We’re in the roller coaster 80s years now. Some are good, and some are bad. This is one of the good ones, with a great option available for most genres, plus some juggernaut filmmakers got their starts this year too.
A very American Road Trip with European sensibilities. Makes sense, since Wim Wenders was from West Germany. Harry Dean Stanton mumbles a word or two as he treks across the South and Southwest. Not a lot happens, but thanks to Wenders’s direction, he wills the story into importance by great scenic shots of rural America and a well crafted story about loss, family, and love.
Wes Craven became a horror legend with this terrifying nightmare of a film. Using the terrific premise of a killer who murders kids in their sleep, Craven unleashes Robert Englund and his striped sweater, triple knifed shape shifting creepily charismatic Freddy Kreuger into the populous, creating a generation of tired children in the process.
Axel Foley is here everyone! Eddie Murphy’s most famous movie character leaves the streets of Detroit for sunny California, combining the fish out of water and buddy comedy together with expectedly humorous results when Eddie Murphy is your star.
The loving reminder, literally of the power a kids imagination can have. This child fantasy revolves around Bastian, a bullied kid who finds the book in the title in a weird bookstore, and becomes invested in the struggle of the Childlike Empress and Atreyu in their quest to stop The Nothing, which consumes hopeless fantasies and leaves nothing but darkness.
Barry Levinson and Robert Redford take the cynical novel and turn it into a sports fable for the ages. Redford plays Roy Hobbs, a baseball prospect who loses his chance at the pros, only to resurrect it in his late 30s. The symbolism is on the nose, but remains pretty effective, as every aging man fantasy comes alive everytime Hobbs swings Wonderboy.
James Cameron’s venture onto his own franchise is a complete success. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the title character, a cyborg from the future intent on murdering Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton), the woman who births the savior of the human race. The action is tense, the story has fun with its time travel premise, and several all time one liners were born. I’ll be back later to tell you which ones.
Before Studio Ghibli existed, Hayao Miyazaki made this amazing adventure film. Princess Nausicaa is an all time heroine, using all of her abilities to help achieve harmony across the post apocalyptic wasteland of warring factions, poisonous jungles, and gigantic insects. It’s beautiful, it’s exciting, it’s got a point, and it’s a great preview of even better films to come from the great Japanese animator.
Harold Ramis took Dan Akykroyd’s technical mess of a screenplay and turned it into one of the bigger action comedies to hit the big screen at the time. That’s really easy to do when you cast Bill Murray, Rick Moranis, and Sigourney Weaver to make the movie funny while Ramis and Aykroyd take care of the plot elements. Plus, for their time, the special effects are pretty exceptional, especially when you see a giant marshmallow man in the middle of New York City.
Pat Morita was a joke of a character on Happy Days. So imagine the spectacular shock of his portrayal of the iconic Mr. Miyagi, giving Daniel LaRusso’s (Ralph Macchio) sensei a deep well of complex emotional history and wisdom that helps Daniel defeat a cadre of Cobra Kai in the All Valley Karate Championship. The script is pure movie magic in its teaching methods, and rousing in that way only a great sports movie can be.
A Milos Forman masterpiece about an artist who created several of them. Forman smartly tells the story of Mozart (Tom Hulce) through the eyes of Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), a decent composer in his own right, but in Forman’s hands, Salieri is a complex figure, simultaneously hating and loving Mozart for the gifts Salieri himself can never posess.
