Favorite Films of My Lifetime, pt. 2 of 4

Ah, the VHS Era! What a great time to be a kid. Here are the films of the 80s that resonate the most with me in 2017. I warn you up front - my choices are fairly conventional. And you'll see a lot more "As a Kid" entries this time around.

~1980~ 

Great year for movies (The Fog, The Empire Strikes Back, Altered States, The Long Good Friday, The Changeling) but my heart belongs to:

The Shining
Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson.

Too much internet vitriol on the topic has hardened my stance on whether or not it's an effective adaptation of the novel (answer: it is), but there are even some baffling dingbats out there who insist it isn't even a good movie. Kubrick movies can sometimes take a few watches to reveal their many levels of genius, it's true, but even a cursory glance at this one should be enough to clue the viewer in that this is no ordinary ghost story. I don't refer to any of the fanciful interpretations re: its underlying themes, just its extraordinary look, feel, and sound. 

I've read such crazy things about it over the years that perhaps I champion it more than most. It's not about sticking up for a personal fave, though, or for Kubrick (who certainly doesn't need little old me to rise to his defense) - it's about... correcting such an outrageous misconception whenever and wherever it arises.

Honorable Mention: Flash Gordon. With each year that passes, this one gets better and better. You can almost see the alternate timeline where America kept making movies like this until the singularity was at hand. This is a film I loved purely as a kid, then outgrew or thought I outgrew, then loved ironically, and now am back to loving purely.

Also The Apple. Because wtf.

Foreign: The Last Metro. My favorite Truffaut is Day for Night, but this might be my second.

As a kid: 9 to 5, Xanadu, The Last Flight of Noah's Ark, My Bodyguard, and The Private Eyes. I've seen 9 to 5 since then but the others not since the 80s. I have had occasion to watch Bon Voyage Charlie Brown, though, a few dozen times over the past couple of years with my girls:

Still holds up.

~1981~

Another banner year for movies: An American Werewolf in London, Nighthawks, Escape from New York, Excalibur, Time Bandits - all classics that have stood the test of time. Excalibur is a little wonky, but wonky King Arthur works surprisingly well. Also? The greatest movie ever made:

Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Lawrence Kasdan (with George Lucas.)

As with Jaws, I mean, what more can be said? This is the only film to have out- Casablanca'd Casablanca. (Not counting Bloodsport.) 

Sorry so brief, but what is there to say really? If you don't love this film, I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you're awful.

Foreign: Possession. I won't spoil anything, but wow. (RIP, Zulawski.)

As a kid: Many of the films I watched over and over again on VHS did not transition well to the 90s and beyond (On Golden Pond, The Cannonball Run, The Fox and the Hound, Dragonslayer, Condorman, The Devil and Max Devlin, (kind of has a creepy context to it nowadays) The Great Muppet Caper, Carbon Copy, Stripes.) I still like them (most of them - probably not Carbon Copy, but it's been a good 30 years since I saw it) just never felt the need to own them as an adult. Others (The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Time Bandits) did/do. 

~1982~

My honorable mentions for this year are some of the best films in their respective genres (Poltergeist, Bladerunner, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Creepshow First Blood) or are awesome in their own unique ways (Quest for Fire, Rocky 3.) But as a few immortals once said, there can be only one, and it is:

Also the subject of a spot-on musical appreciation. ("You can check on your ancient computer / It's astonishing how quickly I spread. / You can pick up an axe and go crazy / But I can grow legs from my head!")

As Nerdist put it in their review of the blu-ray: "The Thing is a movie that infects your mind and imagination, the way the alien bits infect the men of the camp. It’s got the requisite big scares and awe-inspiring creature effects for an '80s horror flick without an ounce of cheesiness. Everything is treated completely seriously, and the result is a movie that was too bleak for the time, but can't be ignored evermore. It’s a classic. Buy this shit." Amen.

Honorable Mention: Tron. It wasn't particularly beloved back in the day and on more than a few occasions in elementary school I pretended not to like it when everyone in the lunch room or on the bus was ganging up on it. (I apologize, Steve and Don; I let you down.) Thankfully - as with The Thing - it found a second and enduring life on home video.

Documentary: Koyaanisqatsi, Burden of Dreams. The former is where I got the (inverted) screencap for the header for this blog. The latter is the first but not the last appearance of Werner Herzog in these posts.

As a Kid: E.T. (of course but I never connected with this quite the way everyone else did; I dig it and all, I can just take it or leave it), Megaforce, The Secret of NIMH, The Last Unicorn, Zapped! (First laser disc I ever watched), Night Shift, (largely forgotten today but great performance from Michael Keaton and the soundtrack is killer) The Beastmaster, and The Slumber Party Massacre.

~1983~

My fave: 

Wargames
Directed by John Badham. Written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." Amen, Joshua. One of these days some generation of human population somewhere is going to put into practice all the great advice we give ourselves in the movies.

Honorable Mentions: Zelig, The Right Stuff, Star 80, and two by David Cronenberg, The Dead Zone and Videodrome, their messages still as timely as ever.

I rewatched: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone in prep for this blog. It didn't hold up under questioning. That brief 3-D craze of the early 80s (I say "craze" but they were all flops pretty much) produced little of value.

Yeah, It's Still Awesome: Return of the Jedi. Somewhere along the way it became popular to trash Jedi. Myself I thought it was undeserving of the contempt heaped on it even before the prequels came along and made the original trilogy shine all the brighter. Yub nub!

As a kid: The Twilight Zone: The Movie, Superman 3, Staying Alive, Mr. Mom, Max Dugan Returns (love this movie still - kinda goes for all of these), Blue Thunder (even this one, not that I've seen it in 30+ years), Something Wicked This Way Comes, Sleepaway Camp, and Krull. (Okay, these last 3 I don't love so much anymore.)

~1984~

I was so gaga over Raiders in the 80s that there was no chance that anything but

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.

would be my contemporaneous favorite. Same is true in 2017 pretty much. A lot of Indy fans have convinced themselves that there's something wrong with this film, or that "it's not as good as you remember." Or that Willie and Short Round (or evil Thugees) ruin it or somedamnsuch. I honestly don't know how to respond. It's not perfect, and it's no Raiders, but it's awesome and stop kidding yourselves. 

Honorable Mentions: Amadeus, Romancing the Stone, (When I was a kid I thought you could grow up and basically choose Michael Douglas' lifestyle as a legit career path and I've never gotten over the disappointment, I don't think. My wife is always busting on my enduring affection for this movie. But I stand by it as a damn entertaining piece of cinema, a story well-told, with characters you care about. Horrible sequel, alas), The Terminator, This is Spinal Tap, and The Killing Fields.

As a Kid: I basically still like all of these films (Gremlins, Ghostbusters, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sixteen Candles, Night of the Comet, Red Dawn, The Karate Kid, The Last Starfighter, Conan the Destroyer, Splash, Footloose) just not the way I did when I was 10. So it goes. 

Ask My Parents... and I did because they were just in town and after telling me there's no way they could possibly remember what I was watching a lot in 1984, they then rattled off Firestarter, The Neverending Story, The Ice Pirates, Breakin', Beat Street, ("those breakerdance movies") and Cloak and Dagger. I've seen the first two within the past few years but I need to line up the last four sometime.

~1985~

My favorite then and my favorite now is:

Young Sherlock Holmes
Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Chris Columbus.

I can see some broad strokes at play in 2017 of which I wasn't aware in 1985, but who cares? It's too bad this didn't lead to any more movies (or some kind of reunion deal) for the two leads. I've been singing this song for years and won't stop anytime soon.

They Also Served: Back to the Future, Brewster's Millions, The Falcon and the Snowman, Fletch, Fright Night, Real Genius, Death Wish 3, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and Better Off Dead.

Foreign: Come and See. Have you seen this? Good freaking lord. If there was a worse place to be on Planet Earth from 1939 - 1945 than Eastern Europe, I don't want to know.

Still my vote for most effective and mind warping war movie ending ever made, no hyperbole. (Outside of In Country.)

Klum, bless his departed heart, gave me a framed picture of the above "for my future office." I have it in the closet. That'll be a fun one for my family to explainif I kick off unexpectedly.

As a Kid: Cat's Eye, My Science Project, The Goonies, Gotcha', European Vacation (Ca Plane Pour Moi!), Rocky IV, Cocoon, Rambo: First Blood pt. 2, Ladyhawke, Explorers, Just One of the Guys, Teen Wolf, Enemy Mine, The Heavenly Kid, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.

~1986~

I tend to gravitate towards those films that have a little something for everyone, or that can be conceptually reconfigured to say everything about everything. Ergo:

Big Trouble in Little China
Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Gary Goldman, David Weinstein, and W.D. Richter.

It is the film all other films - from Herbie the Love Bug to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - wish to be.

Honorable Mentions: Jesus, what a year. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Aliens, The Fly, Blue Velvet, The Color of Money, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

A Genre of One: Top Gun.

As a Kid: Stand By Me (I really wish I could still reconnect with this one, FWIW,) Crocodile Dundee, Karate Kid 2, Maximum Overdrive, Cobra, The Golden Child, Witchboard, Transformers: the Movie, Platoon, Highlander, One Crazy Summer. All classics of one form or another, just the ones above this paragraph edge them out in a liferaft scenario.

~1987~

"Then let's head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch."

Evil Dead II
Directed by Sam Raimi. Written by Sam Raimi and Scott Spiegel.

Honorable Mentions: Full Metal Jacket, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Predator, Robocop, Wall Street, Prince of Darkness, Real Men. That last one's more or less forgotten, which is a shame. I haven't seen it in forever, but it was a very unexpected pleasure to find on cable at my buddy Jeff's house back in the day.

As a Kid: Good Morning Vietnam, Less Than Zero, The Lost Boys. Like a lot of people, I had a huge junior high crush on Jami Gertz.  

Her career faded somewhat, but she did okay for herself.

Also: Three Men and a Baby, Planes Trains and Automobiles, Mannequin, Three o'Clock High, Innerspace, The Running Man, Hellraiser, Summer School. You probably think I'm just naming any movie I once enjoyed, but I'm only listing those films I watched at least 9 or 10 times. Innerspace I must have watched at least 50; it's difficult to see now what it was about that one that so appealed to me. Still a fun little movie, but 50 times? 

~1988~

Did I say that Raiders was the best movie ever made? I was wrong. Here's the correct answer:

Midnight Run
Directed by Martin Brest. Written by George Gallo.

I can't adequately convey how perfect this movie is. Here's a good review that does it for me. Great performances (particularly the leads but also Dennis Farina and Yaphet Kotto), great characters, great script, great heart, great 80s production value (bluesy soundtrack, car chases, helicopter stunts, etc.)

Honorable Mentions: Heathers, They Live, Die Hard, Beetlejuice. In any year that didn't also have Midnight Run, these would all be tied for the top spot.

As a Kid: The Great Outdoors, Big, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Alien Nation, Bloodsport, Eight Men Out, Elvira Mistress of the Dark, Funny Farm, Scrooged, Moon Over Parador. 

~1989~

Couldn't decide between these two quotes so here's both of them: "There are strange things afoot at the Circle K." And "All we are is dust in the wind, dude." Genius. 

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
Directed by Stephen Herek. Written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon.

If you'd told me in 1989 that I'd be listing this as my favorite, I'd have disbelieved you. I almost disbelieve myself now. In no rational universe should this be anyone's vote for favorite movie of 1989. But we do not, of course, inhabit a rational universe. Excellent.

Honorable Mentions: Roadhouse (I was too cool for this one at the time, bizarrely, so I missed out on 20 years of watching this and cackling along with everyone else), Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Foreign: Cinema Paradiso, The Killer. (More on John Woo next time.)

As a Kid: Batman, The Abyss, Sex Lies and Videotape, Tango and Cash, Always, (for some reason I really loved this movie in 1989 and even believed, weirdly, that it was his best film. I have no explanation for this) Casualties of War, Lean On Me, Lock Up. None of these had the longest shelf life with me, but in 1989 (or afterward on VHS/ Pay Per View) I was a frequent consumer.  

~

NEXT:

Favorite Films of my Lifetime, pt. 1 of 4

I've seen a few of these "Favorite Film from Each Year of Your Life" facebook status things making the rounds lately. I wanted to do one, too, but as I sat down with the various year-in-film lists, mine got a little too annotated for facebook. Luckily for me (and you!) I have ol' Dog Star Omnibus to house my ramblings and rantings. And so:

I was born in August of 1974. I considered leaving off any films that came out prior to August but that seemed like a lot of work. Which brings me to an important confession up front: contrary to how this all might appear, I didn't really vet the below as much as I should have. I did a pass through wikipedia, imdb, my DVD folders, my external hard drive, and then wikipedia again. Even with that, I'm sure I missed a few.

In other words, this isn't really an honest attempt to evaluate the cinematic output of each year of my life, more like a overview of my tastes as they evolved over the years and a snapshot of those films I want to throw on right now in April 2017. It's more interesting to me to see how the same films hit me in different eras and contexts. 

I'm sure the rest will be self-explanatory. Let's get started. 

~1974~

The Godfather 2 sucks all the air out of the room in any discussion of '74. Or Chinatown. Understandably so - both are well-deserved classics. But put either of them in front of me and I'll find myself instead throwing in:

Gone in Sixty Seconds
Written and Directed by H.B. Halicki

I just watched it not too long ago (and not too long before that) and that's the thing: who wouldn't want to watch it whenever, just because? And it's not just the cars - it's the sound design, the locations, the attitude, the scruffy DIY-ness, and the macho anti-heroism of it all. It's just goddamn entertaining, the kind of pure, reckless America cinema that was our best line of defense against the the communists.

Two slightly classier suggestions:

Bob Fosse's Lenny, and Ken Russell's Mahler.

Honorable Mentions: The Conversation, Electra-Glide in Blue, The Man with the Golden Gun, Steppenwolf, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And Zardoz. Because wtf.

Documentary: F for Fake.  

Foreign: Going Places aka Les Valseuses. This is my personal bar to clear in the French-evisceration-of-economic-classes-cloaked-in-provocative-sexual-satire genre.

As a kid: Not literally, obviously, but '85-86 I watched Island at the Top of the World an awful lot on VHS. A movie I hadn't thought of probably since then until looking things up for this post. I remember nothing about it.

Can You Believe I've Still Never Seen... Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla? Me neither. Plenty more (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Parallax View, et al) but I want to keep this as breezy as possible. (Says the guy turning a facebook status into 4 different blogs with a hundred screencaps.) 

~1975~

You'll hear "arguably the best film ever made" a lot in this series of posts. Here's the first:

Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Carl Gottlieb.

One of the most beloved and widely discussed films in film history hardly needs any further commentary from me (though I didn't let that stop me before) but what can you say? How much of a 911 pedo terrorist do you have to be to not love Jaws? Don't be an asshole.

Honorable Mentions: Barry Lyndon, Death Race 2000, Dog Day Afternoon, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Rollerball (also arguably the best film ever made), Shivers, The Stepford Wives. All classics. One more:

The Wind and the Lion
Written and Directed by John Milius.

This movie is seriously underrated. I watched it again the other night just to make sure I wasn't Rashomon-ing the awesomeness and am happy to report I am not.

As a kid: Escape to Witch Mountain. Many people I talk to focus only on the terrorized children aspect of it. While I can certainly see that as an adult viewer, such things were a) unremarkable for the era, and b) very appealing to me as a kid. Kid-protagonists in adventure movies need actual villains and danger the same way adult-protagonists do, especially when super powers and aliens enter the mix. This was implictly understood not just by me, I think, but by most kid-age viewers. Adults forget. Bill Denbrough was right. 

Can You Believe I've Still Never Seen... Nashville? One of these days.

~1976~

As with '74, one film (Taxi Driver) tends to dominate all discussion of this year in film. (Although I could just as easily say Rocky or Carrie (or even Logan's Run) depending on the audience.) In my heart of hearts, though, if I had to be the director of any of those - as personally cherished as each of them are to me - I'd most want to be known as the guy responsible for: 

Directed by Blake Edwards and written by Blake Edwards and Frank Waldman.

Each scene is better than the next, but for me its appeal is summed up by the drawbridge scene. Well, kind of. I could just as easily have chosen any of the Doomsday Machine scenes, or the Oktoberfest scene, or any scene at random. Killer score, though, in that drawbridge scene - "Inspector Clouseau's Theme" by Henry Mancini, one of my faves - so there it is. I chose to emphasize this film, too, over the others because comedies too often get slighted in critical discussion (unless they're by Buster Keaton). Is any aspect of its production (from performance to composition to script) inferior to any from a "serious" movie? I'd never claim TPSA is superior to Taxi Driver or a few others mentioned below, but - speaking to my subjectivity as objectively as possible - it's probably my favorite.

Honorable mentions: Murder by Death, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Network, which hasn't aged so well, but neither has America, I guess. That Chinese Bookie, though, man - what a classic. I've heard it described as overlong and I admit it's a slow burn. But for me it's an incredibly intense experience. Criterion reviewed it about as well as anyone ever could - too lengthy to quote here but worth reading for the interested.

As a kid: The Bad News Bears, Freaky Friday. I consider doing Freaky Friday from time to time as a From Novel to Film entry. But do I really want to? Seems like it's time better spent finishing any of the ones left to do on the list before adding any.

~1977~

In some circles naming anything but Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind as your 1977 favorite will get you unfriended; in others, Annie Hall. (In still others, Suspiria.) I'd never argue with any of those - I only ever saw Suspiria once but I have no problem certifying its reputation as a bonafide - and I even support ending relationships over passionate disagreements on which movies are awesome. Better over art than politics or religion.

But I've got to choose the one I go back to more than all of those:

Directed by William Friedkin and written by Walon Green.

When I first saw this - 20 years after it came out - I was impressed but mystified. I kept coming back to it over the years, though, and each subsequent viewing revealed a new layer of awesomeness. In some alternate universe, Sorcerer was a huge hut, giving Friedkin another round of Oscars and cementing him on a different career path altogether. What films did that Friedkin go on to make? Maybe the same ones. Regardless, when you've got a one-two-three punch like The French Connection, The Exorcist, and Sorcerer on your cv, it puts you in rarefied company.

Honorable mention: The Duellists. A little rough in spots, but an auspicious beginning for one of one of filmdom's most consistent maestros, Ridley Scott. Here is an excellent case study of the worth of "foreign" accents in English language films. Is anyone fatally distracted by Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine not bothering to deliver their lines in a I'm-going-to-steal-your-girlfriend-Wood-ee way? I don't think so. (Keitel's New York accent is pretty thick, and perhaps that can be a tad distracting, but he owns the role and that's all that matters.)

Also: Slap Shot. (Not for accents, for the awesome.)

Documentary: A Grin Without a Cat, Pumping Iron.

Foreign: Hausu (wtf?)

As a kid: The Rescuers and of course:

Race for Your Life Charlie Brown
Directed by Bill Melendez and written by Charles M. Schultz.

~1978~

I won't bury the lede:

Halloween
Directed by John Carpenter and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill.

Not just a holiday favorite, though it is undoubtedly that: no October passes without my watching it at least once, but I watch it outside of October at least twice. Halloween began a run of feature films for Carpenter that is even more rarely matched than the Friedkins just mentioned, and we'll be seeing 6 of his next 8 features in the next post. 

Honorable Mentions: Every Which Way but Loose (covers the same conceptual ground as Taxi Driver though rarely mentioned alongside it), Dawn of the Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dossier 51, Days of Heaven.

As a kid: Grease, Jaws 2, Lord of the Rings, Return to Witch Mountain. 

Man I can't tell you how often I watched these 4 movies 1982-1983.

Can You Believe I've Still Never Seen... The Deerhunter? Actually I probably have seen all of it, now, but never all the way straight through. Also: Convoy (famed for the amount of Bolivian marching powder its director consumed while making it - or rather, while holed up in his trailer while James Coburn finished making it for him), Cross of Iron, Harper Valley PTA, The Cat from Outer Space, and Up in Smoke. Seems crazy to me. How can I not have seen Up in Smoke even accidentally?

~1979~

Honorable Mentions: All That Jazz, The In-Laws (this is the scene I think about at every dinner party I've ever been to.) I never saw the remake. I did watch the original not too long ago, though, and it's better than ever. 

You Should Probably Have an Opinion about... 10, Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Tin Drum.

Learn All That Is Learnable and Return That Knowledge to the Creator: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stalker.

As a kid: The Black Hole (if anything, I love it even more as an adult), The Frisco Kid, The Bugs Bunny Road Runner Movie. 

And Ladies and Gentlemen Literally the Best Film Ever Made: 

Directed by Lewis Gilbert and written by Christopher Wood.

Okay I overstate things. Perhaps. Is there ever a time I don't want to watch Moonraker? No, there is not. Just wanting to watch it all the time wouldn't alone make it my favorite film of 1979, but over the years something about this movie has turned it from a guilty pleasure/ nostalgic pleasure into a shining city on the hill. 

"Well" (clink) "here's to us."

Why the hell is this? I have no idea. You Only Blog Twice, though, does its usual comprehensive job of getting to the bottom of the Moonraker gestalt; the answer probably lies therein.   

~

NEXT: