He Fills His Head with Culture, He Gives Himself an Ulcer

Ah, the 1980s. As we continue our jaunt through the films of my life (see 1963-70 here and 1971-80 here) we enter the decade of my greatest film consumption. I saw plenty in college, but in grad school I upped that a serious notch as I was co-director of the student-run Bijou at the University of Iowa for three years. We screened approximately 60 films a semester, classics but also obscure older films, art films, some things the theater chain in town was too dumb to screen, so we made a killing (Stop Making Sense, thank you for keeping us in the black for a good year). I cannot begin to say how wonderful and important all those nights were to me. My guess is 3/4 of the films making all these lists first were enjoyed during that period.

1981

So after that big build up, we start with a weakish year, after all Chariots of Fire, which is best known now for people making fun of its slow-mo set to Vangelis, won the Best Picture Oscar. (And Raiders and Stripes are fun, but best picture of a year? Just can't do it.) Therefore I'll go and get all weird and pick Pennies from Heaven. I'm sort of a sucker for musicals, and even moreso when the musical is an anti-musical musical. But the tunes are delicious, Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, and Christopher Walken are great, and it's relatively depressing. Just my kind of film. As a close runner-up, let's go with Evil Dead, even if the second film is probably better. Still this gave Sam Raimi his start, and it leads with Bruce Campbell's chin. Perhaps the best cheapest-made film of all-time? (All apologies to George Romero, Robert Rodriguez, and John Sayles.)

1982

OK, the decade is building kind of slowly. I promise it's not just because I went to school in Baltimore that I still adore Diner. But think of that cast, and how none of them topped their performances here, least of all Ellen Barkin, woman among boys. But what wonderful camaraderie. I'm also going to go out on a limb and pick Night of the Shooting Stars, which I haven't seen in years but still remember fondly, a terrific tale of Italy at the end of WWII that is poetic and powerful. Whatever happened to the Taviani Brothers?

1983

And so I stay with foreign films but turn to Japan's great Shohei Imamura and his film Ballad of Narayama. Another film I haven't seen in years, and having lost both parents relatively recently, it would probably devastate me--a big part of the film is a man taking his mother on his back up a mountain where tradition has it the elderly must go to die. But there's so much more to this clear-eyed film, the kind of thing Hollywood could never pull off without over-weening piety or heavy-handed mawkishness.

1984

I like things dry, I have to admit, so Stranger than Paradise, with its failing to move camera, totally floored me in 1984. Still there's much humor--"I am da vinner," the chop-sockey film we only see by how it plays on the movie-goers faces, the way Florida looks like Cleveland, the TV dinner "this is how we eat in America" bit--and much cool, from the black and white photography to that enduring emblem of hip John Lurie. Jarmusch has made a lot of fine films, but the first is still the best. And then there's Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, which I loved even more as I first saw it at the Biograph in Chicago, John Dillinger's last theater. It's a myth of much of what the U.S. is about, and love is always in the way, and the cast full of folks who can overdo don't (DeNiro, James Woods). The rest of you can have The Godfather and II, just leave me this one. Both of these films I wrote about in my non-fiction prose MA thesis, too, so I've completely thought them into myself, as it were.

1985

Here's a year where quantity totally trumps a single knock-out quality production, and aren't we much for the better for that? Scorsese isn't necessarily known for his light touch (right Illeana Douglas?)* but he mined dark comedic gold with After Hours, a yuppie-eyed view of a cashless downtown NYC. I haven't seen it in years, but David Hare's writing and the ever-watchable Vanessa Redgrave made the small English film Wetherby a wonder. The Coca-Cola Kid, of all things, stars Eric Roberts, but also stars Great Scacchi, who in her day was as luminescent as any star ever. Plus she seemed to like doing nude scenes--her roll in bed dressed as Santa with Roberts with feathers everywhere...well, Dusan Makavejev knows sexy. Equally sexy, at times, but also silly, but also an ode to food, so how can I not love it, Tampopo is something I really need to rent again. In fact, this 1985 foursome would be a lot of fun to re-live some weekend.

1986

I'm stuck still naming films I wrote about in the thesis, but what films. Blue Velvet is a deep disturbing dream about film itself (that severed ear fell through cinematic history all the way from Dali and Bunuel), and what it means to get to see what we thought we wanted to see only to find out we're wrong. Something Wild is somewhat similar, as Jeff Daniels wants a thrill and gets way more than he bargained for with Melanie Griffith, who then gets way more than she bargained for with Ray Liotta. Plus the Feelies play the high school reunion--I'd go back to one of mine if that could happen.

1987

Raising Arizona. It's just incredibly funny, especially the first 15 minutes (before the opening credits even roll?), an ever-tightening montage of love and crime and a whacked out M. Emmet Walsh. All sorts of brilliant performances, not just by Hunter and Cage, but John Goodman, too. The Coens at their zaniest.

1988

There might not be a more beautiful first 30 minutes of a movie than that of Wings of Desire, but you have to be ready for it, awake and willing, an accomplice in the angel's work where listening has to be enough. It's easy to believe Bruno Ganz as an angel. And who better as a fallen angel than Peter Falk? There's even bonus Nick Cave. For a very different film there's The Thin Blue Line, which wins a man justice but makes us puzzle over whether truth is ever true. A formalist's dream, a hypnotic Philip Glass score. Errol Morris makes films like no one else.

1989

A trio, as each of these films is a bit short of greatness, the first from trying too hard, the second from not trying enough, the third for showing its age. Do the Right Thing is a powderkeg about a powderkeg, which isn't easy to do. Exactly what is the power getting fought if taking down Sal's Pizzeria is the "best" one can do? Drugstore Cowboy captures drugginess without getting dopey about it. Heathers has that final act problem--the more Slater becomes crazy the less interesting he is--but it's got attitude and the perfect delivery woman in Winona Ryder.

1990

I close the decade with a film far too little seen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger has all the wonderful weirdness I like in a movie from its man-on-fire credit sequence on. Danny Glover can do a billion Lethal Weapons if that lets him act, stupendously, magnetically, cruelly, in no-budget films like this one. (Be sure to find the finally released Killer of Sheep, too, while you do your Burnett research.)

*The scene where DeNiro bites her face in Cape Fear is the most horrible thing I've ever seen on film, worse than Straw Dog's bear trap, The Foruth Man's metal rod through the eye, you name it. What was Scorsese thinking?