COMMENTS
In my 80’s Movie Best Lists I attempt a balancing act. I try to be true to my own gut reactions and tastes but also to say something significant about the decade. Last first: I adore Bergman, but not every breath he takes, and I found Fanny & Alexander terribly boring. Certain directors are always losing their touch (though I’m not insisting Bergman was—he did fade, though, as do many) and others are emerging. In English the key emergent directors of the decade were Soderbergh, Frears, Jarmusch. Barry Levinson did his best and most authentic work, wonderful movies about Baltimore as true to it as John Waters’, and that’s my home town so I think I can judge. Levinson can get soft and fuzzy about Baltimore and then it doesn’t work, as in Avalon and Liberty Heights. About The Natural: I hate baseball, okay?!
When I say something’s “MOST OVERRATED,” don’t get too upset, guys: just take as an honest admission that certain movies everybody likes just aren’t to my taste, and I’m not going to pretend that they are. I make no apology for Titanic: it’s romantic and exciting to the max and I loved it. It doesn’t always happen that something that cost a bunch and draws in mobs of teenagers also moves me, and I want to celebrate that, along with the Academy. But I don't have a choice like that for the 80's.
Jarmusch was a wonderful, edgy new director who was on a roll in the Eighties. His beat hipsters, exemplified by John Lurie and Tom Waits – and introducing Roberto Benigni to an astonished English-speaking world – found their home in Jarmusch’s witty, artful movies. Whether he will ever outdo Dead Man is hard to say: it’s a masterpiece. David Lynch was the other edgy guy and he made kinkiness and surrealism seem hip even to the marginally hip; he has tended to repeat himself growing only technically (with some great acting), not ever learning how to tell a coherent story, but Blue Velvet had the edge and was a seminal movie of the decade. It made sexual perversion and small town bland sickness both seem really nasty and surreal. Soderbergh emerged with a movie that seemed quite fresh and challenging yet could draw in a large audience and he’s continued to maintain that delicate balance ever since.
Frears also was on a roll, and he has continued to surprise and experiment to this day. I could also mention Prick Up Your Ears, and The Grifters, a real classic, was just about to happen.
I’m not a huge fan of the immensely talented and bright Martin Scorsese, who has made such a contribution to the study of preservation of movies besides being a great director. I find his work cold and unappealing, and I’d rate Kubrick way above him, but nonetheless I have to acknowledge that Raging Bull is his masterpiece and one of the seminal movies of the decade -- some think the 80’s English-language movie.
Cronenberg is a master whose brilliance I only graduallly recognized. Naked Lunch clinched it, and Spider is perhaps even better.
I admire all those who discover and reveal the more exotic foreign directors. I’m not sure Wong Kar-Wai swam into my ken till the early 90’s, but one of his offbeat masterpieces that is known here is As Tears Go By. It provides a key to his understanding of relationships. Most of his great work was to come in the 90’s, and Quentin Tarantino (the star of 90's mainstream edginess) gave him a boost here by finding mainstream re-distribution for Chungking Express via Miramax.
All my other foreign listings are personal favorites. I consider Kurosawa a god of cinema. Au Revoir les enfants is Malle’s most touching work. Sid & Nancy is a trip. Much of one decade is about revisiting the previous two, in this case the 60’s and 70’s.Kryzszytof Kieslowski is the most profound and serious foreign director who swam into my view in the last several decades, though of course Blue, White, and Red are 90’s movies and Dekalog wasn’t shown here till a couple of years ago, though it was shown on Polish TV in 1987 and belongs with that decade.
I think it's significant that all these are so far from the Yuppiehood and Me Generation Reagonist stuff that was oppressing us in America during the 80's: we needed to escape. Only The Big Chill, which deals with an earlier generation, and sex, lies and videotape slightly relate to the presumed 80's mood, and even that's a stretch.
One I forgot: Running on Empty. Sorry, River! We'll never forget you. But sometimes it's a little too painful to remember. Martha Plimpton knows.
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