MichaelCarmichaelsCar

Anyone who loves 'Until the End of the World' -- for the way it looks, sounds, and feels first, and then for its ideas -- should feel no differently about this short film made around the same time, which is a sliver from the same pie. Wenders even uses at least one of the same locations (if my judgment here is correct).

Like UtEotW, this is a work of its time, though fortunately it's around this time that pop culture pretty much ceased to age badly. With the new century (and millennium) less than a decade away, Wenders' snapshots of the worry and excitement (and resignation) of a global culture bracing itself for the shock of the new are perhaps paralleled only by the later work of Krzysztof Kieslowski. Wenders is mindful of a planet increasingly dense with the imagery of corporate branding, electronic technology, and the impersonal shapes and lines of modern commerce. But he doesn't brood about it; rather, he uses this cold, neon new world as a playground. 'Until the End of the World' saw Solveig Dommartin jet- setting across a heavily commercialized near-future on a supply of stolen loot, in a jet-black wig that seemed encased in proverbial quotation marks. Here, we have Rudiger Vogler in a bear costume, dancing a jig, and Wim Wenders in a Santa suit, filming him via handicam, on a foggy night at a BP filling station.

Later, Russian tourist Anna Vronskaya's minivan becomes its own microcosm of a global village, as she, her children, Wenders and Vogler, and a hitch-hiking Vietnamese family sing along to... Nick Cave's "The Weeping Song." As always, Wenders' taste in music is superb. Particularly if you share that taste, you can lose yourself in a sequence like this.

This sequence, and this film, may not have a great deal to say, unlike 'Until the End of the World,' but the upside is, those whose enjoyment of 'Until the End of the World' was cut short by its occasional ponderousness (I didn't mind) will find this much easier to take. In a way, 'Arisa' is an abstraction of UtEotW's beatific, rock-infused style (one which would dominate Wenders' work from 'Wings of Desire' to date). UtEotW was a notoriously difficult shoot, and 'Arisha' doubtless was a breezy little departure from the stresses of a major, wayward production. That's the sense I got watching it, yet Wenders still wanders the realm of some of the themes he explores in UtEotW, 'The End of Violence,' and to some extent in 'Lisbon Story' -- namely, the way this new world, and its emerging technologies, threatens to isolate us even from those in close physical proximity. This is more directly confronted in his features -- Bill Pullman's computer conferences in 'The End of Violence,' and Dommartin's imprisonment inside her own dreams in UtEotW -- but it's still evoked here (Vronskaya's laptop, Wenders' handicam, forcing him into a "secondhand reality"), and fleetingly triumphed over (the Nick Cave sing-along, encounters with Croatian refugees, and the overall communal attitude). But finally, the paths diverge; Vogler, on his locomotive, goes one way, and Vronskaya and family, in their minivan, go another, with Wenders -- still dressed as Santa -- stranded in between.

It's a lovely closing image, and this short film is pure bliss, as well as a playful affirmation of Wenders' singular bighearted cool.

'Cocktail' has more value than one might think, albeit a value that was not originally intended. A bad movie, yes, it certainly is, but on a purely visceral level, it's never without points of interest. I may even go so far as to assert that it's thoroughly enjoyable. It's also a movie that merits study, as it's quite revealing of the values and preoccupations of America in the 1980s. This is one of the token Hollywood movies of that decade, and were I to, say, teach a course on or curate a retrospective of films depicting the cultural climate of 1980s America, this film, along with De Palma's 'Scarface,' would be among the selected.

Let's first consider Tom Cruise. 'Cocktail' is one of the three or four movies most vital to the establishment of Cruise as the foremost male Hollywood sex symbol of the last two decades. Yet, on screen, he is curiously blank, even sort of dumb. His charisma lies in the fact that he is innately uncharismatic and charming only because he's an innocuous naïf whose cock is his compass, able to mimic the walk and the talk, bemused by his own ability to stand out in a situation by trying so hard to adapt. There's a vast, shall we say, rift between the charm of suave screen idols of the fifties and sixties, like Cary Grant, and the looks-sexy-in-a-business-suit boyish charm of latter-day capital-h Hunks like Cruise and Kevin Bacon. In 'Cocktail,' he is able to dominate women simply because the domination is effortless and incidental. Most of the one-night-stands Cruise's character scores are achieved because of a bet or a dare. The conquests appear to be of little consequence.

'Cocktail' is a movie that seems to be written and made by people who have spent a lot of time drinking at bars, but not serving at them. The movie's two main characters have real redblooded bartender's names: Brian Flanagan, played by Cruise, and Douglas Coughlin. It could only have been science that led to these names. Flanagan, fresh out of the military, establishes his sense of masculine privilege in the very opening scene, when he and his army buddies pull over a Greyhound bus with a red strobe light (the kind they have in undercover squadcars). He boards the bus and heads off to Manhattan with books on and naïve ideas of entrepreneurship, expecting to hit it rich as an executive but simultaneously harboring a working class man's resentment of the rich. He doesn't have a college degree, though, so he gets some advice from his uncle, a bar owner, and enrolls at a university after taking a gig at T.G.I. Friday's, where Coughlin (Bryan Brown) mentors him and turns him into the Hollywood version of a "great" bartender. That, of course, entails a cross between a circus performer and a Busby Berkeley one-man chorus line, as Flanagan can't shake the habit of tossing bottles, shakers and glasses into the air and practically juggling them. It's bartending as stuntwork.

Coughlin, who likes to spout off-the-cuff platitudes under the heading of "Coughlin's law" (be prepared to roll your eyes), and Flanagan become buddies and form a deep masculine bond that is so cloying it fails to actually cloy. They have a falling out and Flanagan, having given up academics, heads to Jamaica to tend bar on the beach. There, he meets and has a torrid Harlequin Romance Novel-cover affair with Jordan Mooney, played by Elisabeth Shue who's the best thing in this movie. Shue is beautiful here and very convincingly projects intelligence and vulnerability. The two lovers milk the photogenic landscape of Jamaica, making love under Dunn's River Falls in broad daylight as though they were posing for a blue postcard for exhibitionist tourists. The Jamaica shown here, by the way, wouldn't even qualify for the adjective "postcard." It's a department store Jamaica, ripe for the windows of a travel agency.

Flangan is reunited with Coughlin, and his penchant for conquest drives Shue's good girl away, silently returning by night to New York. Other circumstances trigger Flanagan's return to New York, and this is where the movie begins to seriously misstep. Prior to this point, it's somewhat level in its depiction of masculine conquest and capitalist fantasy.

In New York, Flangan has been shacking up with a rich elitist with whom he has nothing in common aside from their shared awe of his penis. Meanwhile, Coughlin is a newly married and newly wealthy man, whose riches make his fundamental shortcomings all the more apparent to him. Flanagan dumps the rich witch and locates Shue. Cruise's scenes with Shue from this point forward hit all the wrong notes, and even worse are the scenes between Flanagan and Jordan's father. These scenes miss a very open opportunity for honesty and simply reinforce expected stereotypes.

'Cocktail' is one of those movies that just feels meticulously constructed and laboratory-tweaked to rake gold at the box office. It is, in its depictions, completely naïve, and as an entertainment product, full of thoroughly deliberated contrivances. Even the reparteé reeks of being engineered, and it's enjoyable on that level rather than as banter. This is a "good times" movie that resembles the music you hear in chain restaurants like Chili's and this feature's very own T.G.I. Fridays. It's like a magazine without content, with full-page ads from cover-to-cover. Of course, from an anthropological perspective, you can glean a lot of info from magazine advertisements from the distance of a decade or more. In this magazine, there are only two types of women: Madonnas (Shue) and whores (the rest). The female viewer, though, will likely be too distracted by Cruise to notice, as this is a housewife's movie, designed and successful at inspiring masturbatory fantasies in women and wish-fulfillment in men. The movie is iconic, though. In its way, 'Cocktail' is the 'Casablanca' of the '80s, and that's not necessarily praise.