Wonderful Movie

Great Film overall

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

I've got to say that I'm not fully satisfied with my video about the best teen movies of the 1980s. There are at least two movies that I should have included. They are Footloose (1984) and All The Right Moves (1983). I myself wouldn't call Footloose an '80s classic, but it's still good enough to have made it to my list, though it wouldn't have been in the top 20. Footloose is an epic story about one teen's struggle to... dance and listen to pop music in some American backwater town. Footloose does have a good soundtrack, which is one of my favorite soundtracks of the 1980s. The movie itself isn't bad, and it has some good performances, but it's the soundtrack that I really like. The one movie that definitely should have made it to my list is All The Right Moves, which is easily one of the better teen movies of the 1980s. Unfortunately, I somehow forgot about this movie while I was making my list. What a bummer. First of all, there are good performances from Tom Cruise, Lea Thompson, and Craig T. Nelson. But every performance in this movie is solid. Then there's a good story with a message, which is actually not an uncommon message in Hollywood movies. No matter how hard life gets in the US of A, you can still pull through and triumph if you really try. Well, you can believe that if you want to. Unfortunately, there are a few things that, for me, weigh down this commendable, realistic look at life. One is the presence of sex jokes. The other is the presence of American football. The sex jokes kind of cheapen this otherwise good movie, and I've never been a fan of American football. These two things are staples in many other American teen movies. By the way, All The Right Moves was available on Netflix for a while, but it later disappeared.Now, let's get to my thoughts about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I have not seen this movie, and I'm not planning on seeing it because I learned my lesson after seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But the controversy surrounding this movie is quite interesting. Of course, as I predicted, The Last Jedi, while not being a good movie, got showered with praise by paid movie critics, just like the awful The Force Awakens was showered with praise. Many ordinary and honest people, however, said that The Last Jedi is even worse than The Force Awakens and that it ruins the legacy of Star Wars. Some grown men even said that it made them cry because they had to sit and watch their favorite franchise being ruined by Rian Johnson and Disney. In other words, the peasants rebelled. It seems that not all Americans are brainless consumers yet, as the people at Disney may have thought. The Disney propaganda machine and its buddies in the media and on the internet decided to fight the backlash. Numerous articles began to be released online claiming that the people that don't like The Last Jedi are either obsessed fans or grown men who live in their mothers' basements. Even more favorable reviews of The Last Jedi by Disney's buddies and army of paid critics appeared as well, claiming that The Last Jedi, though certainly not being a good movie, is still kind of original and that it tries something new. But, wait a minute! Didn't the people at Disney say that these new Star Wars movies are for the "fans"? Now, all of a sudden, they're saying that these fans are annoying crybabies and that the movies are really for children (because children often don't care about the quality of movies and because the propaganda in Disney movies is meant to influence children). But Disney and its numerous partners in crime are going even further. The popular website Rotten Tomatoes has recently announced that it won't tolerate users who are intentionally voting down Disney movies because of their anger with The Last Jedi. The reviews and ratings of such users will be removed from the website. Criticism of the Disney monopoly and its bad movies will not be tolerated. In addition, the popular website IMDb recently changed the way user reviews can be viewed. Yes, you no longer have the option of which reviews you want to read, be they old or recent, negative or positive. Now all reviews are in only one section and only the most popular reviews can be viewed easily on the website. Still, even this measure didn't prevent the fact that user reviews of the The Last Jedi on IMDb are almost all negative. But let's not forget about Google (the owner of YouTube), which is another popular American website that's heavily involved in censorship online. Try finding a negative review of The Last Jedi by using the Google search engine. You'll have a very hard time doing this because only reviews that praise The Last Jedi are easily found on Google. Honest reviews by ordinary people are intentionally pushed back. You can still find such reviews, but it'll take some time and effort.It's worth pointing out that I'm not a hater of Disney or of the messages in its movies. I wisely didn't even go and see The Last Jedi in a theater because, as I've mentioned, I learned my lesson after seeing The Force Awakens. I didn't see The Last Jedi simply because it's a bad movie. But what Disney has been doing (releasing unoriginal remakes of beloved movies and crushing dissent) is biting. But this sort of behavior is typical in the USA. Of course, Disney isn't the only Hollywood studio that's releasing bad and unoriginal movies nowadays. What still surprises me sometimes is that some people still think that The Force Awakens is a good movie, though they didn't like The Last Jedi because of its obvious flaws. Well, this just shows that not everyone is rational and informed. Many people are mindless consumers who just want to watch CGI and explosions on the big screen. My younger sister, for example, is such a person. I'm sometimes stricken by the irrational things that she says. And, yes, she does own an iPhone, like many other mindless consumers. Well, such are the people that are being brought up by the capitalist system. They don't question the system or the authorities, and they live for mindless entertainment and consumption. That's why those awful Transformers movies directed by Michael Bay made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office.

Sports movies are often stuck in the same old clichéd formula, but more often than not, they work. To All the Right Moves credit, it doesn't follow that winning formula, but it also doesn't necessarily create its own well-strung story.In one of his first acting roles, Tom Cruise stars alongside Craig T. Nelson and Lea Thompson as his coach and girlfriend respectively. If for nothing else, this film is worth a watch just for those performances alone. Cruise and Thompson prove to be fearless in their risqué high school roles, and Nelson plays a great antagonist and obstacle for Cruise's 'Stefen' character. I can't speak too highly on the film itself, but those performances are certainly worth 90 minutes of your time.The biggest issue with All the Right Moves is that it actually tries to make too many 'moves' with its story, pun intended. It doesn't really know what it wants to be. On one hand, it's a nice coming of age story with Thompson and Cruise. The next it's an intense football drama between two schools. Or even a film that tackles the heavy themes of class struggle and sexuality, just to name a few. There's just no real focus here. The minute you start to get invested with what Nelson's team is doing, led by Cruise among others, it changes its course to another plot point entirely. I appreciate the film's intentions, it just didn't hit home the ideas that it set out to, and it suffers because of that.What I can say is that this film was probably more of a product of its time. The soundtrack is blatantly filled with slow and smooth 80's tracks that can be distracting. The sound editing as a whole is pretty poor. The football sequences are borderline amateur. And some of the plot points have been done much better in more recent years. Sure, that's not the film's fault, but it does hinder its re-watchability to an extent. It's fun to watch a young Cruise and Thompson share great chemistry, but there's not a lot beneath that.+Cruise shows promise+Attempts to explore deep themes-But fails at most of them-Misguided direction56/100

Curiosity may kill the cat but it does not kill nostalgia. To discover today this thirty year old film with a Tom Cruise who must have been hardly out of his teens at the time is funny but interesting to know what an important actor today was at the beginning of his career. You may recognize some of his facial and attitudinal ticks but he sure was young.The film itself is nothing to brag about. A High School football film again. Stef is a promising football player who could easily get a football scholarship in any college or nearly, if he could finish his senior year on the football team and even take the team to a victory.He does not because he makes a mistake he had been warned about several times on the last game he plays (the last but one of the season). In fact his team loses the game because he attacks a player who had the ball after he had passed the ball away. He was attacking the man instead of following the ball. Penalty and the game is lost. The coach is furious of course after the game but Stef is aggressive and in fact attacks the coach and makes him responsible. From this point to the catastrophe there was only one step and Stef crossed it. He is dropped from the team. Then he has to walk home, quite a good distance. So he thumbs a lift and is picked by a band of loafers from his city who decide to go spoil and soil the home of the coach and his cars. They manage to get Stef along and he is considered as responsible for it.He is dropped from all prospective colleges. Since he is from a steel industry city in Pennsylvania, he has no future except working at the mill. The film is supposed to teach us a lesson, just the way it does to Stef: apologize and forgive, but that's hard when you were wrong in the first place, though it is also hard when you get even with someone who is wrong by being wrong yourself, i.e. not forgiving and/or not apologizing. At the same time apologizing and forgiving may become a sort of encouragement to other people to go on being obnoxious. Life at times cannot go without some strife and tension and people have to learn to step over it and just put it behind. But fear comes back into the picture. When you are afraid of life you tend to look back behind yourself and then you cannot put the past behind. If you try too hard it might backfire, at least in your dreams.The myth in the film is that such strife and tension is typically masculine and it takes women to soften the situation: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and the medicine goes down. Really? I am sure I will trip my foot in the carpet if I tried that magic potion.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Please remember that a film doesn't have to be perfect, or even close, to be worthwhile. If it contains some interesting and memorable elements, than it has lasting value. Having said that, let me address this one, and refute some of the accusations of "cliché." Let's start with the setting. The opening sequence around town, and the football practice scenes, portray a combination of gritty urban reality and unrefined sylvan ambiance, with remarkable effectiveness. Interestingly, I don't necessarily think that living in a small, woodsy town, having close family and friends, and working with your hands, is such a terrible fate. If your mill closes down, there are other towns within commutable distance, to work in. What if this movie was set in the Spring? Maybe that part of the country is lovely in Spring. So we are shown the region with a slanted spin, as it is set in the Fall. I lived in a depressed logging town at about the time of this movie, but the difference is that it was totally isolated. Conversely, Ampipe, the town in this movie, is not far from Pittsburgh and its' suburbs. Nevertheless, I get the basic depressed vibe, and I'm sure it existed. Tom Cruise brought heart to this role. There's a scene where he is no longer the cocky jock, but rather simply a boy, in need of a mother, and seeking refuge in the reassuring arms of his father. What a uniquely gentle moment for a film about a high school football player. There was nothing cliché about it, and Cruise pulled it off with savvy. For the record, no one is "stuck" in any town in America. What about Junior College, what about just moving to a bigger town? So of course I don't buy the clichéd "stuck in this town without a way out" theme entirely. The gentility of the young couple's sex scene, where they lose their virginity is not clichéd. It is tasteful, sensitive, and totally believable. Tom Cruise's character looks a bit scared, in awe, and very conscious of the significance of the moment. Again, beautifully played. Lea Thompson is lovely in this film, and does a masterful job of portraying a teen in love. She sees that her boyfriend is self-centered, but she has the sixth sense of a small town girlfriend, that helps her see his the finer aspects of his character. We used to rely on real "girls" to provide balance in society, and bring out the best in a man. The music is simply great. "All The Right Moves," and "Blue Skies Forever," are 80s gems, and convey the optimism of a unique cultural time period. There are two apology scenes by men, that are done nicely, and with simple conviction. It's fresh to see men say they are sorry, and to really mean it. Cruise's best scene involves confronting his stubborn football coach in an alley and intermittently sprinting away, while throwing his hands up in confounded ire. Beautifully executed. He has talent, and perhaps should have pursued more gritty underdog roles than he has. What I loved best, was the portrayal of the mixture of hope, potential, vitality, sexuality, and angst that color one's last two years of high school. To be an upperclassman, athletic, in love, invincible, and free.