Customer Reviews

Blame It on Rio [VHS]

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

"Blame It On Rio" is one of my favorite films. The great scenery of Rio De Janeiro is one of the perks of watching this. It's kinda like watching a travelogue of the city that's a 24-hour carnival. The film is packed with memorable lines as well ("They looked at us, let's go talk to them,"says Victor. "They're practically nude," Matthew states. Victor's response? "Try to picture them with clothes on"). Michelle Johnson won a Razzie for her performance as Jennifer, which I didn't think was that bad. Demi Moore's performance, on the other hand, takes some getting used to. Michael Caine, always the top-rate performer, doesn't disappoint in this one. His performance is honest and well-meaning. There are one small fault in the film though: the soundtrack. I'm not talking about the bossa-nova or nightclub music, but the outdated 80s music. There is one song in the film that gets played over and over again. By the end of the film, the song will not leave your head LOL. That doesn't matter though. It doesn't take away the film's entertainment value. It is still a fun film to watch and make you laugh.

"Blame It On Rio" is like taking a great vacation of fun, sun and no inhibitions. The setting is beautiful Rio de Janeiro and the film gives an honest impression of the city...beautiful beaches, Bossa Nova flavored music, tropical climate. Michael Caine is hilarious, Joseph Bologna a perfect comical foil to Caine, Michelle Johnson sweet and innocent(?), and Demi Moore likeable and levelheaded. I saw this movie for the first time when I was about Michelle Johnson's age and when I saw the film recently, it brought back wonderful memories of that time in the 80s. The film is a not-so-implausible plot of a middle-aged man (Caine) spending a vacation in Brazil with his daughter (Moore),his best friend (Bologna) and his best friend's daughter (Johnson). Valerie Harper plays Caine's wife, who backs out of the vacation to Rio at the last minute and packs for Bahia. "Must have been the free and easy laughter in the air...must have been the moonlight on the sea..." Caine has an affair with his best friend's daughter (Johnson)and the comedy ensues. "Blame It On Rio" is just plain old fun with great scenery, great quotes (Johnson to Caine "That's not you life line, that's your heart line" and Caine's reply "Teeny little thing isn't it"), and great comedy!

Put your inhibitions and prejudices on the back burner, and savor the beauty, innocence, humor, and humanity of this movie. Michael Caine is great as always. Michelle Johnson may never win an Oscar, but she is perfect as the liberated, honest, voluptuous daughter of Caine's best friend (Joseph Bologna). She lures Caine into an affair, presumably based on love, without any hint of malice. A young, pre-implant Demi Moore is pretty, but mostly background. Valerie Harper has funny moments as Caine's wife. Family conflict abounds, and is wrapped up in a mostly satisfying ending. Spiced up with local culture and natural beauty, including numerous topless ladies on the beach.

You've got to hand it to this "sophisticated comedy" from the 1980s -- it has the guts to go where very few films would ever dare, portraying an all-too-possible disaster on a sundrenched holiday. It points out the contradiction that you go on these vacations for fun and relaxation, only to find the constrictions of social etiquette and morality pushed to their breaking point. "Blame it on Rio" might not connect the dots in all the right ways (probably because they knew they were playing with fire) but it's all there if you look.

As usual, Michael Caine is hilarious as an average middle-aged guy who falls for the siren song of a vapid, hardbodied little temptress... who also happens to be the teenaged daughter of his best friend. It's really not done in a creepy way and is in fact a very realistic situation that simply falls way outside of our accepted norms of behavior. Would I do it? No. But I can see it happening, particularly with a guy who is in a problematic marriage. Placing it in Rio was a great idea to show how a Westerner's morals just collapse, and the movie really doesn't shy away from the fallout of thinking with your loins instead of your brain. Having said that, the Caine character gets off pretty easy and the film dodges around to avoid some awkward resolutions and in the end somewhat condones his behavior if not its consequences. That's not so good.

But, this film is a lot more honest than the environment we find ourselves in now, in which very young girls now traipse about in what is the equivalent of hooker shoes and daisy dukes, where in 2010 sex is oozing out of commercials, music videos, and the internet while most men just internalize it all and try their best to keep their view of women in the balance. This is a relatively honest film about the ridiculous hypocrisy our society creates in taunting something that is simply biological.

Gorgeous cinematography, great samba-tinged soundtrack, a hilarious script, and a wonderful cast make this a very enjoyable film. It remains as fresh, warm, and funny as it was when it was first released. Michael Caine's comic timing is, as always, dead on, Michelle Johnson conveys both innocence and teenage hormone-psychosis perfectly, and Joseph Bologna and Valerie Harper are the right combination of buffoonery and bitterness. I think the irreverence and intelligence of the film shows through in the smallest details: the advice of the umbanda woman, the uncommunicative maid, the camera-happy Japanese tourist, the very English Peter and Elaine, etc. With a less sensitive, less intelligent script, this could have been a tawdry tale of illicit love, but instead it is a delicately-crafted farce which perfectly captures the hedonism and sensuality of a cidade maravilhosa, Rio de Janeiro.

I never grow tired of seeing this video. The locations, breathtakingly shot in and around Rio, are enough to make anyone with or without an imagination want to book the next flight.

Caine and Bologna play marvelously off each other reminicent of Walter Mathow and Jack Lemon. Good writing and a terrific supporting cast including a teenage and throaty voiced Demi Moore as Canie's daughter make this a movie not to be missed. While the subject matter may be taboo...remember...it is a comedy.

I saw this movie when it first came out back in 1984, and it has always stuck in my mind as a very fun movie. The movie opens with two middle-aged men, both of whom are going through difficult marriages. One (Joseph Bologna) is getting a divorce and the other (Michael Caine) finds his marriage on the rocks. They travel to Rio on a vacation with their teenage daughters, but without their wives, in order to forget about their marital troubles. Because the daughters replace the wives on this vacation, it creates a vaguely incestous tension. In one of the movie's early scenes, Bologna's daughter (Michelle Johnson) and Caine's daughter (Demi Moore) are bare breasted as they walk up to their fathers on the beach. Moore seems somewhat shy as her hair mostly covers her chest, but Johnson is clearly very confident and proud of her breasts. Her father asks her to cover her breasts and she refuses. Though the direct incestous tension between father and daughter doesn't go any further than this, the sexuality definitely builds between Johnson and dad's friend Caine to the point where they are soon having an affair.

The affair creates a series of situations that are downright hilarious, and many scenes had me rolling on the floor laughing. For the guys in the audience, Michelle Johnson is definitely gorgeous and we get to--well--see a lot of her, and she seems very comfortable and happy with her nudity. Demi Moore plays a more minor role both in terms of nudity and in terms of her character. The movie is not intended to make any grand in-depth statement, and is probably not very accurate about Brazil, but if you want a light-hearted, sexy comedy it would be hard to do much better.

On a personal note, this movie was something of a rite of passage for me because it was, I believe, the first movie showing adult nudity that I ever saw on the big screen. I still thought of myself as a bit of a kid at the time, and I thought of topless and nude scenes as something that adults (i.e. people a lot older than me) did. I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that Michelle Johnson was exactly the same age as me (we were both born in Sept 1965). I came to the conclusion that if an actress my age were doing topless scenes, I must have reached adulthood myself.

The movie is a hilarious comedy without considering the nude scenes--since it is a sex comedy set on and around Rio's topless beaches, the nudity tends to fit right in. And because it is set in Rio (where 'the play gets done') the viewer is allowed to relax and take a vacation for a couple of hours, even if the characters aren't always relaxed in their antics. All in all, you won't find any deep statements about the world here, but it is a really fun movie.

When (1984) I saw BLAME IT ON RIO at the movies I laughed my head off. Ten years later I rented the videotape and did not crack up as much. But both times Michael Caine's comic acting abilities impressed me.

For someone not thought of as a funny-man, Michael Caine's delivered killer laughs in a number of comedies. If you like him in BLAME IT ON RIO, seek out a forgetten comic gem called WITHOUT A CLUE, which is as hilarious as any flick I've seen. (One video store displayed it in the Mystery section, so even some industry people don't know it.)

Father-daughter played by Joseph Bologna and Michelle Johnson take zany turns going at it with Caine in BLAME IT ON RIO. The idea of a teenage girl seducing an adult (her father's best friend, no less) could upset you, but the actors manage to make it funny. See BLAME IT ON RIO, and while you're at it, look for WITHOUT A CLUE.

I love when the amateur psychoanalysts run amok because of a harmless little film such as Blame It on Rio. It is a comedy, for Cristo's sake. To be more precise, Blame It on Rio is a farce. Blame It on Rio is not supposed to be about the Electra complex gone awry in Rio de Janeiro. This film has something more in common with Carmen Electra, if you know what I mean. The point is, there simply isn't any room here for overanalyzing in an academic way. Copacabana Beach and all of those thongs are simply too crowded for that caliber of intellectualism, folks.

Watching the Blame It on Rio DVD, I am instantly transported to the early 1980s, when having sex with strangers was still considered a thrilling dare and not necessarily a death sentence. (Before the film was released, the message of the AIDS pandemic had not yet shocked the world.) At the time, Demi Moore, who was a better actress than Michelle Johnson -- hands and bras down -- in Blame It on Rio, was an unknown. The following year, Moore and the charismatic Jon Cryer made No Small Affair and both of their careers exploded like Malcolm McLaren's "Eiffel Tower" song on the movie's cool soundtrack. Hollywood may have only taken a budding interest in Moore when she modestly bared her bosom in Blame It on Rio, but it later gave her lots of support for films she made a decade afterward, such as Indecent Proposal and Striptease.

Reviewers here on Amazon.com who have blasted the music in Blame It on Rio, in the wrong way, will not be spared my wrath. When Blame It on Rio first came out, MTV was in its infancy and "lady" Madonna was offending the Vatican with her hit song and video, "Like A Virgin." Thanks to her charming displays and those of Prince and his protegees Vanity 6, lingerie sales were soaring a (I can't help it) mile high. Can anyone spell S-K-I-N? This was the body-beautiful '80s. Forget about the good and bad perms, Jheri curls and mullets, which all were the (out)rage. Derrieres were squeezing themselves into Lycra-Spandex, and ladies were giving the hot shoulder in asymmetrically slouching, torn sweatshirts inspired by a film about a frustrated go-go dancer (Flashdance). In such a "Solid Gold" world, nearly every body-conscious human seemed consumed by lust -- especially the kind between the lyrics and the rhythms of every synthesized-to-the-hilt record. Yes, vinyl was still king.

From that aerobicizing mind-set came the American-from-French farce Blame It on Rio. In the film, there are plenty of neo-disco sounds as well as music from soundalikes of 1980s pop icons such as Michael Jackson, El DeBarge and the dynamic duo of Johnny Mathis-Deniece Williams. If you don't believe me regarding the latter, just listen to the theme "Blame It on Rio," and if you can't recall the theme from the hit show "Family Ties," you're too young to be watching Blame It on Rio, anyway. And, hey, with the sound clarity of DVD engineering, you can enjoy the synth-pop until your head explodes like the android in Alien.

Amid all the fun in Blame It on Rio, there's a heaping plate of sensuality. Much of Brazil's homegrown music and dance is well-represented in the film. Beautiful bossa nova is injected into several memorable scenes: upon the travelers' descent into Rio as the city's sublime landscape unfolds and at a nightclub where a sultry songstress sways to a lilting number while the two middle-aged characters slide further into the alluring prospect of so-many-women-in-so-little-time. While the two fathers are strolling on the beach, bragging (Bologna as "Victor") and arguing (Caine as "Matthew") about scoring -- fast-tempo Afro-Brazilian rhythms compete with the characters' midlife-critical, anxiety-ridden dialogue. In this reviewer's opinion, that is pure comedy because despite all the sensual rhythms, bountiful ocean and topless, bikini-waxed babes surrounding them, these dudes are too stiff to go with the flow of life.

I'm surprised that so many reviewers totally overlooked the intentional harmony of music and choreography in this film. Renowned director Stanley Donen was at the helm of Blame It on Rio, after all. View the film again with a critic's eye, and this time pay attention to the beginning of the film, in the first beach scene. There's a Brazilian song playing, and you see two musicians in swimming trunks who are performing that song -- and so are other musicians on the beach. In fact, almost everyone who's upright on the beach is dancing to that song. What about the amazing performance of capoeira in the open square? I'm referring to the scene in which a guilt-laden and fearful Matthew tries to rid himself of Jennifer (Michelle Johnson) and pass her onto a randy local guy closer to her age. And let's not forget the wonderful dancing and chanting of the Candomble religion at the nighttime wedding reception on the beach. How's all that for Donen magic at work?! It's called choreographic direction, and it's fabulous!

You'll miss the commentary that Blame It on Rio makes about Americans and Brits if you can't get past close-ups of bare breasts. The title is a strong clue that this movie is tongue-in-cheek, that there will be non-Brazilian characters in the movie who'll act zany and hypersexual (this they do) because they're not only far away from home and having marital trouble, but also they're in a city where they believe they're supposed to act irresponsibly. As part of the chorus of the title song goes: "What if we're acting like fools/What do we do?/What do we care?/Blame it on Rio."

The sexcomedy Blame It on Rio is a vibrant, passionate tribute to human lust -- and a snicker at most of the flaws that accompany it. Like the neon fuschia shade of lipstick I thickly applied throughout the 1980s, this farce is a tantalizing, full-lipped kiss to a footloose decade that will never be repeated again. Get it on DVD because the videos aren't of the best quality.

Since I first saw this movie when I was ten, I loved it and after all these years I still love it, the locations are beautiful, and it is very funny. Most of all it gets all the details about Rio right. I even love the music even if some of it is a little cheesy, but hey, it was the 80's.