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Wednesday, January 12, 2005 |
You can credit this post to Majikthise, philosopher-blogger extraordinaire. She got the wheels a turning in my head this morning when she posted her favorite films of the 80’s.
Ah, remember when.....
-- leg warmers, polos, and big hair appeared front and center in films such as Fame, Footloose, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club;
-- the biggest house-hold names were E.T., Ferris Bueller, Indiana Jones, Mad Max, and any Star Wars character;
-- we split our guts laughing during films such as Airplane!, Arthur, Big, Good Morning Vietnam, The Princess Bride, A Christmas Story, Top Secret, Ghostbusters, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Raising Arizona, and Better Off Dead;
-- Dustin Hoffman could only find acting work as a woman in the film Tootsie, Julie Andrews could only find entertainment work as a man in Victor/Victoria, and Barbara Streisand could only study the holy writ as a boy in Yentl.
-- no one would mess with the gun-toting Sigourney Weaver after seeing Aliens;
-- no one would forget Meg Ryan faking the "O" in When Harry Met Sally;
-- no one would forget Sally Field’s Best Actress Oscar acceptance speech for Places in the Heart - "You love me! You really love me!"
-- everyone wanted to take a trip Back to the Future in that way cool Delorean;
-- any living woman would die to ride with Tom Cruise on his motorbike in Top Gun;
-- Michael Keaton donned the black rubber suit and cape to play Batman and Richard Gere donned his birthday suit to play the American Gigolo;
-- we fell in love with the films (other than those mentioned above) Moonstruck; Witness; Stand by Me; The Blues Brothers; Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; Bull Durham, Out of Africa, The Little Mermaid; An Officer and a Gentleman, Field of Dreams; Do The Right Thing, and On Golden Pond;
-- and we jumped out of our skin (or, like me, spent a majority of the film hiding behind our hands) in films such as The Shining, Die Hard, Blade Runner, Aliens, Poltergeist, Blue Velvet, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Body Double, Altered States, and Angel Heart;
Out of approximately 130 films that I could come up with in the few hours I had to think about this, these are the films I found most memorable and impressive, that have lingered in the back of my mind (not in any order):
Gandhi (1982), Richard Attenborough
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), Philip Kaufman
Amadeus (1984), Milos Forman
Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), Lois Malle
Ordinary People (1980), Robert Redford
Das Boot (1981), Wolfgang Peterson
Fanny and Alexander (1982), Ingmar Bergman
Platoon (1986), Oliver Stone
Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa
Out of Africa (1985), Sydney Pollack
Honorable Mentions: A Dry White Season, Babette's Feast, The Shining, Aliens, Blue Velvet, Full Metal Jacket, The Elephant Man, Glory, Manon of the Spring, Jean de Florette, The Killing Fields, Rain Man, The Year of Living Dangerously, Galipoli, The Bounty, Silkwood, A French Lieutenant’s Daughter, Sophie’s Choice, The Mission, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Reds, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Emporer, A Room With a View, Chariots of Fire, The Color Purple, A Passage to India, Scarface, On Golden Pond, The Official Story
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