Having lived through 1984 in real time, I remember there being three obvious choices for the best picture award come Oscar time — A Passage to India, The Killing Fields and the eventual winner, Amadeus, which features a sublime film score by some guy named Mozart.
But for me, the best movies of the year were and still are a couple of offbeat low-budget indie films that have become part of the popular culture in a way the Oscar contenders have not.
The Terminator was James Cameron's low-budget sci-fi film about a spunky waitress and the robot sent back from the future to kill her. What at first blush looked like the makings of a cheesy B-picture thriller turned out to be a moving love story, a tautly-told action picture and an interesting think-piece.
It was also the beginning of a lucrative film franchise and featured a career-making turn for weightlifter-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was never better.
The other, This is Spinal Tap, was Rob Reiner's hilarious mockumentary about a fading heavy metal band. Not only is it choke-on-your-own-breath funny, it also spawned an entire genre, both Christopher Guest mockumentaries and such television shows as The Office and Modern Family.
Movies like these two classics never seem to win any awards, but they've won legions of loyal fans over the intervening decades. Count me among them.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Right up there with how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll tootsie pop (between 144 and 1000 according to science, three per the wise ol' owl), the longest running, most divisive debate in the American culture is: Die Hard — Christmas movie or not?
Easy answer: Of course it's a Christmas movie! Debate solved, we return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Look, stripped of the filigree, Die Hard is just How The Grinch Stole Christmas, only instead of the Grinch returning all the presents to the Who's down in Whoville, John McClane throws Hans Gruber off the Nakatomi Tower. What could be more Christmas than that? Because, you know, where three are gathered together for the holidays, somebody's gonna wanna throw somebody else off a really tall building.
Although to tell you the truth, for all its violence, Die Hard is more joyful than most Christmas tales, and if there's a good argument against it being a Christmas movie, that's it.
Christmas, more than any other holiday, tends toward the melancholy and bittersweet. Every version of a Christmas Carol centers on that consummate bastard Scrooge, It's a Wonderful Life is about suicide and despair, Miracle on 34th Street puts Santa Claus on trial for lunacy, Charlie Brown is depressed, Rudolph is ostracized, and the Grinch is, well, the very definition of a grinch.
Even the pure comedies involve a lot of angst: will Barbara Stanwyck lose her job, will Buddy the Elf find his dad, will Ralphie Parker shoot his eye out?
But then what can you expect when the original Christmas story is about a virgin who gives birth in a barn? We're dealing with a lot of [stuff], man!
My point, though, is that uh is that ... is that actually I don't know what my point is. I climbed aboard this train of thought without a ticket and no clear destination in mind and now I'm parked on a siding with no idea where I am or how I got here. Well, it's not the first time and it surely won't be the last. (And don't call me Shirley!)
And now the dog is whining at me so I'll wrap this up by saying that wherever you are and whatever you're doing, I hope you're safe and warm and with the people you love. And now I've got to take the dog out or I'm going to have a bigger problem than Christmas on my hands.
A merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
(Fun fact: Reginald VelJohnson who played John McClane's cop buddy Sgt. Al Powell in Die Hard plays the Ghost of Christmas Future in my favorite Hallmark Christmas movie, the completely bonkers Ghosts of Christmas Always, about three ghosts who successfully scrooge some poor schmuck only to discover they scrooged the wrong guy. If you haven't seen it, check it out.)
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Is Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice my favorite performance of 1982?
Uh, no, that would be Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, which along with Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and The Americanization of Emily belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Dame Julie movies.
But I've already voted Julie Andrews two alternate Oscars (and you've agreed with me), so I'm bypassing her for Streep's most iconic performance.
Gotta give her one, right?
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
My votes for the five best action sequences in movie history would include (1) any of Buster Keaton's death-defying stunts in his Civil War classic, The General, but especially the train wreck scene, (2) the chariot race in the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, (3) the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now, (4) the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan, and (5) every minute of Raiders of the Lost Ark, my pick for the best picture of 1981.
Feel free to weigh in with your choices in the comments section below.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I voted for Raging Bull as the year's best picture (along with actor and director) which is not exactly the same as saying I enjoy watching it. Just between me and thee, the ratio of times I've watched The Blues Brothers, Airplane! and Caddyshack to times I've watched Raging Bull is roughly infinity to one.
As portraits of unlovable losers go, Raging Bull is without peer. Real-life boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) did exactly one thing well — beat people up — and he parlayed that into a spectacular career in the ring. That this talent for uncontrolled rage proved to be a liability in every other walk of life came as a complete surprise to no one but himself.
Which makes him a pitiable figure, maybe even a tragic one, and director Martin Scorsese makes you feel in your bones LaMotta's desperation and humiliation as he careens from one self-inflicted disaster to another. It's absolutely top-notch filmmaking.
But, boy, is it hard to watch. I've really got to be in the mood ...
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
I wrote this nearly five years ago about the films of 1979:
As I look at my list of movies from 1979, I find it interesting just how many of them — Apocalypse Now, Manhattan, North Dallas Forty, All That Jazz, even the robot in Alien — were about the destructive nature of what we now call toxic masculinity. So, of course, the Academy (always with a finger on the pulse of its own product) gave all the Oscars to the movie about toxic feminism, Kramer vs. Kramer. Pee-yew!
Okay, I exaggerate. But Kramer vs. Kramer was, at its heart, comfort food for men in need of reassurance when what they desperately needed was a cold, hard slap in the face.
For years, I had Woody Allen's Manhattan down as the best picture of the year (I first saw it forty years ago, the summer I turned eighteen), but in revisiting it recently, I saw not the wistful romance I remembered but the uncomfortable story of a sweet seventeen year old girl (Mariel Hemingway) who finds herself in the clutches of a creepy, balding homunculus twenty-five years her senior (Woody Allen). Woody works overtime to remake the girl in his own crabbed, misanthropic image, but — good for her! — she wriggles free of his grasp at the last minute. The cinematography (Gordon Willis) is gorgeous, the Gershwin music sublime, and maybe I'm just cranky because both Mariel Hemingway and I are now old enough to be the girl's grandparents, but I don't find this stuff amusing anymore.
To that I would add:
The story of a seventeen year old girl seduced by an older man could be a fine movie (see, e.g., 2009's An Education, starring Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in the Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen roles, respectively) if the movie knew that's what it was about. Which I'm 99% sure Manhattan doesn't. Which is perhaps why Woody Allen was horrified when he saw the first cut of it, begging the studio to bury it.
Joan Didion saw through Manhattan immediately. That's why she was a genius. Me, it took a little longer.
These days I prefer Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (the original theatrical release, not the bloated director's cut Apocalypse Now Redux). Based on Joseph Conrad's brilliant novella Heart of Darkness, this tale of the Vietnam War is a violent, funny, profane, and always exciting study of the dark underbelly of our best intentions.
I, too, love the smell of napalm in the morning, especially if it smells like waffles and bacon.
You might also try Alien, the sci-fi horror classic which introduced one of the all-time great monster villains, as well as the greatest kickass heroine of movie history, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley.
Or how about a pair of my favorite comedies, Monty Python's irreverent satire of religion, Life of Brian, and the screwball odd couple comedy, The In-Laws. Don't forget to serpentine!
But whatever you pick, you can't go wrong. It was a great year for movies!
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
