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Retro Review: Gleaming the Cube (1989)

by Commuter Staff · May 23, 2018

Director: Graeme Clifford

Starring: Christian Slater, Steven Bauer, Richard Herd, Art Chudabala, Min Luong, Ed Lauter, Tony Hawk, Rita Rudner, and Max Perlich

Production: David Foster Productions, Gladden Entertainment

Genre: sdsdf

Rated: PG-13

Overall Rating: ***/5

With the rise of films and television shows taking place in the 1980’s, it seems only fitting to review a film from that time frame that still holds up to this day, nearly 30 years later.

“Gleaming the Cube,” also known as “A Brother’s Justice,” is a film filled with adrenaline and excitement. If the film 1980’s film “Rad,” and the game “Skate or Die” had a child, it would be this film.

The film follows the character Brian Kelly (Christian Slater), as he is forced to re-examine his purpose in life after the loss of his adopted brother Vinh (Art Chudabala). Something doesn’t sit right with Brian when he learns of his brother’s suicide.

Brian believes adults and the police are inept, which leads to him investigating the death himself. He learns that many things play into his brother’s apparent suicide. Brian’s unkempt appearance seems to hinder his ability to be taken seriously, so he makes the change from skater to prep.

As his closest friends begin to feel alienated, they leave Brian to his own devices. Brian seeks the help from his brother’s girlfriend, Tina (Min Luong). With her help, Brian finds just how deep the conspiracy goes and that his brother’s death was merely a casualty of circumstance relating to a much larger picture.

In keeping with the films of the 80’s, Brian’s buddies quickly forgive him and help however they can, even if it means borrowing Pizza Hut’s delivery truck, recklessly being driven by Brian’s friend Buddy (Tony Hawk).

This film has its moments of strained or forced acting, and some slightly cheesy dialogue, but overall, it is still a fun film filled with friendship, action, skating, drama, and sprinkled with romanticism and hope.

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Gleaming the Cube Review

01 Jan 1989

100 minutes

Gleaming the Cube

Just what the world needed, a skateboarding vigilante movie.  Slater plays a punk who's no good at anything that doesn't involve a skateboard, but ignores the cop on the case (Steven Bauer) who justifiably keeps telling him not to interfere.  He romances the dead kid's Asian girlfriend (Le Tuan) in an attempt to get the goods on her father - who is mixed up in the killing - and turns from a boring no-good slob into a boring clean-cut preppie.

In a scene evidently supposed to be an emotional climax to compare with Ray Milland refusing a drink in The Lost Weekend or Gary Cooper throwing away his badge in High Noon, the kid even consents to leave his board at home and walk somewhere.  However, he climbs back on a special model for the big chase at the end.

This is one of those movies that seems to have been stuck together like a model kit.  It has enough skateboarding footage to fill out a half hour time-waster documentary, enough plot for a low-grade kiddie adventure movie, enough insight into the Californian Vietnamese community for a two-minute news filler on a slow night, enough teen pouting and angst for an MTV spot, and enough family crises for the pre-credits sequence of a suburban soap.

Slater is a blandly rebellious hero, and his hymns to skateboarding as the last bastion of freedom are pretty hilarious.  It gets mechanically exciting in the contrived action scene at the end, but its overall ordinariness - compounded by lacklustre villains, inoffensive rock music and nary a whiff of sex or sleaze - becomes extraordinarily wearisome long before that.

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Gleaming the Cube

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• Duration: 105 mins

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• Director: Graeme Clifford
• Screenwriter: Michael Tolkin
• Christian Slater
• Steven Bauer
• Richard Herd
• Art Chudabala
• Charles Cyphers

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Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Directed by graeme clifford.

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Description by Wikipedia

Gleaming the Cube (also known as A Brother's Justice and Skate or Die) is an American film released in 1989. It featured Christian Slater as Brian Kelly, a 16-year-old skateboarder investigating the death of his adopted Vietnamese brother. The skating technical advisor for the film was original Z-Boy Stacy Peralta. Among the skateboarders who appear in the film as stunt skaters are Mike McGill, "Gator" Mark Rogowski, Rodney Mullen, Rich Dunlop, Eric Dressen, Lance Mountain, Mike Vallely, Chris Black, Ted Ehr, Natas Kaupas, Chris Borst, and Steve Saiz. Tony Hawk (Buddy), and Tommy Guerrero (Sam) then members of the Bones Brigade, appear in the film as members of Brian's skate crew. Future lead singer of The Aquabats and creator of Yo Gabba Gabba!, Christian Jacobs, also appears in the film as Gremic. The film received a moderate release in the United States from 20th Century Fox (in 469 theaters). Although the film had a relatively low box office turnout, it garnered a significant cult following after its theatrical release, through basic cable replays on networks such as USA and the burgeoning VHS (and later DVD) market, as well as among skateboarders. The title of the film refers to the gibberish question "Have you ever gleemed inside a cube?" that Garry Davis (GSD) asked Neil Blender in an interview in the December 1983 issue of Thrasher magazine. In the film, Christian Slater’s character defines “gleaming the cube” as “pushing your limits to the edge.” The DVD contains an easter egg; by highlighting the skateboard on the main menu, viewers can watch a short featurette entitled “What Does Gleaming the Cube Mean?”.

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A ChucksConnection Film Review

Christian slater and others wear black, blue and red high top converse “chuck taylor” all stars in the film., gleaming the cube, by hal peterson.

Christian Slater plays a skateboarder turned detective in Gleaming the Cube .

Gleaming the Cube is a combination mystery and skateboarding action film starring Christian Slater, in one of his first major roles. Slater plays Brian Kelly, a young skater who becomes involved in the investigation of the death of his Vietnamese half-brother Vinh (Art Chudabala). The film begins by showing Brian as a leader in the local skateboarding subculture, whose main interest in life is finding virgin cement to skate on with his buddies. In the opening scene, you see Brian and his friends skate through a local airport and persuade a pilot friend to fly them around the Los Angeles area to help them find brand new unfilled swimming pools where they can test out their skills. However, the story shifts from the typical teen rebel film to a detective story when Brian refuses to accept the explanation given for his brother’s sudden death and vows to find out what really happened as a way of dealing with his personal grief, anger, and guilt.

Brian and his buddy Harvey look around Los Angeles for new skating locations.

Vinh gets into trouble when he goes to a warehouse to investigate suspicious invoices he runs across in the video shop where he works for his girlfriend’s dad, Colonel Trac (Le Tuan), a former commander in the Vietnamese army. In truth the store is part of an elaborate front to smuggle illegal weapons, and just as Vinh discovers this, he is captured by the Colonel’s allies, and accidentally killed while being interrogated. To cover up the killing, Vinh is left hanging in a local hotel room as if he committed suicide. Knowing his brother’s seriousness about life and his commitment to succeeding in his studies, Brian refuses to believe that Vinh’s death was self-inflicted. When he stumbles across Vinh’s notes (in Vietnamese) about the invoices, he sets out on his skateboard to find out what the words mean and what really happened. In the process, he runs into a local police detective, Al Lucero (Steven Bauer), who first thinks he is just another punk kid, until he realizes that Brian is on to something. To complete his investigation, Brian must also successfully infiltrate the local Vietnamese community and spend time with Tina Trac (Minh Luong), Vinh’s former girlfriend, as one method of finding out about what Vinh was up to. But in order to be accepted socially in traditional Vietnamese society, Brian must clean up his act. One of the most hilarious scenes in the film is the horrified reaction of his skating buddies to Brian’s transformation from a skater with frosted hair, camouflage pants and chucks, to a clean cut looking, bicycle riding young gentleman, wearing button down shirts, Dockers, and boat shoes. Brian’s friend Harvey (Charles Cyphers) tells his buddies, “If I ever get what he’s got, just shoot me.” The balance of the film is about how Brian, with the help of Detective Lucero, Tina, and his skater buddies track down Vinh’s killers and bring them to justice.

Brian gets his skater buddies to help him chase a bad guy.

Gleaming the Cube has some great Los Angeles chase scenes, combining cars, skaters, motorcycles, police cars, and trucks in pursuit of each other in hilly residential neighborhoods and out on a freeway. Christian Slater’s performance as Brian is a little on the edge but with a sense of humor and cool attitude. As the film progresses, Brian, the rebellious, disengaged kid without a lot of purpose in life becomes a focused avenger unafraid to infiltrate the bad guys’ defenses, and fight back against his brother’s killers. The rest of the cast is believable and Stephen Bauer’s detective provides the right contrast to Slater’s teen rebel act. Director Graeme Clifford gives us a lot of action to make up for the rather convoluted plot, and there is a good energy in the film. By the way, the title is a skater’s term that roughly means “achieving the pinnacle”.

Brian’s skater buddies check him out after a big fall.

Best Chucks Scene

There are some interesting chucks close ups during the skating sequences.

The best chucks scenes in this film are the skateboarding sequences, where you see them shown in a variety of close ups with some fairly impressive stunts.

Brian stands up on an upright board.

There are standing up stunts, leaps and turns, and great balancing tricks well performed in the various chase and action sequences of the film.

Brian balances on one wheel.

Although Brian (disappointingly) doesn’t return to wearing chucks after his fling as a straight model citizen, but instead wears some brand new Airwalk high tops, his skater friends do not disappoint, and you see them decked out in red, black, and blue Chuck Taylor high tops at various times in the film.

Harvey wears red chucks during the final chase action sequence.

Gleaming the Cube (1989)

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An Orange County teenager's carefree life of ditching class and skateboarding abandoned pools comes to a screeching halt when someone close to him dies. The cops rule the death a suicide, but the bereaved skater believes he was murdered. It's up to him to solve the case, with a skateboard.

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Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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Gleaming the Cube (1989)

Oh yeah, dudes and dudettes, it’s some more radical times ahead for this week’s B-Movie Enema review!

This week, we’re going to be Gleaming the Cube and… well, hopefully… trying to learn what that term even means because it was clearly important enough to name an entire movie around it. This movie comes to us in that sweet period in the 80s that was totally trying to ride the gnarly coattails of tubular fads to the max. We’ve talked about skateboarding before on here. For more grindage, check out my review of 1986’s Thrashin’ from David Winters.

I don’t think I have much more to say, but I will bring up three important people connected to Gleaming the Cube that are of note. The first is the screenwriter for this film, Michael Tolkin. Tolkin was still relatively new to the scene at this point. He had one screenplay prior to this movie, the 1982 unfinished film Gossip . Gleaming the Cube was his first film and he also served as Associate Producer as well. Frankly, this isn’t that bad of an accomplishment. Sure, the reviews weren’t great, but a lot of people my age and slightly younger really like this movie. However, his big splash came in 1992 when he wrote The Player for Robert Altman. This would garner Tolkin an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Later in the 90s, he wrote the blockbuster Deep Impact . More recently, he developed the very highly appreciated miniseries The Offer about the making of The Godfather .

Directing Gleaming the Cube is Australian Graeme Clifford who was at the helm for the 1982 drama Frances that racked up a pair of acting Oscar nominations for Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley. While his directing credits aren’t huge, his editing credits are. He directed the wonderful 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now . He followed that up in 1975 with the all-time cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show . Then, in 1976, he edited David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth . He finished out his editing career with Sylvester Stallone’s F.I.S.T. in 1978 and the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice starring Jack Nicholson and, hey… Jessica Lange. I’m guessing that might have led to her getting the role in Frances .

Let’s be serious, though… The draw of Gleaming the Cube is the hot up-and-coming Christian Slater.

Now, let’s go back in time to the late 80s and early 90s because late pre-teen and early teenager Geoff was a massive fan of two people I mentioned above. Honestly, we could count Jessica Lange as a third person because her role in 1976’s King Kong informed a great deal of what I find exceptionally attractive in women. But 1989’s Batman made me a HUGE Jack Nicholson fan. After seeing that movie, I started watching everything Nicholson was in beginning with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , in my opinion, the best film ever made.

Around 1990, the other key figure in this story came to my attention, Christian Michael Leonard Slater. You see, it wasn’t Heathers that made me a huge fan of his. I didn’t see that until, like 1991 or something. It was 1990’s Pump Up the Volume . Not only did that anti-establishment, counter-culture film seem to place Slater on the path of being the heir apparent to Jack Nicholson in just about every way possible, but it also deeply spoke to me. See, I was kind of an outsider in my early teen years. I was quiet. I was kind of interested in things that other kids my age may not have been as keen on. I felt as though if I really got a chance to kind of let it all out, I would have wanted to hijack the airwaves and just bluster into the wind and try to speak as much truth to power as I possibly could.

Oh god… what have I done with my life?

Anyway, back on topic. In no way, shape, or form was I as cool as Christian Slater, but that movie was the hook to get me to go back and watch Heathers and this movie (though I barely remember much about this movie at all) and then be excited about movies like Kuffs (yes, I’m getting to that one on this blog at some point, hopefully, this year). To be honest, the first movies of his I did see were probably the two movies that came out in 1990 before Pump Up the Volume – Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and Young Guns II . The former was a role I didn’t really recognize him in any specific way, but the latter was probably the one that got me at least somewhat interested in seeing him play the rowdy pirate radio show host. Naturally, I was already all-in for the 1991 summer blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because he and Kevin Costner were both in it. I was a fan of Costner’s Dances with Wolves and Bull Durham too. However, I was thrilled beyond all thrills to have seen Slater pop up as a quick little cameo as a young officer on Captain Hikaru Sulu’s U.S.S. Excelsior in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country . There was a time in which, yeah, any movie Slater was going to be in, I was buying a ticket and, if it was R-rated, I was dragging my mom to it so I could ensure I was getting in.

That Star Trek VI fact is part of his backstory. His mother is Mary Jo Slater. She has been a successful casting director in Hollywood for, like, 45 years. She was the casting director for that Trek film and it just so happened that her son was a big fan of the franchise so she was able to get him into a Starfleet uniform and deliver a message to Captain Sulu in a sort of pivotal moment. She’s still casting movies and TV shows today. She’s amassed over 200 credits in the role of Casting Director.

1993 kind of showed the two sides of Slater. In the early part of the year, he appeared in the weepy Untamed Heart with two more rising stars, Marisa Tomei and Rosie Perez. Then, later, he was in the really hard-edged True Romance which was penned by yet another rising star, Quentin Tarantino. Both movies were romance-centric with Untamed Heart the one that you take your best gal to on a date and True Romance the one that you watched with your guy pals because of the much harder and tougher attitude of the plot. By the end of the 90s, Slater started down a different path that wasn’t quite my cup of tea and he sort of started to fade for a bit until he produced and co-starred as the title character in the breakout television series Mr. Robot that also gave rise to Rami Malek.

But it’s this era Christian Slater that I’m a huge fan of still, so let’s use that as a way to get into Gleaming the Cube .

The movie achieves peak radness almost right out of the gate. We open with a shot of a small airport in the Southern California area and a quintet of skateboarders using the runway to do skating and some special tricks… Look, I don’t know what it’s called when people are not gleaming cubes or thrashing or shredding nugs or whatever skateboarding terms there are. I do know this is fairly ballsy as these kids are skating as airplanes are taxiing down the runway. That seems like something you can’t do in a post-9/11 world.

The leader of this group is Brian Kelly, played, of course, by Christian Slater. They are at the airport because he knows a small plane pilot. Brian pays this pilot to take he and his friends up to spot pools where they can 720 grind or whatever it’s called when you use a pool as a skateboard rink. As is the case with Thrashin’ , when you have a movie about skateboarders and it is set in California, you better get Tony Hawk in your fuckin’ movie. That’s because if you don’t you are a total dweeb.

Skateboarding in pools must have been Hawk’s specialty because that’s also what he was featured as in Thrashin’ . Also, it’s very clear that I’m just a normie because I can’t even say what it is that Tony Hawk’s specialty was in skateboarding or what exactly made him famous. I just know he was a skateboarder.

Okay, so one of Brian’s buddies wipes out and between needing to get an ambulance and leaving some blood on the pool’s inside surface, he and his pals get in trouble for trespassing. Upon returning home, Mr. Kelly, played by perennial jerk Ed Lauer, essentially grounds Brian. At the very least, Brian will not be able to use his skateboard for a little while. We learn that he also has an adopted brother, Vinh, who is from Vietnam.

For the most part, the two brothers are complete opposites. Brian is the reckless slacker who is constantly rebelling and getting in trouble and Vinh is generally considered the do-gooder. The movie goes to almost painstaking lengths to set this up. What was Vinh doing while Brian was out doin’ ollies in the pool? He was at home doing homework. The two brothers share a room but Vinh’s side is completely neat and overly clean. Brian’s side is a complete pigsty with magazines and comic books strewn all over the place. The two brothers have a long-running chess game between their beds that reveals a little more of Brian’s actual intelligence as his most recent move is a good one that Vinh needs extra time to ponder over.

But… Vinh is not as innocent as we were led to believe. After he tells Brian that their parents really do love him, basically doing that classic parenting thing that makes them hard on Brian to bring out his true potential, his little girlfriend, Tina, comes to the window. Vinh sneaks out through the window to go out with her. He also… gasp… smokes! Tina’s father is also Vinh’s boss at the Vietnamese Anti-Communist Relief Fund. Basically, this organization sends relief stuffs out to Vietnam.

He runs some numbers and discovers a mysterious difference in shipping weight. Tina’s father thinks it must just be a typo from the supply company. He thinks Vinh isn’t all that much of an expert in this sort of stuff. After all, he’s only been working with the organization for a couple weeks. This guy basically takes Vinh off that job to put someone more experienced on that task. Vinh kind of refuses to let it go and takes his calculations with him when he leaves for the day.

Vinh confides in Brian that he’s got some trouble. He also asks some hard questions. For one, we hear a little more about Brian’s philosophy about why he rebels against the older generations. He thinks that the older folks are simply trying to hold onto an ideal of something that is always in transition and that it’s a waste to hold onto the past and tradition. Vinh also accuses Brian of still being upset that their parents adopted him. Brian says that it’s been eleven years, man… That’s all water under the bridge at this point. It’s not the reason why Brian rebels. All the while, Christian Slater is proving he really is a young Jack Nicholson.

After being a little cryptic about what happened at work that day, Vinh can’t let go of what happened at work. He sneaks out again late that night and drives to the warehouse where all the supplies the VACRF is sending to Vietnam. He doesn’t realize he trips a silent alarm and he takes pictures of the place. He tries breaking open one of the crates with VACRF supplies but is caught by the owner of the warehouse, Ed Lawndale (played by great character actor Richard Herd). Vinh is bound and questioned by Lawndale and co-worker Bobby. They use a wet, rolled-up towel to wrap around Vinh’s neck to force him to tell them who he works for. When Tina’s father, Colonel Trac, arrives, he tells Lawndale that the kid is a good kid, and, ya know… he was only trying to track down the discrepancy he saw earlier in the day.

When they go inside the hotel room to resume questioning or for Trac to get Vinh out of there, Bobby got a little too tight with the towel and Vinh is dead.

Trac, Bobby, and Lawndale have a whole heap of mess on their hands. So, what do they do? They fuckin’ beat cheeks. They bail and stage the motel room as if he hanged himself with his belt. The cops start investigating. The head investigator, Al Lucero, was the same cop who came when Brian and his buddies were busted at the pool.

Mr. Kelly comes to the school to tell Brian about his brother’s death. How does Brian cope with the loss of Vinh? He gleams that fuckin’ cube and then does some deep contemplating.

Yeah, this is the era of the 80s rebel without a cause. Like in Footloose or, say, in this movie, when tragedy hits, the main character angrily does the thing he likes to do. Angry interpretive dancing for Kevin Bacon. Angry half-pipe skateboarding for Christian Slater. You know it’s such a stupid thing, but it plays deep to the youngsters watching the movie. If you were, I dunno, 12 to 18 years old and watching Gleaming the Cube , you’d really get this deep expression of his pain. Then… when he arrives at the funeral on his black, grief skateboard, and leaves the white king chess piece, that’s the chef’s kiss on this moment of deep despair.

Brian finds the folded-up piece of legal paper that Vinh had from work. He goes to Vietnam Town to ask people to translate what was scribbled on the paper. He goes to a pool hall and someone reveals that one of the lines says something about drug supplies. Unfortunately for him, Bobby is there and he’s now planning to follow Brian to find out why he’s suddenly so curious about this piece of paper.

Brian next goes to the motel where Vinh was found. He tells the maid that he was his brother and that’s why he wants to know who found him and what have you. She asks him if he thinks she’s blind and/or stupid because, you know… Christian Slater and Art Chudabala are hard to mistake for siblings. That’s been a subtle running joke throughout this movie that is also very of its time. Vinh was once told (by Bobby the first time we saw him) that he can’t believe his last name was Kelly. One of Brian’s pals jokes that maybe Brian was the adopted one. Now, the maid can’t possibly think that Brian and Vinh were brothers and she scolds Brian for making a joke in poor taste. It’s just an odd thing thrown into this movie that draws a lot more attention to race than it needs, but whatever. It was 1989. Oddball race gags were kind of a thing.

Were… shit. Sadly it kind of still is.

Anyway, Brian knows that Bobby is following him. So after slipping him, and Bobby stops to use a pay phone for business, Brian slips into the back of Bobby’s car. Bobby stops off to talk to the Colonel and Lawndale. In exchange for the name of the person who is going around and kicking the hornets’ nest about Vinh’s death, he wants $50k and a plane ticket to Bangkok. He pulls a gun and after a struggle, Bobby is shot by his own gun. the Colonel stashes the body into the trunk of his own car and… beats cheeks.

Brian runs back to town and gets the cops. Lucero and his partner ride out with Brian to take a look at the scene of the crime. However, the cops don’t really buy Brian’s story. Why would Brian get into the backseat of the car driven by the guy following him? Why can’t Brian give the descriptions of the people whom Bobby met? Besides, Brian is a known troublemaker. On top of that, Bobby has a clean record.

Brian tells Lucero that he cannot believe Vinh killed himself. He was not that type of guy. When he went to the pool hall and then to the motel, this Bobby Nguyen fella suddenly started following him. Why would he make any of this up? Lucero takes him back home, but he also does some extra investigative work himself back at the motel.

Brian goes to his buddy Yabbo’s house. Yabbo is an interesting fella in this movie for multiple reasons. One, he was the one who wiped out at the beginning and got Brian in trouble just before Vinh’s death. He seems to be Brian’s best friend. His sister seems to be smitten by Christian Slater (seriously, how can you not?). He has an absolutely bitchin’ underground hangout room which I have to assume is maybe a portion of a tunnel that was blocked off or maybe a bomb shelter… I dunno, but goddamn how could any kid back then see this movie and not yearn for their own underground lair with all their awesome ass skateboarding shit everywhere???

But maybe most interestingly, he’s played by longtime character actor Max Perlich. Perlich appeared in movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Can’t Buy Me Love prior to this movie. Along with this movie in 1989, he was also in Gross Anatomy and Drugstore Cowboy . Later, he appeared in Cliffhanger with Stallone, Maverick with Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, and he was part of the ensemble cast of Beautiful Girls which features a title song from my absolute favorite indie rock artist Pete Droge. But fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would know him best as Whistler, the enigmatic half-demon dude who set Angel on his path to an apocalyptic prophecy that included his love affair with Buffy.

None of those things are as cool as having an underground lair for your skateboard shit.

Most importantly, though, Perlich also gives meaning to the title of the movie. He tells Brian that he is constantly “gleaming the cube” which means that Brian is always pushing the boundaries. He’s always burning the candle at both ends. He doesn’t know where to stop. It was in response to Brian asking him if he failed Vinh. Yabbo tells both Brian and the audience that he is every bit the good guy. He’s not the ne’er do well that the fuzz or his parents might think him to be.

Speaking of the fuzz… Brian has taken all the Robert Nguyen names and addresses from the phone book and starts trying to find Bobby’s house to see what he can figure out. When he gets to one of the places on the list, he is met by Lucero who is finding some definite leads. The most interesting thing he found out is that Vinh did not actually register himself at the motel the night he died. He doesn’t know who it was on the registry, but it was not Vinh.

Brian was able to slip a piece of paper into his pocket from Lucero’s investigation. It was a list of phone numbers that he then calls. One of the numbers was to a video store. The video store was owned by Colonel Trac. It’s where he runs the VACRF out of. Brian knows that Vinh worked for Trac. He also knows that Trac was the second of the three guys at the scene of Bobby’s death. They need to find the American. He goes to tell this to Lucero, but, uh oh spaghettios, it appears that Bobby’s passport was checked in Bangkok that morning (something oddly never brought up again or ultimately proves or disproves anything). Brian says the guys are clearly covering their tracks. That’s when Brian gives Lucero the piece of paper with the list of medical supplies that led to Bobby following him. When someone at the police station reveals the medical supplies written on the paper, Lucero again writes off Brian’s claims that someone killed Vinh by telling him all signs still point to suicide.

Brian storms out and gleams some more cubes by doing some very angry skateboarding.

You know what? These angry expressions of one’s pastimes or hobbies are really relatable. I remember back in 2004 when my adopted Inuit brother, Nanook, was found dead with a needle in his arm. The cops said he killed himself with an overdose of smack. I said that he never did smack a day in his life. They said that the coroner says in the autopsy it was an overdose of smack and that’s how it was going down in the books and there ain’t nuthin’ I can say to change that. I remember yelling at the cop that NANOOK DIDN’T DO SMACK! and I stormed out of the police station. How did I clear my head and blow off some steam? I angrily read comic books. Motherfucker did I read the shit out of my collection of Rom: Spaceknight . I read it so hard and with such vigor, I thought my eyes were going to bulge out of my goddamn head. And it didn’t stop there. When I uncovered more information about how Nanook obviously pissed off this one guy who probably shot him full of the dope, the cops again shut me down. So I went out to an abandoned parking garage and read the fuck out of Crisis on Infinite Earths for the fourteenth time in my life. I read it so hard that I accidentally shit myself a little bit when Supergirl sacrificed herself to save the heroes and try to defeat the Anti-Monitor.

So, suffice it to say, to all those 80s movies that had these angry expressions of frustration through the main characters’ various talents, I get you. I see you. I am you. Okay, glad I got that out of my system. Rest in peace, Nanook. I love ya, man.

Anyway… Back to the movie.

Brian attempts to make friends with Tina. Tina turns him down flat. Part of it is she doesn’t think she has anything in common with Brian. She then says it’s a touch more complicated than even that. Her father forbids her to hang out with American guys. I would not be surprised if that also extends to girls too. Then, she actually goes the stuck-up bitch route and tells him that even if her father would allow him to be friends with American boys, he needs to take a good look at himself. He dresses like a turd and he has the attitude to match.

So he decides that the only thing for him to do is do a makeover. If people look at him and just see a screwup, then he needs to actually do something about that. He goes into Vinh’s dresser and closet, removes his earring, and then cuts his hair.

He basically turns into Zach Morris.

I do kind of expect for him to suddenly turn toward me, break the fourth wall, and then tell me what his big scheme is to get Kelly to go out with him this weekend, but he doesn’t do that fourth wall breaking until Kuffs . The change confuses just about everyone. Most importantly, it turns the heads of Tina and her friends (which surprisingly includes a white girl).

Brian apparently does score some sort of a date with Tina. Brian picks Tina up for a movie. Initially, Brian wants to stay when invited for tea, but the Colonel shoos them off to the movie when he says he would like to know more about Vietnam because it could help him understand what happened with Vinh. After the movie, Brian keeps asking about the Colonel, especially about whether or not he does business with Americans, but Tina would like to know more about skateboarding. He says that it is the one thing that makes him feel like he’s not being judged. But he also claims he’s just given it up like it was nothing.

When he comes home, he and his dad have a heart-to-heart about life before Vinh and what’s to come now that he’s gone. It’s actually a pretty good scene. It’s just a little bit past the halfway point of the movie and Brian is kind of growing up and realizing he needs to be something he wasn’t before. In a way, you can maybe say he’s kind of going about it the wrong way because he’s changing his appearance to fit in, but the stuff beyond the physical is done pretty well. He’s kind of apologizing for being a sort of bad kid. He provides some advice to his dad about moving forward because Vinh can’t be brought back. All the while, Brian is trying to set Vinh’s legacy right. It’s a good scene and maybe one that this movie didn’t exactly have the right to even have. Remember, in three years’ time, the screenwriter is going to be nominated for an Oscar and the scene is being played out by a guy who has been a solid character actor for years before and years after this movie and a kid who is about to be a fairly big star.

Later, Brian goes to see Tina at an event for the VACRF. While they talk about Vietnamese food, he sees Lawndale who makes a big deal out of talking to Colonel Trac. Realizing that Lawndale’s company, Westpac Medical Supply, likely connects to the WMS on the paper that he carries around from Vinh, he sneaks into WMS. Unlike Vinh, he recognizes the silent alarm. He finds one of the crates for VACRF and he breaks it open. Inside are ammunition and machine guns.

Brian realizes that Trac is likely involved in pretty heavy shit. Sure enough, Trac talks about a movement with Lawndale. He’s clearly arming a group over there for some purpose. Later, he spends more time with Tina and uses this as an opportunity to sneak around the Colonel’s home office. Tina finds him in the office, but he’s quick to say he saw a map and was hoping to find where Vinh was born. She sneaks him out the backdoor when her parents get home. Before leaving, he pockets an engraved Zippo lighter that was apparently given to Trac in 1972 at the height of the Vietnam War. He also nabbed the Colonel’s Los Angeles Rams hat that he always wears.

When he goes to WMS again, he finds there is an addition to the campus – hired security. Since he broken in previously, Lawndale opted to secure the place even better. He creates a distraction and traps the guards in their own trailer and uses gasoline he siphoned from his parents’ car and the Zippo he took from the Colonel’s office and blows a propane tank. He leaves the Rams hat for Lawndale to find and sew mistrust between the partners.

Tina overhears her parents talking about their troubles. Her mother even says to her father that he promised there would be no more war. He tries to send her away for her safety, but Tina decides to go to Brian. Brian also got a visit a little before Tina from Lucero who knows Brian set the fire at WMS despite Brian saying he was taking Lucero’s advice to shake things up for them. The next morning, Tina discovers her father’s Zippo in Brian’s room. She says that he got that from an American Ambassador. He fesses up to how he got that lighter.

So… She goes to her father to ask what really happened to Vinh. The Colonel admits a few things. First, Vinh did not kill himself. The Colonel was there and it was an accident. He also says that everything he’s done was for the actual greater good of Vietnam. So, it does seem he is involved with smuggling guns, but for the good guys. Ashamed for all he’s been involved with, he calls Lawndale to end the whole thing.

Lawndale is not willing to just drop things.

Like an idiot, Trac has given enough information to Lawndale to reveal Brian’s identity. Lawndale hires a Vietnamese motorcycle gang to run him down when he’s on his way to school. With a little bit of skateboarding skill and a lot of luck of there actually being a cop that shows up on the road and prevents Brian from being attacked by the gang once they catch up to him, he’s able to escape this. Lucero questions Brian and tells him that the official statement from the bikers is that he dropped some bigoted language their way.

Lucero attempts to shakedown the two motorcycle gang guys for information. Lucero’s got an ace up his sleeve… There’s a cop who speaks Vietnamese. When the two goons talk to each other in Vietnamese, Lucero gets the info that it was Lawndale who paid them to get rid of Brian. Brian’s gone to Yabbo to get a newer, faster board and to rally the rest of his skateboarding friends.

Brian arrives at Trac’s house just before Lucero does. Brian sees that Lawndale is in a heated conversation with Colonel Trac. Trac is planning to leave for Bangkok, but Lawndale says he can’t because they are still in business together or whatever. Trac says that two people are dead who shouldn’t be so he’s pretty much out. In the middle of the conversation, Tina comes into the office and says that a police car just pulled up. Lawndale seizes the opportunity and takes Tina hostage.

Brian also springs into action and skateboards his way right through the window to try to save Tina, but that only causes Lawndale to shoot Trac in the chest and provides an easy way out for Lawndale to escape with Tina. Lawndale forces another guy to take Lucero’s police car and makes off with Tina while Lucero and Brian pursue in one of Trac’s cars. Lucero calls for backup and, like a good 80s movie should, Brian mobilizes his buddies to get in on the chase too.

Eventually, Lucero nearly loses Lawndale, but Brian pursues on skateboard. Naturally, this leads to a chase that involves the dried up Los Angeles River for a very brief moment. The rest of Brian’s gang, sort of led by Tony Hawk driving a goddamn Pizza Hut delivery truck shows up…

Guys. The last 15 minutes of this movie have been utterly insane. You have Brian evading Lawndale’s goons. Lucero using a cop who knows how to speak Vietnamese getting information from the goons they arrested. Brian goes to his girlfriend’s house knowing her dad is going to be in some heavy shit with Lawndale. But before he goes there, he gets a super rad new board and rallies the gang to help him. Then Tony Hawk uses a Pizza Hut truck… Anyway, this leads to an insanely long chase that involves a guy who looks an awful lot like David Hasselhoff getting his really nice sportscar messed up by Lawndale trying to escape in the stolen police car with two hostages. With that guy trying to rundown Lawndale, Christian Slater is hanging onto the car as it speeds through highway traffic…

Look, all I’m saying is this part of the movie is exceptionally exhausting.

How does the whole chase scene end? Okay, so the cop car spins out, gets clipped by Lucero, and Lawndale takes off with Tina and gets into a firefight with Lucero briefly. Brian fuckin’ launches to disarm Lawndale by knocking the gun out of his hands. The cops arrest Lawndale and Brian recovers in the hospital. Tina’s dad gets arrested for his whole gun-running thing. Tina says her mother wants to stay in America but she doesn’t know how she can face going back to school with all that’s gone on. Brian is like, “Nah… Just wait until I get out of the hospital and we’ll go back together and it will be super cool and shit.”

Brian and Lucero visit Vinh’s grave and looks like everything is gonna be juuuuust fine. Well… Vinh’s still dead. Looks like Brian’s limping pretty good. Brian also probably acted a little like a vigilante and totally committed some crimes at WMS. Tina’s probably not going to be doing too great with the whole my-dad’s-gonna-be-in-prison-for-a-long-time thing. But, hey… Lucero’s doing pretty good! He caught the bad guys! Everyone else is pretty fucked though.

Man, this movie is a strange one to be sure. Frankly, I don’t know if it’s actually any good. That’s far from saying this is a bad movie. It’s a fun movie. It’s fairly inoffensive in its story and characters. You have a rebellious skateboarding slacker who likes doing things his way and is cynical. This is an 80s version of Rebel Without a Cause . Ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that. You can certainly kind of chuckle or, I guess in some people’s cases, nitpick at some stuff in this. There’s no way that Brian can do the things he does without facing serious consequences. The movie is ostensibly a skateboarding culture film. Yet, here we have gun-running. We have weird American-Vietnamese culture gaps. We have a murder mystery. It’s a lot for this movie to handle and it only kind of barely does.

Generally, I absolutely understand why some people have a great deal of affection and nostalgia for this movie. This can only be heightened if you were in the culture too. If you’re a skateboarder or you were a little bit disaffected, then this movie would probably hit pretty dang hard with you. The further away from 1989 you get when you watch it, especially after not remembering much of it or for the first time, the more of a curiosity of its time it becomes and that’s okay too. This movie does have a charmingly pleasant late-80s vibe to it that would fade away from movies in just a couple short years after this movie’s release. Plus, you’re seeing what made Christian Slater an appealing star in this movie when he was still basically a kid.

Well, I think we gleamed enough cubes for this week. Let’s put the wraps on this and look forward to what’s coming up at this very site. Tomorrow, join me for episode #2 of this new season of B-Movie Enema: The Series ! You can come here to the website or you can check the links to the right of the screen for the YouTube and Vimeo pages. The episode for tomorrow is William Shatner in Kingdom of the Spiders ! Come check it out! Next Friday, the written review of the week is yet another classic from the 80s. It’s high time I reviewed The Beastmaster !

So be sure to nosh some tubes and gnarl some juicy half-pipes and put your peepers on those things coming up!

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3 thoughts on “ gleaming the cube (1989) ”.

This sounds like a really fun bad movie. Complete with a skateboard theme.

Like Liked by 1 person

Ever watch BMX Bandits from 1983?

I’ve not seen that one but I am aware of it and it’s been one I’ve wanted to do.

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Gleaming the Cube

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Product Description

To 16-year-old Brian, life is an empty pool and a skateboard, until his brother is found dead and it's declared a suicide. Determined to uncover the truth, Brian risks all as he crosses into a world of deceit, contraband, and murder. Special Features include: Cast and crew filmographies, trailer, behind the scene footage, film facts, and scene access. Christian Slater

Product details

• Aspect Ratio ‏ : ‎ 1.33:1
• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ NR (Not Rated)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 5.38 x 0.6 inches; 4 ounces
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Color, NTSC, Closed-captioned
• Release date ‏ : ‎ June 1, 1999
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Slater, Bauer, Lauter
• Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ English
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Pioneer Video
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00000ILFQ
• #26,183 in DVD

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Review: Stuffed with in-jokes for parents, ‘The Garfield Movie’ isn’t a cat-astrophe

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Since 1978, cartoonist Jim Davis has explored the quotidian dramas of pet ownership via the daily travails of beleaguered Jon Arbuckle, his eager dog, Odie, and the titular tubby orange tabby, Garfield. If the comic strip (the most widely syndicated in the world) is the weekly sitcom version of their story, then “The Garfield Movie,” the latest effort to bring Garfield to the big screen, is the oversized action-adventure film, replete with references and comparisons to Tom Cruise.

Those Cruise-inspired Easter eggs are laid not necessarily for kids but for the adults who have accompanied them to the theater, such as when the score references “Mission: Impossible” while an ox named Otto, voiced by Ving Rhames (who plays Cruise’s techie Luther in the action franchise), lays out the plan for a heist. Later, a triumphant climax featuring airborne food-delivery drones offers the chance for a bit of the “Top Gun” theme while Garfield (voiced by Chris Pratt) brags that he does his own stunts , “just like Tom Cruise.”

The line is a bit of over-emphasis that this is the big, thrilling version of Garfield, not a “Jeanne Dielman” -style study of domestic life. In fact, after a quick framing device that shows us Garfield’s heartstring-tugging history as a starving stray kitten who encounters Jon at an Italian restaurant, the film speeds through a quick montage of our favorite Garfield tropes: He loves lasagna, hates Mondays, torments Jon and manipulates Odie.

We know him, we love him: Garfield’s unique characteristics have been printed on coffee mugs for years. Now, on to the high-stakes and highly contrived plot. Garfield and Odie are kidnapped by a couple of thuggish pups, Nolan ( Bowen Yang ) and Roland (Brett Goldstein), who are working for a Persian cat named Jinx (Hannah Waddingham). She wants them to collaborate with Garfield’s deadbeat dad, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson), on a milk heist as revenge for the time she did in the pound after a scheme she and Vic pulled.

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The heist plot allows for the action, adventure and suspense to come into play, as well as the aforementioned Tom Cruise references, along with nods to film noir and early silent films (there are a lot of sequences set on trains). There’s even a “Rashomon”-like flashback as we see Garfield’s childhood abandonment from Vic’s perspective, changing the way we understand how Garfield found himself alone in that alley that night. The heist may make up the majority of the story, but it’s merely a means by which an estranged father and son can escape the emotional prison of masculinity and express their feelings to each other.

“The Garfield Movie,” directed by Mark Dindal and written by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgove and David Reynolds, may sport a deep knowledge of film history to delight cinephile parents, but it is still a kiddie movie and comes with the same zany, harried energy one might expect from such a project. The aesthetic hews closer to the look of the comic strip than the CGI/live-action abomination of the two Garfield movies of the early aughts, which is on trend with other animated films that embrace an illustrated style, though this is less edgy than some recent examples (the “Spider-verse” movies, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” ).

Bill Murray voiced the rusty, rotund feline in “Garfield: The Movie” (2004) and “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties” (2006) in his dry, laconic manner, and Pratt does a fine job taking over vocal duties. Harvey Guillén offers his voice for Odie’s noises and the rest of the voice cast (Nicholas Hoult as Jon, Cecily Strong as a Midwestern security guard named Marge) round out their world.

Though the film is formulaic and somewhat annoyingly energetic, it’s cute and irreverent enough, and manages to bridge the generation gap, offering up a kid-friendly flick that can keep adults somewhat entertained for the duration, proving that even after all these years, Garfield’s still got it.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'The Garfield Movie'

Rating: PG, for action/peril and mild thematic elements Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes Playing: In wide release

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‘Grand Tour’ Review: Miguel Gomes’ Dreamy, Delirious Time-Swirling Travelogue Through East and Southeast Asia

Bristling with life and song and revelatory collisions between cultures and timeframes, the Portuguese master's Cannes Competition title is a healing balm for trying times.

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All we know is that, when this low-level British diplomat (who, like all the British characters, whether they hail from London or pine for Yorkshire, speaks in Portuguese) shows up at Mandalay train station, it is 1918, near midnight and he is drunk. The next day, when he goes to pick Molly up from her arriving steamship, his nerve suddenly fails, and before he even claps eyes on her, he scarpers onto the next ship bound for Singapore.

This is the story of “Grand Tour,” but it is not the half of “Grand Tour.” From the beginning, Gomes’ eccentric, puckish sensibilities are in evidence, with every beautifully rendered black-and-white, period-set interior alternating with bustling, bristling contemporary footage of the various towns and countries featured. Between 1918 and now, some of them have changed their names — Burma is now Myanmar, Siam is now Thailand — but none have changed their spirit, a fact that the seemingly reckless but actually deceptively meticulous construction makes clear.

Sometimes in color, sometimes in monochrome, with the narrators speaking the local lingo and knitting Edward and Molly’s colonial-era stories into the Asia of today, we get gorgeous on-the-fly snapshots of modern life across the continent. A rickety Rangoon ferris wheel propelled by hand (and foot). Workers untangling the wires atop Saigon’s overloaded telephone poles. Old Chinese men playing mahjong; Filipino locals riding tuktuks; Lunar New Year fireworks exploding over the Saigon skyline; a portly man in a restaurant moving himself to tears with his karaoke rendition of “My Way” before returning to his noodles, dabbing at wet eyes.

The film also has a recurring motif in the puppet shows that seemingly every culture has developed, and developed differently, as a storytelling medium. There are marionettes and paper silhouettes and two-person representations of — are they turkeys? Ostriches? Who knows? But that we always see the puppeteers as much as we see their puppets seems appropriate to the sense we get, throughout this overflowing cornucopia of worldly pleasures, of a single intelligence, a particular curiosity and a uniquely skewed sense of humor unifying so much that, in our darker moods, might seem actually to divide us.

Gomes shot this extraordinary film in an extraordinary way. Hampered by Covid-era restrictions, a lot of the modern footage — credited to three cinematographers in Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Guo Liang — was directed remotely, while the period segments, whether in bamboo forests or Raffles Hotel or aboard a ship whose captain speaks in six different languages over the mooing of a cargo hold full of cows, were creations on a sound stage. But even aside from the occasional deliberate anachronism — like a cellphone dropped in a forest when Molly is on the verge of catching up to Edward — and despite the brash collisions of stock and style, and scripted fiction and found-footage reality, “Grand Tour” is a remarkably coherent, if richly complex experience.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Competition). May 22, 2024. Running time: 129 MIN.

• Production: (Portugal-Italy-France) An Uma Pedra no Sapato production in co-production with Vivo film, Shellac, Cinéma Defacto. (World sales: Match Factory, Cologne.) Producer: Filipa Reis. Executive Producer: João Miller Guerra. Co-producers: Marta Donzelli, Gregorio Paonessa, Thomas Ordonneau, Tom Dercourt. 
• Crew: Director: Miguel Gomes. Screenplay: Mariana Ricardo, Telmo Churro, Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes. Camera: Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Guo Liang. Editors: Telmo Churro, Pedro Filipe Marques.
• With: Crista Alfaiate, Gonçalo Waddington, Cláudio da Silva, Lang Khê Tran. (Portuguese, Chinese, Thai, French, Burmese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese dialogue)

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