OUT OF AFRICA (1985)

East Africa, 1913. A wealthy female moves to Africa to marry a serial philanderer. They happily live together on a coffee farm and he even stops screwing other females long enough to give her syphilis. What a guy. Throughout all of this, the woman has secretly been wettin’ her panties over a local chap who is a professional elephant murderer. She hooks up with him and eventually their relationship advances to the point were they can go out and murder animals together.

OUT OF AFRICA was a big deal when it came out back in the 1980’s. As evident by the fact it won multiple Academy Awards (including Best Picture) and was #5 at the box office for 1986. Beating out everything from THE GOONIES to FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF. Revisiting it nowadays, it is entertaining and watchable, but that story is garbage. Very "unslay" as modern day kids would say.

Solid acting by the entire cast, gorgeous scenery, medium pace, rich people problems, some weird crap going on in the background at the beginning of the movie that looked super fake, unrelatable main character that I had zero sympathy for, dumb decisions left and right, onscreen bird murder, disappointing ending, average direction, cool-looking dog, zero sexual tension between the two leads, zero sex scenes, zero tits, zero dicks. Looking at the Winners and Nominees list for 58th Academy Awards, it’s difficult to see even one award that OUT OF AFRICA actually deserved. Then again, I think the overall winner for the year should have been BACK TO THE FUTURE.

As always, my uneducated opinion is totally formulated in my stressed out, little simpleton brain and holds zero weight at all.  I'm just a big dummy who likes yapping about movies.  That said, OUT OF AFRICA is an interesting time-capsule back to what was considered highbrow Cinema back in the mid-1980's.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969)

A young man with severe mental issues, Joe Buck (Jon Voight), leaves Texas and travels to New York City in hopes of being a long-legged mack daddy. He soon finds out, mainly thanks to his brain having the computing power of 14 Fig Newtons superglued to a half-dead AAA battery, that although he has long legs, he damn sure ain’t no mack daddy! Things happen and before you can say “I should write a YA novel called ‘Donner Party Slumber Party Massacre’ about teens playing a slumber party game where whoever falls asleep first gets eaten.” Ol’ Joe Buck is homeless and starving to death. At the same time, he befriends a predatory street hustler with the confidence building name of Ratso (Dustin Hoffman). Together these two champions go into business capitalizing on Buck’s supposed ability to satisfy women.  Things go about as well as you would expect.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY won three Oscars at the 42nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture.  Looking back on it meow, was MC really the best movie of 1969?  I have no clue.  I haven't seen every movie released in 1969, but I am curious (and will probably update this review in the future) because while it is a good film...I cannot imagine that it was really the absolute best movie of the year.  Then again 1969 was like three or four hundred years ago, so who knows what the fuck was going on back then.  One thing I do know is MIDNIGHT COWBOY is a very interesting time capsule back to a time that looks absolutely foreign as fuck compared to [insert the year you're reading this].  Another interesting tidbit is MIDNIGHT COWBOY is the only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture.  Being "rated X" you're probably expecting to see wall-to-wall big floppy juicy dongs and titties bouncing all over the place, but sadly what little nudity there is was extremely non-erotic and honestly depressing as hell due to (most of) it being in rape flashback nightmares.  Instead, I'm guessing, the X rating was due to overall depressing tone of the film, the homosexual subject matter and the strongly implied sexual abuse Joe suffered as a young child at the hands of his grandmother.

Should you watch MIDNIGHT COWBOY?  Definitely.  100%.  It's still a good film with strong acting, amazing NYC locations and wildly influential on movies and TV shows even still today.  Especially the "I'm walking here!" quote.  That shits been used in everything from FORREST GUMP to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Check it out.

[Update 03/02/2022: This has absolutely nothing to do with the review, but I was just looking through some old newspapers and found a few ads for something called "Midnight Plowboy". I can only assume it's some kind of adult parody of MIDNIGHT COWBOY (or maybe not).  Either way I just wanted to share. Link to newspaper ads.]