Released during the 1980s

The Road Warrior (1981)

AKA: Mad Max 2
Thursday, June 30th, 2011

Oh, so that’s it, you lost your family? That makes you something special, does it?

Three or four career meltdowns ago, Mel Gibson was still a fresh face on the scene when he went into a bar the night before his audition for a little film called Mad Max. The brawl that temporarily battered his youthful good looks actually helped land him the role that would launch his career. The first Mad Max was a hit worldwide but made a negligible impression in the States, partly due to a lousy dubbing job that was inflicted on the film because the studio thought Yanks weren’t ready for a real Australian accent (This was a few years before Crocodile Dundee).

The Road Warrior

As a result, the sequel was called Mad Max 2 everywhere but the U.S., because you can’t have a sequel to a movie no one had heard of. Call it Mad Max 2 or The Road Warrior, it was like a jolt of adrenaline right into the eyeballs.

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Director:  | Released:  | 95 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Raging Bull (1980)

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

I’m your brother and you ask me that?

Raging Bull is an unforgettable portrait of man who seemed to lack the capacity and imagination to ever be happy. It’s not a film you watch to be uplifted or reassured about the human condition. The most pleasant thought you can take away from the story of Jake La Motta (Robert DeNiro) is how fortunate you were not to be one of his friends. Or him.

Raging Bull

Stacked next to La Motta, DeNiro’s other great role for director Martin Scorcese, Travis Bickle, is a poster child for well-adjusted contentment. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 129 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Into the Night (1985)

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Do we thank you, or what?

I’d say I fall in the “or what” category.

Into the Night

The hero of this film is an insomniac (Jeff Goldblum) who doesn’t really know where his life is headed. Watching Into the Night left me with a similar feeling, and I don’t necessarily mean that as a criticism. This whole movie seemed infused with that groggy, discombobulated feeling you get when you’ve been awake for thirty-six hours straight. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 115 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

S.O.B. (1981)

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Ben: I’ve seen week-old corpses that looked healthier.

Cully: But not happier.

I don’t think William Holden’s presence in this movie is a coincidence, because he almost automatically puts you in mind of Sunset Boulevard, and Blake Edwards1981 movie is obviously meant to make Billy Wilder’s 1950 poison pen letter to Hollywood look like a Shakespearean love sonnet. (more…)

Director:  | Released:  | 122 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Ghostbusters (1984)

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

Why worry? Each one of us is carrying an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back.

Ghostbusters represents such a high water mark for not only the careers of those involved, but also for comedy in general, that it’s hard to overstate the level of accomplishment on screen. It’s difficult enough to make a good movie, not just a good comedy, but to produce a comedy classic while dealing with the complications of an ambitious special effects picture has to be some kind of cinematic grand slam.

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Director:  | Released:  | 105 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Friday, April 15th, 2011

My minimum price for taking a stranded lady to a telephone is 400 dollars.

Back in the eighties, there were a lot of films (and television shows) that tried to cash in on the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Who would have thought that this breezy trifle, written years before Raiders, would come closer to capturing the spirit of the original film than Spielberg’s sequel of the very same year?

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Director:  | Released:  | 106 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

The Last Emperor (1987)

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you’re the worst of all!

Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively tells his brother that an emperor can do anything he wants. The bitter irony is that this is only true so long as the emperor does not want to do anything that matters to the people of China. He spends his childhood as a prisoner of his court’s need to have an emperor, in order to justify their own position.

last-emperor.jpg

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Director:  | Released:  | 163 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

The Final Countdown (1980)

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Still think it’s a dream?

For what it tries to be, about the only thing I can find wrong with The Final Countdown is the title. There really is no countdown involved and, even if there were, there would be nothing particularly final about it. We shouldn’t let that hamper our enjoyment about what has to be the best movie ever made about a time-traveling aircraft carrier.

The Final Countdown

This is one of those movies that would be nothing without its cast, as it depends upon actors with a certain level of gravitas that you need to sell a profoundly silly premise and this film has scored a jackpot in that department.

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Director:  | Released:  | 103 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Henry V (1989)

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves acursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap.

Just 29 when he made this, Kenneth Branagh fired a shot across the bow of no less a figure than Laurence Olivier, who had, forty-five years earlier, also directed and starred in his own adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play. Olivier’s version, made in wartime, was intended as a patriotic rallying cry for a weary nation. Branagh’s grittier, more ambiguous version is no less accomplished, although it could stand to be slightly better paced.

We few. We happy few. We band of brothers.

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Director:  | Released:  | 137 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Die Hard (1988)

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Man, if this is their idea of Christmas, I gotta be here for New Year’s.

When 1988 began, this guy Bruce Willis was a popular enough TV star, known for his years on Moonlighting, but his two ventures into film were a pair of alleged comedies that had a negligible impact at the box office. At the same time, action movies had been in a creative black hole, full of invulnerable superman battling hordes of commies and terrorists. So, when Die Hard appeared with an unproven star, there weren’t a lot of expectations for its success. It certainly wasn’t expected to reinvent the entire genre. Well, Merry Christmas in freakin’ July, Hollywood.

Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

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Director:  | Released:  | 131 min. | Rated:  | Genres:  | Franchise: 

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

You wanna see something really scary?

Back when the Twilight Zone movie was made, the concept of turning TV shows into movies was still in its infancy. In 1983, you had two Star Trek movies and that Get Smart Nude Bomb monstrosity, so this attempt to bring Rod Serling’s classic anthology series to the big screen was something of a novelty.

Twilight Zone: The Movie

Unfortunately, any novelty value became permanently irrelevant on July 23, 1982, when actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children were killed as an ill-advised helicopter stunt went tragically wrong. Even if John Landis’ segment had been the Citizen Kane of television-to-film adaptations, it would not have been worth the cost in human lives.

Sadly, none of the four segments or the overlong, unfunny introduction even came close to that standard.

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Director:  | Released:  | 101 min. | Rated:  | Genres: 

Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

Laugh while you-a can, Monkey Boy!

Mix theoretical physics, rock’n’roll, neurosurgery, Orson Welles and Rastafarian aliens from another dimension and you get this goofily eccentric genre-bending science-fiction action comedy. This is definitely one of those “love-it-or-hate-it” movies that you recommend to friends with caution. After watching this, they will either thank you profusely or recommend you for civil commitment.

Buckaroo Banzai

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Director:  | Released:  | 103 min. | Rated:  | Genres: