This movie is the year that movies changed forever. Apologies to the great stories told this year by Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, David Lynch. Apologies to one of the first great documentaries about Arnold Schwarzenegger. But this is the year George Lucas brought us to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.
John Travolta helped immortalize the Disco Era with this dance flick, sneakily about class mobility. So did the Bee Gees’s, who’s propulsive hits give the movie a cool swanky energy that also helped popularize the band too.
Some of the references are dated for sure, but this vignette lampooning of culture at large hits more often than it doesn’t, but in that Family Guy way of giving us a joke, then another one 5 seconds later, unrelated. This way, even if one is bad, you know there’s another coming, and it’s probably going to be good. Now I’m taking off my pants, film at 11.
Sinister stuff coming out of Italy. Dario Argento soaks the screen in red with this thriller. From moment one, you know something is off as you enter the European dance academy, uneasily uncovering the rotted secrets of the place. WAY better than that 2018 piece of garbage…
Sometimes you just want cars to crash and chase each other. Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, and Jackie Gleason take a beer delivery guy, an overprotective sheriff, and his daugther and turn it into a car lover’s delight.
This is one of the earliest documentaries to show up on a top 10 movie list. And it’s totally deserving! We get a look into the 1975 Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding contest, and all the prep that goes into it. What makes this year especially legendary is two Hollywood actors participated: the Incredible Hulk himself, Lou Ferrigno is the new hot shot on the scene, hoping to halt the multi year victory streak of a little known terminator named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Paul Newman is funny as ever here, taking a hockey team and leaning into the base carnal instincts of kill or be killed to make the team succeed. It’s crass. It’s a sports comedy wrapped in a 1970’s tone, that works so well because of Newman’s insane ability to hold the movie together. It’s also guaranteed to make you laugh, and laugh again.
I’m picturing David Lynch at a party, watching friends at college hooking up, and him in the corner, confused, conjuring this film in his twisted head. About the horrors of becoming an adult man, we get our first hints at how warped the Lynch mind can be, with weird, outrageous, creepy, and mesmerizing results, scored with tones that will eat away at you, slowly, and unnervingly.
Steven Spielberg’s follow up to Jaws is another great 70s movie. When Richard Dreyfus’s electrician becomes convinced he saw a UFO, he becomes obsessed with learning the truth. Spielberg turns that question from scene to scene into family drama, a road trip movie, a horror movie, and in it’s wonderful climax, a spectacle to dazzle and wonder the audience.
Before this became Woody Allen’s thing, his first feature captures a very specific type of educated, neurotic New Yorker in search for love. Diane Keaton is also sensational in this movie, playing the delightful, sweet Midwest transplant that enrages, attracts, and scares Allen’s TV writer in equal measure. Allen’s New York archetype can be seen in countless characters since (George Costanza for example), as well as Diane Keaton as an early version of the manic pixie dream girl.
The minute the opening crawl starts, and John Williams operatic score snaps you into deep focus, George Lucas’s vision was something different…and amazing. Taking the plot of The Hidden Fortress and putting it into deep space, Lucas’s tale of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, and a million other characters you know will become seared into your brain, especially if like the whole planet, you watch it before you turn 13. This movie changed movies forever, as well as opened the minds and ideas of every person on the planet to what stories movies could tell.
