Andrew's Best of the 1980s

Needless to say, I think the next few decades are going to be particularly tough: so many great films to choose from, so many tough cuts to make. One absentee from my eighties list is worthy of special note, however, as it was the decade's single greatest cinematic achievement: Kieslowski's Dekalog (1989). I chose to omit it from the list because it's technically a television mini-series.

1. The Stunt Man (1980)
   I love Richard Rush's films. The Stunt Man took him nine years and one heart attack to complete, and it pretty much ended his career, but it was worth it! Steve Railsback is terrific as an on-the-lam Vietnam vet who gets enlisted as a stunt man in a war film being directed by the megalomaniacal Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole, never better). He remains in a continual state of paranoia about whether O'Toole is trying to kill him to get a stunt finished, creating a compelling metaphor for the ways in which trust and domination play out in personal relationships. The Stunt Man is also one of the great films about filmmaking: fantasy and reality get blurred and the insanities and egomanias of the Hollywood system are skewered by Rush with extreme prejudice. It's a shame that there aren't more action movies as smart, as sophisticated and as idiosyncratic as this one. It's also a shame that Rush has only completed one film since – Color of Night (1994) – a film which also caused him a heart attack.
   


2. The Shining (1980)
   This is my favorite Kubrick film and is one of only a few Stephen King adaptations that I really like. It’s also one of the few films that still gives me the chills after all these years: "Come play with us, Danny!" If The Stunt Man is one of the great films about the insanity of filmmaking, The Shining is one of the great films about the insanity of writing, with the Overlook Hotel becoming an analogue for the inside of Jack Torrance’s head. Kubrick’s precise, mathematical approach to mise-en-scène and editing creates a genuinely unsettling atmosphere, and the Steadicam has never been put to better use. It's also a surprisingly humorous film with some great, quirky dialogue – especially any scene with Scatman Crothers: "Larry, just between you and me, we got a very serious problem with the people taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes."
   
   
3. Cutter's Way (1981)
   A film about impotence, apathy, narcissism and responsibility, that asks whether our actions give our lives meaning. Jeff Bridges plays Richard Bone, an apathetic gigolo who witnesses a man disposing of a dead girl in a dark alley. He is quite willing to dismiss and forget about what he saw, but his friend Alex Cutter (John Heard) has other ideas. Cutter is an embittered, alcoholic Vietnam veteran who's missing an eye, a leg, and an arm, and he develops an obsessive drive to prove that a prominent local businessman was the murderer. It's a remarkable, Ahabesque performance from Heard, turning the film into a fascinating fusion of Chinatown and Moby Dick. No less impressive, in much more low-key performances, are Bridges as the terminally passive Bone and Lisa Eichhorn as Cutter's depressed, alcoholic wife. The film also features an awesome score from Jack Nitzsche that uses a combination of glass harmonica, zither and electric strings to haunting effect. Released the same year as some higher profile revivalist noir films – such as Body Heat and The Postman Always Rings Twice – I think Cutter's Way got lost in the mix and has never really received the acclaim it so richly deserves. It is modern-day noir at its best.
   
   
4. Knightriders (1981)
   By the end of the 1970s, George Romero had established himself as one of the preeminent directors of the horror genre, having made such groundbreaking films as Night of the Living Dead (1968), Martin (1976) and Dawn of the Dead (1978). For his first film of the 1980s, Romero confounded expectations by delivering a lengthy, melancholic melodrama about a traveling group who stage Renaissance fairs in which they dress up as knights and joust on motorcycles. It might be the best film on the subject of sixties countercultural idealism entering the Reagan era: the group is a living anachronism with a strong code of ethics modeled on King Arthur's Camelot, and tensions spill over when a handful of the knights split from their king (Ed Harris) and "sell out" to corporate show business. Harris is superlative in his first leading role; the rest of the cast is made up of Romero's stock troupe of players and they are all excellent, especially Tom Savini as the treacherous Morgan.
   


5. Q (1982)
   Made at the tail end of the golden age of drive-in and grindhouse cinema, Q is a satirical, low-budget monster movie about New York City being terrorized by Quetzlcoatl, the winged serpent Aztec god. Michael Moriarty stars as Jimmy Quinn, a petty crook who thinks he might have a shot at the big time when he discovers Quetzlcoatl's nest at the top of the Chrysler Building. Only exploitation auteur Larry Cohen would have the balls to film a full scale monster movie in Manhattan without permits – including a massive gun battle at the top of a skyscraper! The results are an absolute blast and Moriarty's extraordinary performance as a beaten-down loser opportunistically looking for a "Nixon-like pardon" gives the movie an unexpected depth and poignancy.
   


6. Videodrome (1983)
   This list would be incomplete without a film from David Cronenberg, who was one of the few seventies directors to do consistently great work throughout the eighties, including Scanners (1981), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988). Videodrome was Cronenberg's last Canadian film before heading to Hollywood, and it stars James Woods (at his sleazy best) as Max Renn, a cable television operator who becomes obsessed with a broadcast that is comprised entirely of torture and murder. It's a cold, brutal, hallucination of a film in which Cronenberg takes Marshall McLuhan's view of media as an extension of man to its logical, horrific conclusion ... paving the way for the cyberpunk movement that would blossom in the following decade. The film's depiction of the cathode ray tube as a cancerous tumor is a theme echoed in my next pick...
   


7. The King of Comedy (1983)
   This is Taxi Driver re-imagined as a comedy of manners and it's a terminal, spastic piece of cinema, cynical in the extreme and intent on making its audience squirm. I love it! It's a dark portrait of passive hostility and of a culture that has lost all sense of priorities and values, and it seems more prescient with every passing year. In Scorsese's eyes we are all Rupert Pupkins, and the motto "I'd rather be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime" prophetically sums up the direction in which television culture would go over the following decades. Jerry Lewis is cast wonderfully against type as a self-serious, humorless grump; Sandra Bernhard is volatile and appropriately excruciating; and it's probably the last movie in which De Niro really made an effort. Now that Scorsese has presumably got the Oscar chasing out of his system, I'd love to see him make another black comedy like this.
   
   
8. Trading Places (1983)
   Another comedy of manners and an uproarious take on 1930s social message films, updated for the Gordon Gekko era. Every line of dialogue is priceless – "Where is your bitches?" – and the cast is remarkable. Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd are so good that I can still forgive them for everything they have done since the nineties began, and special kudos should also go to Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as the slimy Duke brothers, Denholm Elliott as the butler, and Paul Gleason as the villainous Mr. Beaks. And, no, I've not forgotten about Jamie Lee Curtis or her boobies; no boy in the eighties ever could! I also love the gritty, earthy look of the film and the local Philadelphia flavor that it captures. John Landis was a comedic genius in the 1970s and 1980s, making a handful of timeless classics; Trading Places is not only his finest work, it's also my pick for the best film comedy of all time.
   
   
9. Repo Man (1984)
   The cult film of the decade and a stunning debut for Alex Cox. A wild genre amalgam involving repo men, street punks, secret agents, Latin revolutionaries, Scientologists, ufologists, and a hippie mystic who are all on the hunt for a Chevy Malibu with dead aliens in the trunk that is being driven around East L.A. by a lobotomized scientist who invented the neutron bomb. It's an hilarious satire of Reagan era America and a cool time capsule of the 1980s West Coast punk scene. I feel a great affinity for Cox's representation of Los Angeles and I probably quote from this film more than any other (so I will refrain from doing so here). True, there is a strike against the film for kick starting Emilio Estevez's career ... but Cox did apologize for this later.
   
   
10. Wings of Desire (1987)
    One of the most sublimely beautiful films ever made. Bruno Ganz is wonderful as an angel who falls in love with a trapeze artist and longs to be human, but Peter Falk steals the movie as a film star who was once an angel himself. Just about perfect in every way, and a fascinating document of a Germany on the verge of unification, two years before the wall came tumbling down. Avoid the Nicolas Cage remake at all costs.
    

Also, here are ten performances of note (five male, five female). I'm sure I've forgotten somebody, so this is by no means a definitive list:

• Nicholas Worth, Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980)
• Ed Harris, Knightriders (1981)
• Michael Moriarty, Q (1982)
• Christopher Walken, The Dead Zone (1983)
• Harry Dean Stanton, Paris, Texas (1984)
  
  
• Lisa Eichhorn, Cutter's Way (1981)
• Jenny Agutter, An American Werewolf in London (1981)
• Nastassja Kinski, Paris, Texas (1984)
• Sigourney Weaver, Aliens (1986)
• Michelle Pfeiffer, Married to the Mob (1988)