MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE (1985)

A young man, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), lives in London with his depressed father. His father is so bummed out that he just sits in bed all day and drinks. Omar is offered a job by his uncle in his uncle’s parking garage. Soon he is promoted to driving around drug trafficker Salim. One evening, while Omar is driving Salim around, the car is approached by a small group of goofballs. While the dorks are literally licking the car’s windows, Omar looks over to the side of the road and there is sexy badboi Johnny (Daniel Day-Lewis) leaning up against a light pole. They used to be schoolboy chums and begin talking again. Eventually other family stuff happens and Omar is given a broken down laundromat to run. He hires Johnny to help.

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE is a watchable film (and I’m sure back in the mid-1980’s it was a fresher idea), but overall, it left me flat. Maybe if I knew more about Thatcher-era London I would have enjoyed it more but based on the Criterion Collection disc cover and the various things I’d heard about the film over the years, I was expecting the romantic relationship between Omar and Johnny to be the main focus of the film. Instead, to me, it felt like Omar’s family was the main focus, the tension between the street punks and well, everybody to be second and finally, Omar and Johnny’s relationship third. Also, I didn’t get any sexual chemistry between the two main actors.

Solid acting, a television set behind a sofa, meddling pace, unimpressive sets and locations that kinda gave off a made-for-TV vibe, too small of a cast, multiple scenes out on the street but without any feel of it being a real street with random citizens walking around, multiple unsympathetic characters (including our two heroes, I especially felt bad for the little girl they terrorized while they were stealing her family's electronics), 1980's fashions, a SOME LIKE IT HOT poster, another poster for a movie that looks like it is called LAILA (which there is a movie from 1984 with that name), a very odd placement of a traffic light, a character with a face tattoo (not sure what the historic timeline is on cinematic face tattoos, although we all know that King Vidiot had one in 1983), non-threatening street punks, a woman in jeans and a purple shirt playing a video arcade machine but then when a fight breaks out it's a different woman in jeans and a purple shirt, a weird water(?) sound effect that was annoying, a "turf accountant" which I had to Google. It's the same as a betting hall, like for horse races. Also, how was Salim so naive as to not expect some kind of reprisal for what he did to the punks foot?

MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE is historically interesting and I’m glad it was made (and I'm glad I watched it), but the entire thing felt undercooked to me. I would like to see a remake.

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY (1980)

An African bushman, Xi, is living a simple life with his tribe in the Kalahari Desert when a litterbug airplane pilot tosses a glass bottle out the window. The flying bottle is seen by Xi who thinks it is a gift from the gods. He shows it to his tribe and everybody is confused, or concerned, or shocked, or aroused, or all of the above by the mysterious object. Soon though, they discover that it is a useful tool and everybody gets jelly at one another wanting to use it all the time. Xi says these negative waves are bringing me down man, I’m gonna walk to the end of the world and yeet this mother back to the gods. So, he starts walking. Along the way he meets various people and critters. One such critter is biologist Andrew Steyn who seems to be a fairly normal person until he’s in the presence of an attractive single female. Then he suddenly turns into Cary Grant in the singing recital scene from THE AWFUL TRUTH. Too bad he’s been asked to go pick up the new (attractive single female) schoolteacher, Kate Thompson.

THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY is an alright film, slightly above average at a 6/10, but the 1980’s must be more cray cause this movie reportedly made around $200 million at the worldwide box office! To me that seems unbelievable (for example: DIE HARD only made $143m worldwide and THE LITTLE MERMAID $211m), but I do remember it being popular as fuck on VHS when I was kid. Also, going through old newspapers I saw multiple ads hyping the film’s long runs. See below for an ad from Miami celebrating its 58th week and one from Sydney saying, “10th month”! What the fuck?

Anyway, revisiting THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY as a staggeringly handsome adult, all of the scenes that I remember being funny are still funny (mainly only the scenes with the bumbling biologist and the schoolteacher), but the rest of the film was kinda slow. I was also surprised at the darker moments of the film: terrorists killing people, terrorists kidnapping children and forcing them to walk for miles and (at least) three real-life chickens being murdered onscreen.

Up and down pacing, a few scenes that are genuinely funny, unreliable narrator that got more annoying as he went, many scenes filmed with goofy cartoon logic, unnecessarily dark storylines, okay ending, lots of different animals doing animal stuff. For an older, non-mainstream studio film, THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY is worth watching for those curious, but I still have no idea why it had such a following back in the day. I’d love to know more about that 1980’s cultural phenomenon.

Part 2 - The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989)

Unofficial Sequels:

Unofficial Sequel 1 - Crazy Safari (1991)
Unofficial Sequel 2 - Crazy Hong Kong (1993)
Unofficial Sequel 3 - The Gods Must Be Funny in China (1994)