In the first part of this series I covered the best movies and films from '69 to '78. Given that I saw very few of these movies at the time they were released, the pool of choices was more limited. After all, I'm not likely to dig up a movie that everybody pretty much agrees is kind of bad (like say Airport) unless it's so horrible that I have to watch it (like say Sextette.) So when I looked through the list of movies for any given year, I had only seen a handful and most were pretty good.
This next stretch is different as I saw a ton of movies at the time, then went back and saw all the cult/art movies afterwards when I went to college and became an arugula-eating elitist. With that in mind, here are the best movies and films from 1979 to 1988:
1979
The movie choices are pretty diverse: Alien, the best anti-pregnancy movie since Rosemary's Baby; the slowly-becoming-completely-plausible Mad Max; the ludicrous stylings of The Warriors; and the lovingly rendered barnyard miscegenation of The Muppet Movie. However, the best movie was Rock 'n' Roll High School for realistically depicting a fantasy universe in which cute high school chicks were really into The Ramones.
The film choices come down to three. Quadrophenia is a gritty depiction of teenage alienation and all that, plus it naturally has an awesome soundtrack. Apocalypse Now is an unhinged war film based on a classic story and features our future first Mexican President. But time has been kindest to Being There, as the idea of platitude-spouting being confused with depth runs rampant through the country and our political system.
1980
With apologies to The Long Good Friday, which loses a lot of points for presenting the Irish as scary, the choice for best movie comes down to two influential comedies. The Blues Brothers featured R&B legends (Ray Charles, Aretha, Cab Calloway), famed directors (Spielberg, Frank Oz, John Landis) and serious drug addicts (Belushi, Carrie Fisher, James Brown.) Half of Chicago was seemingly destroyed during its shooting and damn if it didn't seem worthwhile. Still, for better or worse, Airplane! is a huge step forward in getting to the gag-a-second directing style we see in the better comedies today.
Before I get to the best film of the year, I would like to state for the record that I did not, at any time, fuck Jake LaMotta's wife. So yes, it's Raging Bull.
1981
Best movie is an easy choice as Raiders of the Lost Ark is fantastic entertainment. On completely different ends of the spectrum, Escape from New York and Mommie Dearest are also a lot of fun.
Best film is a more difficult choice as there are less noteworthy selections. My memory is that Das Boot taught me never, ever to enlist in the Navy so that is my pick.
1982
There were some strong movie choices this year. Tootsie was amusing, although I'd be damned if I understand how it can be considered the second best American comedy ever. It's only marginally better than Airplane II: The Sequel. Also noteworthy is Fast Times at Ridgemont High and its introduction of famous serious actor Jeff Spicolli. But I guess it would be silly not to select E.T. the Extra Terrestrial since I thought it was TEH AWESOME when it came out. Of course, I was 13.
This is another year where I haven't seen a lot of the film choices. I'm going to go with The Verdict as Newman was fantastic, although not Slapshot-level fantastic.
1983
This year brought us Saturday-afternoon-TNT classics like Risky Business, Easy Money, The Dead Zone and A Christmas Story. None of these furthered our understanding of financial matters as much as Trading Places did. Besides giving us the Mortimer Bet and a peek at blind-pouch breasts, it also taught us everything we needed to know about the commodity futures market.
In the film side I prefer the low-key silliness of Local Hero over Sandra Bernhard's one justification for existence The King of Comedy.
1984
A movie like The Terminator is more than qualified to be the best movie of the year. It is entertaining, contains iconic quotes and shows loads of stuff getting blow'd up. Unfortunately, it was released the same year as the classic comedy of This Is Spinal Tap. If only James Cameron had gone to eleven...
The film side was strong as well with Amadeus, which would have been better with an all-Falco soundtrack, and Once Upon a Time in America, which is still the greatest four-hour film about a mobster named Noodles ever made. The best film of the year (yes, film) was the fast-paced, extremely-quotable and always rewatchable Repo Man.
1985
This year produced some entertaining movies of various types like Day of the Dead, Pale Rider and Real Genius. Of course as children are repeatedly taught in school, this was the year in which the greatest teen movie ever was released: Better Off Dead. As you all know Savage Steve Holland magnum opus swept the Palme d'Or, the Golden Lion and the Academy Awards that year. With no other K-12s to scale in motion pictures, SSH gave up filmmaking and dedicated himself to the more challenging medium of children's television programming.
While the brilliance of Better Off Dead is unquestioned, it is most definitely also true that it is not Shakespeare. Kurosawa's Ran is Shakespeare. King Lear in fact. The film is a visually stunning, violent, moving spectacle.
1986
Aliens is more fast-paced than its predecessor while still being tense. It has Paul Reiser in it, which docks it a few points. Back to School on the other hand has both Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison, plus Kurt Vonnegut for a throw-away gag. Just Kinison's rant about Vietnam, which McCain is quoting word-for-word on the campaign trail, makes it the best movie of the year.
Many of the best film candidates suffer from tragic flaws. Blue Velvet has terrible performances on both ends of the spectrum from Dennis Hopper and Laura Dern. Platoon has the ham-fisted direction of Oliver Stone. River's Edge has Keanu Reeves and there's only so much Crispin Glover can make up for that. So the best film has to be the Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring combination. They were beautifully shot, perfectly acted and ruined Provence for everybody.
1987
This year featured two remarkably prescient visions of the future. The Running Man successfully predicted the direction of network television: cheap-ass "reality" game shows, while RoboCop showed us the natural end result of privatizing every damn thing: giant killer robots shooting people dead. Even more prescient was my best movie choice The Princess Bride. Since we forgot about the land war in Asia thing, I hope we never have to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
The best film of the year, and I'm stretching here a bit, is Withnail & I. There may not be a lot of "art" in Richard E. Grant's crazed performance of a drunken drama queen, but it is funny as hell.
1988
Here is a list of some of the movies that could be considered for best movie of 1988: Bull Durham, Hairspray, The Naked Gun and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? All of them would be worthy of the honor. I guess when you are 19 every single movie is targeted exactly at you. My choice is Tapeheads because it is more rewatchable than any of the others. Maybe it's the scene where Tim Robbins states with no emotion whatsoever "look, two ninja bitches about to kill each other" that does it for me.
Films included the excellent Eight Men Out and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. While either would be fine choices, this was the year of Almodovar's Women on The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
Next time: the '90s, where I pretty much start skipping every movie that made over $100 million.
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