1980s List Discussion and Suggestions (Lists Project Vol. 3)

[Michael Kerpan]

Ann Hui has some impressive -- but probably impossible to find -- films in this decade. Her very stark Boat People is one contender. But my favorite is Romance of Book and Sword (including its second part). This was a fairly low-budget historical "epic" (and every now and then the economies showed), with a mostly mainland China cast, mostly shot on location in all sorts of remarkable spots. Visually stunning most of the time -- and with a (genuinely) heartbreaking story.

[Cold Bishop]

Don't know if it's in print, but Boat People is one of the easiest to see: there was a subbed Taiwanese release a while back. Romance of Book and Sword still seems to be VCD only, unfortunately.

[Michael Kerpan]

Don't know if it's in print, but Boat People is one of the easiest to see: there was a subbed Taiwanese release a while back. Romance of Book and Sword still seems to be VCD only, unfortunately.

There _were_ subbed DVDs of Romance of Book and Swords (both parts) -- but these went out of print long ago, right before I wanted to order them. Alas, these never got re-released.

[domino harvey]

Dragnet (Tom Mankiewicz 1987) I don't know why, but this was one of my favorite films growing up, and revisiting it now has not unlocked the mysteries of childhood tastes! To my adult eyes, this is an average at best buddy cop comedy bolstered by some decent central performances and two expertly exaggerated comic villains in Christopher Plummer and Dabney Coleman, the latter of which sports an accent up there with Richard Widmark in Saint Joan in the "What producer let them get away with this" Hall of Fame. The bizarre nature of the plot, complete with elaborate Nuremberg-esque pagan sacrifice, has a peculiar appeal as well, but this is pretty much relegated to the "oddity" distinction.

Ms 45 (Abel Ferrara 1982) Interesting variation on the rape-revenge flick of the 70s with Zoe Lund targeting any and all males who exhibit chauvinistic or sexist tendencies. I could have done without the ludicrous twin rapes which open the film, which seems like deck-stacking in an already over-the-top production, but I did appreciate the film's aims and the novelty of it flipping the norm as far as victims go. I was disappointed that Ferrara walked back the boldest and most darkly hilarious joke in the film with his final shot, though. Would make for a good discussion-provoking double feature with Maniac.

Transylvania 6-5000 (Rudy De Luca 1985) Nothing in this movie is half as clever as its title, but I must confess that morbid curiosity gave way to actual enjoyment pretty quickly here. Every actor thankfully got the memo to play their roles to the hilt, and everyone is clearly having a grand time playing to the back rows in this silly bit of fluff about newspaper reporters sent to Transylvania to confirm the rumors of a Frankenstein's monster. This is basically an updated Abbot and Costello vehicle, and Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr are quite good at striking the pitch of not taking the film seriously but still having fun with their histrionics. The film finds a nice if unlikely twist at the end to further alienate any genre fans who were somehow invested in this as anything other than campy fun. I'm not sure this merits a fully-fledged recommendation, but I did like it. Fun fact from Wikipedia: I guess I haven't noticed since she's always cast with towering co-stars, but apparently (the provocatively attired) Geena Davis is six feet tall!

[Yojimbo]

I guess I haven't noticed since she's always cast with towering co-stars, but apparently (the provocatively attired) Geena Davis is six feet tall!

I remember there was a tv series she did with Dabney Coleman - set, I think, in a TV newsroom - where her height caused her to stand out. She was model-thin back then and probably incapable of holding a tennis racket in her hand, never mind engaging in the adventure-film heroics she later became famous for

[domino harvey]

You're thinking of Buffalo Bill, which I keep meaning to watch-- I think Coleman's an underrated comic actor and the series is notorious for being ahead of its time

[Yojimbo]

You're thinking of Buffalo Bill, which I keep meaning to watch-- I think Coleman's an underrated comic actor and the series is notorious for being ahead of its time

Yep, that's it - set in Buffalo, NY. I don't think I've seen it since it's original broadcast. Was it an early HBO series?.
Coleman is good, agreed.

[flyonthewall2983]

Dragnet (Tom Mankiewicz 1987) I don't know why, but this was one of my favorite films growing up, and revisiting it now has not unlocked the mysteries of childhood tastes! To my adult eyes, this is an average at best buddy cop comedy bolstered by some decent central performances and two expertly exaggerated comic villains in Christopher Plummer and Dabney Coleman, the latter of which sports an accent up there with Richard Widmark in Saint Joan in the "What producer let them get away with this" Hall of Fame. The bizarre nature of the plot, complete with elaborate Nuremberg-esque pagan sacrifice, has a peculiar appeal as well, but this is pretty much relegated to the "oddity" distinction.

Wasn't this also the first time a TV show that was adapated to film that took a 360 in terms of it's tone, predating Starsky & Hutch and a few others I'm clearly forgetting?

[Lemmy Caution]

Transylvania 6-5000 (Rudy De Luca 1985) This is basically an updated Abbot and Costello vehicle, and Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr are quite good at striking the pitch of not taking the film seriously but still having fun with their histrionics. ...(the provocatively attired) Geena Davis is six feet tall!

Never heard of this, but that is a great title and it sounds like fun.

[domino harvey]

Blind Date (Blake Edwards 1987) Hammering several final nails into the long ago sealed coffin of screwball comedy, this laborious misfire is 100% laugh free. Bruce Willis, fresh off Moonlighting (any five minutes of which contains at least three funny lines, each no doubt wittier than the entirety of this picture), plays it straight for most of the running time as a harried businessman who finds himself saddled with Kim Basinger's "crazy drunk," to telegraphed results. While again I must reiterate that at no time are any of the zany shenanigans afoot within this film funny, I do think Kim Basinger, who usually does nothing for me, does a good job playing the daffy gremlin setting everything she encounters into chaos, and I wish her game performance was at the service of any other script/direction.

Blue Velvet (David Lynch 1986) Unfortunately this joins Satantango and Uncle Boonmee in the "It's not worth exhausting myself going against the rest of the board" category. Sadly, I didn't appreciate or care for anything Lynch does here, like at all, and I'll just leave it at that. I'm very happy for those of you who've found meaning, entertainment, and/or greatness within, but no thanks.

Robocop (Paul Verhoven 1987) Extremely kinetic filmmaking by Verhoven at the service of often clunky satirical barbs and silly over the top violence. I appreciated Verhoven's energy on a technical level, but this film just exhausted me with its non-stop shoulder shaking and graphic shoot 'em ups. That's a selling point for some films, but I just could never quite engage with this film at the level it was pitched.

[Cold Bishop]

I don't find Blue Velvet valueless, but I certainly find it pretty schematic, for lack of a better word. What you see is exactly what you get, without any of the fissures or enigmas which to me makes most of Lynch's films engaging. The real value is purely in terms of atmosphere and mise-en-scene, specifically the graphic qualities of the film - the interplay of luscious colors (velvet reds and blues) and bottomless blacks which so few people can do as well as Lynch - but for such a psycho-sexual coming-of-age film, I find it too easily analysed.

This will join the likes of Raging Bull or Blade Runner for films where I get what they're doing, I even like what they're doing, I just don't love the or find them compelling enough to anoint them masterpieces among masterpieces like much of the canon.

You won't get any agreement from me on Robocop, however, no sir. Graphic shoot-em-ups and sledgehammer satire mix perfectly there, even if my actual list might tip towards The Fourth Man for Verhoeven, and any countless HK films for ultraviolent entertainment.

[bamwc2]

Blue Velvet (David Lynch 1986) Unfortunately this joins Satantango and Uncle Boonmee in the "It's not worth exhausting myself going against the rest of the board" category. Sadly, I didn't appreciate or care for anything Lynch does here, like at all, and I'll just leave it at that. I'm very happy for those of you who've found meaning, entertainment, and/or greatness within, but no thanks.

Robocop (Paul Verhoven 1987) Extremely kinetic filmmaking by Verhoven at the service of often clunky satirical barbs and silly over the top violence. I appreciated Verhoven's energy on a technical level, but this film just exhausted me with its non-stop shoulder shaking and graphic shoot 'em ups. That's a selling point for some films, but I just could never quite engage with this film at the level it was pitched.

Argh! Two likely picks for my top ten! Oh well, Domino, at least we can rest easy knowing that neither of us will put a David Hamilton flick in their vote.

[domino harvey]

Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford 1984) Man, the eighties sure did have a love affair with remaking noirs. Out of the Past most certainly didn't need to be remade (and never will, not that that'll stop Hollywood), but if it must, at least it's as good as this take on the material. Here now we have Jeff Bridges as an ex-footballer finagled into helping bookie James Woods track down his ex-love, Rachel Ward, and the whole familiar tale starts falling into place, with at least one notable scene even giddily playing on the audience's expectations of where the original film went at a key moment and then upending it. It's also nice to see Richard Widmark and Jane Greer as the old guard in more ways than one. But while I'd say this fares the best yet of the noir reboots I've seen from this decade (though I only mildly enjoyed it and don't really recommend), it still falls victim to an ending that for all its feigned ambiguity is still far too soft and happy for a genre (and a source film) that was anything but.

the January Man (Pat O'Connor 1989) A unique viewing experience in that this may be the world's first accidental film. Like, all these well known actors and actresses just tripped and fell into a movie that has no idea what it is, what it's about, or why all these roles exist and interact with each other. Ostensibly this is a comedy about the hunt for a serial killer (Golly, are you laughing yet?) scripted, if that's the right word, by John Patrick Shanley coming right off Moonstruck, starring Kevin Kline as a former detective who years ago was forcibly transferred to the fire department (Huh?) by his brother, Harvey Keitel, and the mayor, Rod Steiger, breaking up his romance with Keitel's wife Susan Sarandon (whose casting and character here are at the top of the question mark pile, since it's an especially useless role in a film filled with 'em) until his presence is required back at the department as for some reason he's the only one who can solve the serial killer's three-level deep pattern of murder. Kline is assisted in this by his painter friend Alan Rickman and the mayor's daughter, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and cursed by his reluctant police chief, Danny Aiello. As you can tell from just those couple of sentences, there are too many characters here, and even with such talent filling the slots, the whole affair is doomed. If any aspect of this mess sounds like it might be at least a fun mess, you're reading my words wrong. This thing is the worst kind of indulgent mess, one that never makes any sense from one moment to the next, and the labored super-arch tone and disconnect from moment to moment is impressive for all the wrong reasons. The January Man is however a great worst case scenario of what often happens immediately after someone wins an Oscar and they finally get to produce their otherwise unfilmable pet project.

Top Gun (Tony Scott 1986) The quest to familiarize myself with unseen popular landmarks continues with a film I have never for even one moment in my entire life had any desire to see. Perhaps part of my devotion to the List Projects is some form of twisted self-harm, I don't know, but I must admit this wasn't as terrible as I'd feared. It is, however, pretty laughable and I greatly look forward to watching Hot Shots now so I can see this thing get ripped apart, as it shouldn't be too hard with a film like this that is soooooo silly and yet takes itself sooooo seriously. I did enjoy the possibly unintentional homoerotic approach to much of the material from the borderline softcore porn of the beefcake-y volleyball scene to Cruise's love interest being a woman with masculine personality traits named Charlie. All of the interminable flying scenes blend together and are interspersed with macho posturing and a parade of cliches (I just about lost it late in the picture when one character shares with dramatic flair "That's right, I served with your father") that aren't much to hang a helmet on either. But hey, it has a couple songs we've all heard a million times since and whooooooosh go the airplanes!!!!!!!!

[Yojimbo]

Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford 1984) Man, the eighties sure did have a love affair with remaking noirs. Out of the Past most certainly didn't need to be remade (and never will, not that that'll stop Hollywood), but if it must, at least it's as good as this take on the material. Here now we have Jeff Bridges as an ex-footballer finagled into helping bookie James Woods track down his ex-love, Rachel Ward, and the whole familiar tale starts falling into place, with at least one notable scene even giddily playing on the audience's expectations of where the original film went at a key moment and then upending it. It's also nice to see Richard Widmark and Jane Greer as the old guard in more ways than one. But while I'd say this fares the best yet of the noir reboots I've seen from this decade (though I only mildly enjoyed it and don't really recommend), it still falls victim to an ending that for all its feigned ambiguity is still far too soft and happy for a genre (and a source film) that was anything but.

Rachel Ward has about as much life, never mind 'fatale' in her as my granny (who's been six feet under , near 40 years now). Jeff Bridges and James Woods should have been a solid pairing on paper, but maybe it's the whole environment, or the direction. Or both. It just splutters, instead of fizzling.
I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

the January Man (Pat O'Connor 1989) A unique viewing experience in that this may be the world's first accidental film. Like, all these well known actors and actresses just tripped and fell into a movie that has no idea what it is, what it's about, or why all these roles exist and interact with each other. Ostensibly this is a comedy about the hunt for a serial killer (Golly, are you laughing yet?) scripted, if that's the right word, by John Patrick Shanley coming right off Moonstruck, starring Kevin Kline as a former detective who years ago was forcibly transferred to the fire department (Huh?) by his brother, Harvey Keitel, and the mayor, Rod Steiger, breaking up his romance with Keitel's wife Susan Sarandon (whose casting and character here are at the top of the question mark pile, since it's an especially useless role in a film filled with 'em) until his presence is required back at the department as for some reason he's the only one who can solve the serial killer's three-level deep pattern of murder. Kline is assisted in this by his painter friend Alan Rickman and the mayor's daughter, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and cursed by his reluctant police chief, Danny Aiello. As you can tell from just those couple of sentences, there are too many characters here, and even with such talent filling the slots, the whole affair is doomed. If any aspect of this mess sounds like it might be at least a fun mess, you're reading my words wrong. This thing is the worst kind of indulgent mess, one that never makes any sense from one moment to the next, and the labored super-arch tone and disconnect from moment to moment is impressive for all the wrong reasons. The January Man is however a great worst case scenario of what often happens immediately after someone wins an Oscar and they finally get to produce their otherwise unfilmable pet project.

The only Pat O'Connor film I've seen is the beautiful, small-scale work for TV, 'Ballroom of Romance'. I was put off checking this out by the universal panning it received.
I think he's still married to his star, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

Top Gun (Tony Scott 1986) The quest to familiarize myself with unseen popular landmarks continues with a film I have never for even one moment in my entire life had any desire to see. Perhaps part of my devotion to the List Projects is some form of twisted self-harm, I don't know, but I must admit this wasn't as terrible as I'd feared. It is, however, pretty laughable and I greatly look forward to watching Hot Shots now so I can see this thing get ripped apart, as it shouldn't be too hard with a film like this that is soooooo silly and yet takes itself sooooo seriously. I did enjoy the possibly unintentional homoerotic approach to much of the material from the borderline softcore porn of the beefcake-y volleyball scene to Cruise's love interest being a woman with masculine personality traits named Charlie. All of the interminable flying scenes blend together and are interspersed with macho posturing and a parade of cliches (I just about lost it late in the picture when one character shares with dramatic flair "That's right, I served with your father") that aren't much to hang a helmet on either. But hey, it has a couple songs we've all heard a million times since and whooooooosh go the airplanes!!!!!!!!

I enjoyed it - for its loud flashness - and partly because I was intrigued by the nature of the relationship between Kelly McGillis and her midget co-star. Also loved the bombastic ballad, 'Take My Breath Away'
So sue me!
But I don't even remember did Kelly and Tom live happily ever after!

On a personal note, I remember a couple of years later driving across Death Valley and seeing all those 'Top Gun' wannabes flying overhead, and making similar pretty patterns in the sky. It made the ride that much more interesting.
I wonder how the Joads would have reacted?

[John Cope]

I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

Wayne Wang's awesomely atmospheric Slam Dance for one and Scott's still underrated Someone to Watch Over Me for another.

[colinr0380]

But I don't even remember did Kelly and Tom live happily ever after!

As seemingly the go-to homoerotic subtexter on the forum, I will happily step aside on Top Gun and let the Quentin Tarantino cameo from Sleep With Me handle this one! (Amusingly the uploader of the video has added the illustrative cutaways to the Scott film during the molologue!)

[matrixschmatrix]

I think from modern eyes Top Gun (and several other super brotastic 80s faves- Commando, I'm looking in your direction)- don't so much have homoerotic subtext, given how many oiled up muscles and acts of lovemaking sublimated into penetrative violence we wind up seeing.

[colinr0380]

The best example of both playing to and subverting this trend of course being Keith David and Roddy Piper's relationship (versus the duplicitous and unknowable female love interest!) in John Carpenter's They Live!

[Mr Sausage]

I think from modern eyes Top Gun (and several other super brotastic 80s faves- Commando, I'm looking in your direction)- don't so much have homoerotic subtext, given how many oiled up muscles and acts of lovemaking sublimated into penetrative violence we wind up seeing.

Commando also has a sense of humour, and at one point has Tommy Chong's daughter stare in disbelief at an excessively violent fight scene where the fighters trade insults as they hit each other and exclaims "I can't believe this macho bullshit!"

[domino harvey]

I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

Wayne Wang's awesomely atmospheric Slam Dance for one and Scott's still underrated Someone to Watch Over Me for another.

I said Against All Odds was the best (so far) of the 80s noir remakes, so no doubt there are better "original" (neo)noirs from the decade

[zedz]

Against All Odds (Taylor Hackford 1984) Man, the eighties sure did have a love affair with remaking noirs. Out of the Past most certainly didn't need to be remade (and never will, not that that'll stop Hollywood), but if it must, at least it's as good as this take on the material. Here now we have Jeff Bridges as an ex-footballer finagled into helping bookie James Woods track down his ex-love, Rachel Ward, and the whole familiar tale starts falling into place, with at least one notable scene even giddily playing on the audience's expectations of where the original film went at a key moment and then upending it. It's also nice to see Richard Widmark and Jane Greer as the old guard in more ways than one. But while I'd say this fares the best yet of the noir reboots I've seen from this decade (though I only mildly enjoyed it and don't really recommend), it still falls victim to an ending that for all its feigned ambiguity is still far too soft and happy for a genre (and a source film) that was anything but.

Rachel Ward has about as much life, never mind 'fatale' in her as my granny (who's been six feet under , near 40 years now). Jeff Bridges and James Woods should have been a solid pairing on paper, but maybe it's the whole environment, or the direction. Or both. It just splutters, instead of fizzling.
I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

Well, I would have suggested Blue Velvet, but. . . never mind.

(Though in domino's favour, the only time I tried to watch the movie on DVD, I found it unwatchable and had to stop after twenty minutes. It was catastrophically inferior to the 35mm theatrical experience.)

[Yojimbo]

I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

Wayne Wang's awesomely atmospheric Slam Dance for one and Scott's still underrated Someone to Watch Over Me for another.

I said Against All Odds was the best (so far) of the 80s noir remakes, so no doubt there are better "original" (neo)noirs from the decade

Hopefully, anyway. I'm sure I'll think of one or two,....eventually.
Does Pialat's 'Police' count as (neo-) noir?

[Yojimbo]

But I don't even remember did Kelly and Tom live happily ever after!

As seemingly the go-to homoerotic subtexter on the forum, I will happily step aside on Top Gun and let the Quentin Tarantino cameo from Sleep With Me handle this one! (Amusingly the uploader of the video has added the illustrative cutaways to the Scott film during the molologue!)

"There is this gay fighting fucking force and they are beating the Russians"
"You can ride my tailllll!"

Can you imagine Tarantino being in that movie theatre queue in 'Annie Hall'?

[zedz]

More 80s undertakings:

La Femme Publique - Zulawski makes art films that are ludicrously over the top. I can't say I'm a fan, but I find his work weirdly fascinating. It somehow takes itself extremely seriously while simultaneously wallowing in hysteria, ending up as a kind of aggressively heterosexual camp. The local nonsense that serves as a plot in this film involves a struggling actress who somehow gets involved in a political assassination, and a dreadful, florid psychodrama adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. I say 'struggling actress', but her biggest struggle seems to be the one to keep her clothes on, and it's a struggle that Zulawski ensures she loses again and again and again. This is the kind of film in which everything is dialled up to eleven, even the subtext. Cameras swoop and slide and soar. They get down on the ground and up with the stars. I don't know if any of the main actors got through a single scene without crying or screaming. It's just exhausting, but kind of stupidly thrilling as well. If any scene looks like it might drag, you can pretty much count on a catfight breaking out in its margins to liven things up. How self-aware is Zulawski? Obviously the absurd acting styles are deliberate, but that doesn't make them good, or resolve the disconnect when one of the main character's bizarre performances in the film-within-a-film is excoriated as complete and utter shit while another differently bizarre reading is praised as transcendentally exquisite, career-creating and life-changing. And all of those performances are just variations on the common or garden bad acting she's offering up in the film proper.

Warsaw Bridge - A completely mysterious, completely enthralling film. It's notionally the story of a handful of loosely connected artists / scholars (writer, conductor, biologist etc.) mixing and matching, talking about art and so forth, but what makes the film completely rivetting are its wild and wonderful digressions that flash forward and back, convey cryptic messages, roam around the city and landscape, or present arresting musical interludes.

The film rambles around for half an hour before the opening credits arrive (over an incongruous but gorgeous aerial tracking shot that is only explained at the very end of the film). In that time we've had a wordless tour of stunning architecture, a domestic vignette, an ultra-lavish awards ceremony and an amazing sequence in which one of the characters wanders down a city street that has been co-opted for an innovative musical performance in which the conductor stands high on a podium while his televised image is broadcast to the individual players nested in first floor windows or on balconies down the length of the street. (Please note that this film was released three years before John Cage debuted 'Fifty-Eight'.)

After the credits, we stumble across a charred and broken body found in a forest fire. It's wearing a wetsuit. Some fucking. A lecture, lunch. Then a couple of opera singers perform Wagner in a fish market, elevated on forklifts. A nice drive in the country. Women in a sauna sing to one another and casually recreate Ingres paintings. One pair resolve into primitive computer graphics, disintegrating on the screen in a publisher's offices. One of the employees leaves in the lift, we go back to the computer screen where simple lines evolve into a building. Cut to the building, and there's the employee hopping into a car with our protagonist. As they idle in a side street, she gazes off and imagines a past? / future? / fiction? in which she attends the death of her mother and gets involved in totally surreal violence in a German subway car. And so to the seaside. The film seems like a breadcrumb trail of non sequiturs, but slowly the pieces cohere, and the audacious ending definitively resolves one of the film's most overt and bizarre mysteries. I still have a lot of unanswered questions, but the film is so brilliantly inventive and technically accomplished that I can't wait to experience it all again. It reminds me a lot of the radical play of Godard's 80s films, particularly in its soundtrack, which artfully drowns out sections of dialogue with jazz or ocean waves, but I find this film much more emotionally and intellectually satisfying - and a hell of a lot more fun.

[Yojimbo]

I'm sure there must be better 80s noir than this

Wayne Wang's awesomely atmospheric Slam Dance for one and Scott's still underrated Someone to Watch Over Me for another.

I see Slam Dance is available on YouTube, albeit in an inferior VHS conversion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Q0hBSOUEs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I've just chanced upon what sounds like something of a 'Marathon Man' 'is it safe' homage, at 12:35 in