Films of 1984

1984 is not only my favorite movie year; I honestly believe it may be cinema's greatest year. My love for this year may have a lot to do with the fact that I consumed a ton of these movies at a highly impressionable age, but I think what 1984 represents in terms of cinematic trends and the variety of types of movies on offer is quite distinctive and special. 

It was a prolific year for movie studios and independent filmmakers. It was a time when moviemaking turned away from the auteurist aesthetic of the late '60s and early '70s and made its way back to releasing and celebrating a range of pictures closer to that on offer during Hollywood's Golden Age. The early-to-mid-'80s especially gave us films about women that weren't limited to rape/revenge thrillers, films about African-Americans that weren't all blaxploitation, films that took the lives and emotions of teenagers seriously, films with LGBT characters that weren't depicted as freaks, and films that explored American subcultures from the inside.

Of course, the move away from gritty, honest, angry-white-male-director-driven cinema is the main reason people trash the 1980s. Corporate-owned studios had re-found their footing with mainstream audiences and had begun to make more populist, comforting, escapist fare, often relying on high-concept blockbusters that could be spun into a series of seemingly endless sequels. There's no denying that the 1980s trends in film production that people lament were real. Those trends just aren't the entirety of what cinema culture was in the 1980s. 

In no way do I mean to trash the 1970s as some kind of erroneously heralded era in cinema. I love 1970s cinema for all the same reasons everyone else does. It was a decade that smashed the tired formulas of a stagnant mainstream Hollywood culture and dared to tell more raw, dark, personal, and honest types of stories. It's just that when you take yourself out of that decade and look back on it, it looks a little monochromatic in terms of the films that were easily available to a wide audience.

Similarly, the 1990s is always heralded as the great era of the indie movie, but that's because it was the decade when independent filmmaking became corporatized. The 1980s was the true golden age of indies. In 1984 alone, we got the iconic independent films Stranger Than Paradise, Repo Man, The Terminator, The Brother from Another Planet, Stop Making Sense, Streetwise, Love Streams, Choose Me, This Is Spinal Tap, Old Enough, The Times of Harvey Milk, and Paris, Texas. If you went to film festivals, you also got to see Blood Simple!

But where 1984 truly shined the brightest was in its blockbusters. This may be the only year in which I not only loved every one of the top-10 box office hits, but the film I thought was the year's best movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture. We were still living in a time when "highbrow films" like Amadeus and The Killing Fields were mainstream hits, and "movie movies" like Ghostbusters and Beverly Hills Cop made even stuffy critics jubilant with delight.

1984 was the year Sergio Leone released his final epic, Once Upon a Time in America, and James Cameron made his first sci-fi masterpiece, The Terminator. It was the year Prince reinvented the rock ’n' roll movie, Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads made the greatest concert film of all time, and Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner redefined the mockumentary format for all time. It was also the year Freddy Kruger first haunted our dreams and Kevin Bacon taught us all to dance. And speaking of dancing, it was also the year the Israeli tax shelter factory of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus capitalized on a new fad so successfully that the two Breakin' pictures they made eclipsed '84’s more substantive and authentic breakdancing movie, Beat Street.

1984 was the seminal year the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating, Disney created Touchstone Pictures, and the Supreme Court decreed that home VCRs could be used to record TV shows and movies off broadcast television without any violation of copyright law. It was a year we saw a lot of babyfaced Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage, and a whole lot of Mel Gibson when he was young, gorgeous, and (relatively) sane. It was the year Andie MacDowell made her screen debut dubbed by Glenn Close in a film that got a dog nominated for writing a Best Adapted Screenplay!

Daryl Hannah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rae Dawn Chong, Chris Penn, Wallace Shawn, John Lithgow, and Geneviève Bujold seemed to pop up in everything.

Kris Kristofferson starred in three films—only singing in one.

Dudley Moore starred in three films—only not falling down in one.

Paul Winfield repeatedly demonstrated how an actor can simultaneously play comical, authoritative, warm, and deviant all in the same performance.

Tom Hanks was well on his way to becoming the next obnoxiously overconfident '80s white guy actor of the moment with Bachelor Party until Splash came out and secured his fate as a beloved movie star for the next four decades.

Eddie Murphy went from being a popular upstart comedian to the decade’s biggest box-office draw with Beverly Hills Cop. 

And Harry Dean Stanton went from being a “that guy” actor in films like Red Dawn, to being “fuckin’ Harry Dean Stanton!" after appearing in Repo Man and Paris, Texas.

Even the bad movies of 1984 are memorable because they are soooo bad: films like Slapstick of Another Kind and Best Defense still hold top slots on most lists of worst comedies ever made, while watching Blame It on Rio is now practically a criminal offense. Some pictures have not aged well and have been rightly canceled, like Bolero. Some films are now labeled as deeply problematic but are still great movies and need to be seen in context, like Sixteen Candles. And some films straddle that line, like Revenge of the Nerds.

Of course, there are also dozens of films from 1984 that I've never seen or only seen on bad VHS transfers. I'll be reliving at least 125 films from 1984 on, or close to, the 40th anniversary of their release dates.  This trailer captures most of the ones I hope to revisit and review.

https://vimeo.com/925243757?share=copy