I've written about Rob Reiner before (most recently here). He directed a run of classic movies from 1984 to 1992 that wasn't just the best of his day but rivaled similar runs by all-time greats Buster Keaton, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder.
In case you've forgotten, I'll repeat the list: This Is Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men.
In the course of that run, he made stars of River Phoenix, Meg Ryan and Kathy Bates (who won an Oscar as James Caan's biggest fan); turned the mockumentary up to eleven, establishing a beloved comedy genre in the process; gave us Jack Nicholson's best known catchphrase ("You can't handle the truth!"); and most importantly, taught women everywhere how to fake an orgasm (Oh, no, sorry — I've just been informed they've been doing that since the beginning of time).
Throw in The Sure Thing (1985), a very funny screwball rom-com that put John Cusack on the map, and you can say Reiner's movies helped shape everything that came after.
The son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, he was also a very good comedic actor in his own right. On the groundbreaking comedy All in the Family, his performance as Mike Stivic — a.k.a. the earnest, sometimes misguided but always funny "Meathead" — twice earned him a Primetime Emmy.
Maybe of more significance, Reiner, with his comic foil Archie Bunker (the great Carroll O'Connor), helped left-wing and right-wing America carry on a conversation at a particularly fraught moment in our history.
If only there were such a cultural meeting place these days! But alas, times change and we're lucky now if we can agree on the day of the week much less things that matter.
Finally, on a personal note, Rob Reiner taught me how to put on my shoes — one foot at a time, of course, not like the rest of you animals, with your sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe.
Saw that as a kid fifty-plus years ago and I've been walking in Rob Reiner's footsteps, so to speak, ever since.
For that, and for all those movies I still watch and love, thank you, Mr. Reiner. You will be missed.
Much like The Shawshank Redemption a few years later, The Princess Bride didn't find an audience until it reached the rental aftermarket ...
If you haven't seen it, The Princess Bride is a swashbuckling romance/comedy (as distinct from a romantic comedy) of the first order. Told as a story within a story, the movie opens with a doddering grandfather (the hilarious Peter Falk) insisting on reading a book to his skeptical grandson (Fred Savage) who is home from school with the sniffles.
"When I was your age, television was called books."
So what's in this book? Glad you asked.
"Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles ..."
"Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake."
"Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming."
After that, the story — stuffed with the aforementioned swashbuckling, romance and raucous comedy — unfolds on screen, although Peter Falk helpfully pops in from time to time:
"She doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time."
"What?!?"
"The eel doesn't get her. I'm explaining to you because you look nervous."
"I wasn't nervous. Maybe I was a little bit concerned, but that's not the same thing."
Stars Cary Elwes and Robin Wright as the young lovers, Chris Sarandon as the evil Prince Humperdinck, Wallace Shawn as an assassin for hire, Mandy Patinkin and Andre the Giant as his morally-conflicted henchmen, and Billy Crystal and Carol Kane as, respectively, a down-on-his-luck wizard and his no-nonsense wife.
Based on the book of the same name by legendary screenwriter William Goldman, The Princess Bride is endlessly quotable:
"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."
"We'll never survive."
"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has."
"Inconceivable!"
"You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders — the most famous of which is 'never get involved in a land war in Asia' — but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!'"
"Have fun storming the castle!"
And many others.
The Princess Bride was directed by Rob Reiner in the middle of one of the greatest runs of great movies any director has ever had — This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men. The train came off the tracks after that and I really have no idea what Rob Reiner's been up to the last thirty years. But for a while there, he was as good as anybody ever.
So. If you haven't seen The Princess Bride, see it. And if you have, treat yourself and see it again. One of the Monkey's all-time faves.
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 ✱.
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 ✱.
Having lived through 1984 in real time, I remember there being three obvious choices for the best picture award come Oscar time—Amadeus, A Passage to India and The Killing Fields. For me at least, none of them have really held up on repeat viewings.
Amadeus is the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his chief musical rival, Salieri. I hope to God you know who Mozart was and assuming you do, you know the music in this is sublime. But in terms of narrative, both Mozart and Salieri are reduced to cartoon characters—the gifted idiot and his Snidely Whiplash nemesis—that become progressively less interesting (to me) the second time around.
A Passage to India was one of those sumptuous David Lean cinematography-fests that packed ninety minutes of story into nearly three hours worth of running time. The acting is uniformly brilliant and the pictures are pretty, but Lean seemed to have learned all the wrong lessons from his masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. After starting out as a director of spritely adaptations of Charles Dickens novels (Great Expectations from 1946 is probably the best film based on Dickens ever), Lean became more and more long-winded and by the time he got to 1984, his story-telling had become completely ossified. This was his last movie.
Finally, The Killing Fields was Roland Joffé's take on the fall of Cambodia after the VietNam War and Pol Pot’s subsequent reign of terror that left as many as three million of his own citizens dead. The resulting film is a heartfelt if one-sided history lesson with a horror show in the middle. Granted, U.S. foreign policy in southeast Asia during the early 1970s was a mess, and what happened in Cambodia is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century, but unless you're in the mood to grind this particular axe for two hours—which I'm not—I can't recommend seeing The Killing Fields more than once.
Instead, I'm going with a couple of crowd-pleasers, The Terminator and This is Spinal Tap, which for all their low-budget limitations, are very nearly perfect and have entered the popular consciousness in way those other three films haven't.
The former 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 was a career-maker for bodybuilder-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. True, its selection means I've handed a top prize to a science fiction film for the third time in eight years (four, if you count Raiders of the Lost Ark), which seems like a lot to me, but the late 1970s to the early 1990s was a golden age for science fiction on film, what with the Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Indiana Jones and Terminator franchises in full swing. Like choosing screwball comedies in the 1930s, you gotta go with what's available.
(By the way, whenever I see The Terminator, I think what a pity that director James Cameron ever became so successful that he was allowed to work with unlimited budgets. Like many artists, limits forced Cameron to think creatively to realize the vision in his head. Without limits, his films have become increasingly bloated, obvious and, for me at least, much less interesting. But I digress.)
The best comedy, 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. Stuff like this never seems to win any awards, but it's won legions of loyal fans over the intervening decades. Count me among them.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:The Terminator (prod. Gale Anne Hurd)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:This Is Spinal Tap (prod. Karen Murphy)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Un dimanche à la campagne (A Sunday in the Country) (prod. Bertrand Tavernier)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Harry Dean Stanton (Repo Man and Paris, Texas)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Steve Martin (All of Me)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Judy Davis (A Passage to India)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Kathleen Turner (Romancing The Stone)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: James Cameron (The Terminator)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Rob Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: M. Emmet Walsh (Blood Simple)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Peggy Ashcroft (A Passage to India)
SCREENPLAY winner: Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Rob Reiner (This Is Spinal Tap)
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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