Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and found one --the past.
In fact, goin' back thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s! NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. Argh! Oops, now skate parks... to me, it begins and ends with the VCR.
I had to assemble this list to combat the best of the 80s lists on the web that all either include nostalgia-invoking propaganda like Ferrie Bueller and Raiders of the Lost Ark or acts of admittedly brilliant pop connivance like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment. Don't think I don't love some of them too, in my fashion and can quote them endlessly (well, Tootsie and Raiders): Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed. Blow it up! Blow it back to God! That is one nutty hospital. Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them! I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company. Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, right now? Michael, I begged you to get some therapy. The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around. Wait, that's Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated it. Much like most of that decade, at least until 1987 when we discovered we didn't have to live in it at all - but could hide in the late 60s.
We invariably come to any film with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography. Godard assumes this and intentionally screws with our narrative-based expectations. The issue is, how dogmatically do we adhere to the "rightness" of these expectations? When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations we have cliche' -- when a film deliberately screws with them, you have post-modern ambiguity, as in one of PASSION's many bizarre film set scenes: in one we see a knight on a horse trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden--thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: will we see this chick being abducted? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera, and the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman then goes climbing up into the lighting rigging so the knight can't reach her; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke, ignoring her. (more)
9. AKIRA (1988)
Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira is set in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe, peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, flying vehicles, telekenetic mutations and strange teddy bears, all so gorgeously illustrated time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and tendrils of fleshy HDMI cables connect you directly to the screen.
The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between misfits one of whom goes crazy, but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse as government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in the crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city as he seeks the titular entity. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode through its frozen jar.
8. MOONSTRUCK(1987)
Directed by Norman Jewison
Does this film really belong here, you ask? How dare you. What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but after multiple viewings in the 80s it now seems faintly unbelievable - the rapid rise of Dorothy Michaels to that awful Stephen Bishop song ("It Might Be You") is enough to keep it off this list. But Moonstruck looks to the great Italian operas for its soundtrack, and it's the best Cher role ever. Her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles and he becomes a star bringing mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "I'm going to take you to da bed." The effect for us, at the time, was akin to what Brando in Streetcar must have been 30 years before, a mix of terror, heat, and hilarity. Jewison manages to make a movie free of bad guys but overflowing with color and character, climaxing in a family breakfast where all problems are solved as more and more family members and players drop by while Olympia Dukakis steals the film with little more than exasperated but resigned sighs. Don't hate it cuz it's sweet and optimistic - it's not just those things. Foreget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating back-to-back Italian-American chicks, one from Stamford and the other from Carmel. If you have to hate a sweet optimistic comedy from the 80s, hate Tootsie! Telling me it must be you / telling me it must be you / all of my life / YEAH, RIGHT!
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7. MATADOR (1986)
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
His fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodovar from post-Franco celebratory punk shock cinema anarchist to something infinitely darker. After a disturbing credit sequence involving masturbation to a slasher film highlight reel, we find gored ex-toreador Diego (Nacho Martinez) masturbating to slasher film highlights and then lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) teaching Catherine Trammel on ice pick etiquette. A disturbing juxtaposition of imagery to be sure, but then as it plays out Almodovar adds a small minor key piano motif and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level melancholy reverie. These two sick fucks need each other in ways that make Romeo and Juliet seem a second tier booty call. Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, a solar eclipse, and oblique commentary on Spain's post-Franco identify crisis all pave the way in roses towards a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores your faith in cinema. Dub it downer if you want, but then you'd best run back under cloying skirts for protection, puta madre, because cinema's true heart is darkness. With a jovenes Antonio Banderas as Diego's repressed, psychic, vertigo-stricken protege, Eva Cobo as the model girlfriend and Almodovar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave, the astonishing Bibi Andersen as a Titania-esque flower girl, and Almodovar himself as a fashion designer. They're all great but the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and Serna's luxuriantly bloodthirsty femme fatale (Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast). Most American fans of Almodovar came around with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000) but rich, hilarious and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador, to the bloody grave.
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6. EXCALIBUR (1981)
Directed by John Boorman
Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it on a pan and scan. Thanks to the beautiful blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, but even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the manly grace, and how desire wrecks all men's best intentions, almost on instinct, and the stirring grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide. See it again and bask in its Jungian splendor. Director John Boorman stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players (incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry) all drinking the same tarot page-laced Kool-Aid. See it again and become a Wagner fan if you never were, particularly "Siegfried's Funeral March" from the Ring cycle, which made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).
5. L'AMOR BRAQUE (1985)
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski
Though L'amour braque is a 1985 gloss punk-style French action movie with the violent neon 1980s blue light of films of the era like Le Femme Nikita (with which it shares the amazing Tcheky Karyo) and Subway (1980), it's actually an art film, or a drug film, Brecht-fast style. Typically 80s synth stabs invoke Hong Kong and Mondo Vision's subtitles keep up brilliantly with Zulawski's poetic post-structural dialogue in a way that echoes the accidental poetry of old HK movie subtitles. It's enough like a normal movie that without subtitles it would probably weird out a whole room of relatively un-intoxicated bros expecting Luc Besson-ish linearity in addition to the Luc Besson-ish glamor. And action fans who wondered -- as I did -- if Karyo was just a dud actor after his stone-faced blank of a performance in Nikita can know for sure it just ain't so, as his character in Braque is wayyy out there. He tears it up like a dozen Oscar Jaffes on a cocaine and whiskey bender.
The story finds easygoing Czech refugee Leon (Francis Huster) spontaneously adopted by an insane bank robber (presumably) Mickey (Karyo) and his gang of laughing, joking, Shakespeare-quoting Arab terrorists. The beautiful Sophie Marceau shows up as their mutual obsession, yet another lynch pin in Zulawski's string of love triangles. She's rich, super-smart, and out for a cryptic vengeance we only know about gradually. She proceeds to destroy Mickey and cockblock Leon while pursuing her ancient vengeance against a ritzy conglomerate; Leon's hot cousin Aglae (Christiane Jean) meanwhile competes for his attention while performing in a version of Chekhov's "The Seagull". (more)
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4. BLUE VELVET (1986)
Directed by David Lynch
Directed by David Lynch
I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found it disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After enduring the harshness of Hopper's Frank I wanted more than just a single gun shot into his dome. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek, who point out the deep dream logic of Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds turns out to be actually the primal scene as understood through the mind of a child, who misunderstands the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to occupy mom's afternoons on a whim. The dappled sincerity of Laura Dern and Kyle are an ideal foil to the exaggerated dream-like evils of Lumberton's seedy criminal underbelly.
Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell lip syncing Roy Orbison while Frank huffs and stares, transfixed, and Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through it. Whether or not these freaks understand the service they do him is immaterial. All that matters is that Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is a keystone, the first great 'cracking it wide open,' it's his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment; as per W.B. Yeats, Blue Velvet leaves the world of film "changed / changed utterly / a terrible beauty is born."
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Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell lip syncing Roy Orbison while Frank huffs and stares, transfixed, and Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through it. Whether or not these freaks understand the service they do him is immaterial. All that matters is that Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is a keystone, the first great 'cracking it wide open,' it's his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment; as per W.B. Yeats, Blue Velvet leaves the world of film "changed / changed utterly / a terrible beauty is born."
3. THE LITTLE MERMAID (1989)
Directed by Ron Clements
If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, this is a peerless masterpiece that reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time, even if its perfection has never quite been matched. Voiceover work is uniformly strong, the congested kid bad-acting the voice of Flounder being the only exception, but that's more than transcended by the glorious Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll like a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Elaine Stritch, Margo Channing and . And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth in our cinema since The Wizard of Oz.Directed by Ron Clements
2. THE SHINING (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary to itself discussing the film's myriad meanings (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby), and I've got my own each new viewing uncovering new layers of meaning and madness. The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrance family each falls into a separate madness. With no direct link to the social order present to keep them anchored--whether to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds who are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing!) Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack goes off the deep end; in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy' he's compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can escape into the past; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' response from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).
1. COME AND SEE (1985)
1985 - Dir. Elem Klimov
A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.
As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our relative humanity. Politics, sides, none of it mattered compared to the horror of the camps, the sheer monstrous scale of it. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound us non-Nazis together. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted leer of a horrified face, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema.
2. CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)
Directed by John Milius
3. REPO MAN (1984)
Directed by Alex Cox
Long before there was straight-edge, goth, emo, and granola, we just had the one thing - punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. Alien conspiracies, oblique metatextual greek chorus TV commentary, Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody ('generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and a Lou Reed Live video I had, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "Let's just go do the job" when going off to score booze, and "I blame society" when we failed. The Criterion blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic. I still write within its kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on blu-ray just for him.
4. PLATOON (1986)
Directed by Oliver Stone
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| and his hair was perfect. |
5. RAGING BULL (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Directed by Martin Scorsese
I remember hearing a review of this film the weekend of its original release, I would have been 13, on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower one morning and I was just bouncing around, and the way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to change the world. He sounded literally blown away. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.
Even though I have had mixed feelings about the film over the years, especially around 1990, in a really bad final stretch of life in Seattle with my girlfriend - she coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache, to find me already drunk in front of our tiny TV. The scene where De Niro is in a Florida jail was on. She came in right as he started punching the stone walls for like half an hour screaming and shouting "Dummy! DUMMY!" I was hoping he'd stop soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But it kept going, so I got sympathy pain, too. I felt like this damn film was breaking our relationship apart. She was like what the fuck is this horrible crap, like I had put it on just to torture her, like it was emblematic of our relationship. I was to drunk to defend it, or to get up and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on. She decided right there and then to leave me and would never be with a man from the east coast ever again. I was like "where you goin'? Get back here fore I trow yews a beatin'!" I let her go. I drove back east after tax season ended, heading to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back she was already dating a jackass hippie who whinnied like a horse when he laughed and was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted.
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Sure it's still a towering masterpiece but after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years we more than ever we seem to have found his weaknesses, his inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away to let some future girl take the lumps) and his over-reliance on manly violence to dispel deep-seated castration anxiety rather than exploring it head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything much except lines and climactic monologues.
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The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from delusions and insanity brought on by consistent head trauma (I remember being with the aforementioned girlfriend while I was in the midst of a terrible fever and accusing her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I KNEW he was under the bed. I looked there too, nothing, but then I KNEW he was in the closet. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice. So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.
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That's no excuse though, and either way, Scorsese's towering masterpiece, not quite as fun as Goodfellas perhaps, which had his strongest woman ever in Karen but certainly rich with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy, and full of great moments of transcendent poetry that could be as seemingly slight as good girl Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as perhaps in any other movie on this list, .
Aside from Conan and Valeria, of course. DUMMY!
Even though I have had mixed feelings about the film over the years, especially around 1990, in a really bad final stretch of life in Seattle with my girlfriend - she coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache, to find me already drunk in front of our tiny TV. The scene where De Niro is in a Florida jail was on. She came in right as he started punching the stone walls for like half an hour screaming and shouting "Dummy! DUMMY!" I was hoping he'd stop soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But it kept going, so I got sympathy pain, too. I felt like this damn film was breaking our relationship apart. She was like what the fuck is this horrible crap, like I had put it on just to torture her, like it was emblematic of our relationship. I was to drunk to defend it, or to get up and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on. She decided right there and then to leave me and would never be with a man from the east coast ever again. I was like "where you goin'? Get back here fore I trow yews a beatin'!" I let her go. I drove back east after tax season ended, heading to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back she was already dating a jackass hippie who whinnied like a horse when he laughed and was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted.
Sure it's still a towering masterpiece but after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years we more than ever we seem to have found his weaknesses, his inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away to let some future girl take the lumps) and his over-reliance on manly violence to dispel deep-seated castration anxiety rather than exploring it head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything much except lines and climactic monologues.
The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from delusions and insanity brought on by consistent head trauma (I remember being with the aforementioned girlfriend while I was in the midst of a terrible fever and accusing her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I KNEW he was under the bed. I looked there too, nothing, but then I KNEW he was in the closet. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice. So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.
That's no excuse though, and either way, Scorsese's towering masterpiece, not quite as fun as Goodfellas perhaps, which had his strongest woman ever in Karen but certainly rich with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy, and full of great moments of transcendent poetry that could be as seemingly slight as good girl Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as perhaps in any other movie on this list, .
Aside from Conan and Valeria, of course. DUMMY!
