body" Ventura spitting tobaccy juice all over the jungle while unleashing an endless stream of macho one liners. Future governator Swartzenegger as the leader of this band of ultra commandos dropped into a jungle where they are about to become big game. Carl Weathers as Ah-nuld's former BFF, and a current pencil pusher gone soft...or has he???

Head on over and join us on the roof this Thursday, June 17. Chris Klimek, who claims to have seen this movie over two dozen times between the ages of 11 and 13, has volunteered to give us a brief introduction to the finer points of this sci-fi/horror/action near-masterpiece. We'll get the projector fired up after dark, around 9pm, but I'll be up on the roof from around 7pm onward, so feel free to show up and hang out whenever you like.

Second Verse, Same as the First

People out of town, people mired in the last week of the school year, people too tired, and people who just didn't know about it (due to my failed experiment of only "inviting" people via Twitter and Facebook) resulted in our scrubbing the launch of the 2010 rooftop movies.

So, we're going to try this again, and everything we said in last week's post applies again this week, except for the new date, which is Thursday, June 10. We'll see you up on top of the world.