With all the talk about 2007 as a singularly great year for movies, we at The A.V. Club have been discussing among ourselves what years we'd nominate as the best-of-the-best. The A.V. Club's regular film reviewers are offering our individual choices.)
When Keith first broached the idea of writing up our favorite film year, I was positive I was going to end up writing some part of the 1940s. My favorite films are screwball comedies and noirs; the former flourished in the '40s, and the latter were born there. Hitchcock, probably my favorite director, was in high form in the '40s. The women were glamorous, the men were dashing or rakish or hard-bitten, the cinematography was aces, and the banter was terrific. I love films from the '40s. Problem is, as I found out once I started digging, that I only loved a handful of films from any given year. And beyond that was a morass of B-films and lesser-known works and serials that have never made it to DVD, and a vast, embarrassing gap in my film-going knowledge.
So how did I somehow travel from writing about a sophisticated, serious-critic era of black-and-white film and smartly crafted dialogue to defending a year in the heart of the cheeseball '80s, one of the most commercialized, MTV-driven, flash-without-substance eras in American cinema?
Answer: Reluctantly. But honestly. Once I started looking at a year-by-year rundown of releases, I couldn't help but admit that an awful lot of the films I love come from smack-dab in the midst of that cultural wasteland. Sure, the '80s were packed with dross, but it doesn't take much digging to get to the gold. And thanks to the filmmaking boom of the '80s, there's a whole lot of gold to get to.
First, though, it's worth noting that a surprising amount of said dross sits firmly at the top of 1986's box-office charts. Little of the year's top-grossing list withstands the test of even a little bit of time. Top Gun is a hollow style-fest that didn't impress me even back in its heyday. Also depressingly among the year's box-office top 10: Crocodile Dundee? The Karate Kid, Part II? Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? Back To School? The Golden Child? Ugh. A whole lot of ugh.
So why 1986, already? For one thing, it was generally a year where films were fun. Not capital-G Great, necessarily, but after the anarchy and New Wave stylings of the '60s, the deep-'n'-depressing naturalist classics of the '70s, and even the stripped-down guerilla styles of the no-wave late '70s and early '80s, the selfish, money-happy mid-'80s were more about enjoying yourself at the cinema than anything else.
And there was more cinema to enjoy than ever before, in part because there were more ways to access it than ever before. The rise of multiplexes meant more theaters in smaller spaces, which meant more potential variety, and more specialization of audiences. At the same time, the dropping costs of VCRs opened up new markets in home video, further fracturing audiences by ensuring that every film, no matter how specialized or outré, had a second chance to find its own cult status on video. Which left the '80s as an era without a great cinematic movement to call its own—there was a potential market for almost anything. In 1986, grimy neo-noir like Blue Velvet and Mona Lisa hit theaters alongside shiny teen-pop fluff like the influential, successful one-two punch of Pretty In Pink (written by John Hughes) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (which Hughes both wrote and directed). Those films shared screen space with adapted stage dramas (the Best Picture nominee Children Of A Lesser God, David Mamet's About Last Night, and Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs), stylish imports (Leox Carax's Mauvais Sang, Alain Resnais' Mélo, Pedro Almodóvar's Matador), less-stylish, meatier imports (Denys Arcand's comedy The Decline Of The American Empire and Andrei Tarkovsky's Sacrifice), and the slowly growing number of non-Disney animated features, like An American Tail and Transformers: The Movie.
Granted, there were attempts to unify the multiplex and home-viewing audience—the '80s saw an increasing attempt to nab big audiences with big, accessible eye-candy blockbusters and with sequel cash-ins on previously successful films. But 1986 was a year of relative sanity—apart from the aforementioned Top Gun and the Star Trek and Karate Kid franchise installments, it wasn't a major blockbuster/sequel year.
It was, however, a year when movies were getting shorter and snappier. Possibly because there was so much going on, possibly because multiplexes wanted to churn people through faster, or possibly because MTV was helping shorten younger viewers' attention spans, mainstream cinema in the '80s tended to be polished, brief (fewer two-hour-plus movies, more 90-minute ones) and stylish. To the degree that there was a major film movement in the '80s, it was about crowd-pleasing genre films, influenced equally by George Lucas' success with the Star Wars series and Steven Spielberg blockbusters like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and E.T. More than anything, 1986 is a heartland of infinitely rewatchable genre/adventure films like Aliens, Highlander, Labyrinth, The Fly, Big Trouble In Little China, F/X, and From Beyond. (Okay, yes, the same rising tide also pooped out Short Circuit, Clan Of The Cave Bear, and Howard The Duck. No year is perfect.)
The same influences—shorter, snappier, more stylized—extended to action films and dramas (Sidney Lumet's The Morning After, Bertrand Tavernier's 'Round Midnight) as well as comedies like Hollywood Shuffle and Down And Out In Beverly Hills. Obviously, not everything was quick and punchy: Directors like Peter Weir (The Mosquito Coast) and Clint Eastwood (Heartbreak Ridge) still continued to follow their personal muses more than their immediate eras.
Nonetheless, there was plenty of room for all sorts of weird stories in 1986. It was a wildly diverse year, one that simultaneously produced dark, stylish personality pieces like River's Edge, Sid And Nancy, Manhunter, Down By Law, and The Hitcher, talky arthouse fare like Woody Allen's Hannah And Her Sisters, and costume dramas like Lady Jane and the medieval murder mystery The Name Of The Rose. It was the year America first really noticed Merchant-Ivory films, thanks to the import A Room With A View, and the year it noticed John Woo, thanks to A Better Tomorrow. The same year saw Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger sexing each other up in Adrian Lyne's tawdry, exploitative 9 1/2 Weeks, and Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene romancing each other with rib-ticklingly silly Ashman and Menken songs in Little Shop Of Horrors. It wasn't so much a year without an identity as a year with an appealingly fractured identity, one trying to be all things to all people, with all sorts of strange cultural detritus piling up around the fracture lines between previously clear-cut genres.
Finally, it's worth noting that 1986 was the year a little startup computer-hardware company named Pixar put out a cute little proof-of-concept computer-animation short called "Luxo, Jr."—starring the little hopping-lamp character that still serves as the company logo. Everything Pixar is began here.
Tasha Robinson's top five of 1986:
1. Made and released the same year, the
French saga comprised of Jean De Florette and Manon
Of The Spring tells one continuous story and is essentially one film, and a hell
of a film at that. Claude Berri's almost unbearably beautiful picture
(cinematography by Bruno Nuytten) etches out a morality play in which two
cunning French farmers contrive to deprive newly arrived city boy Gérard
Depardieu of the spring that feeds his land, hoping he'll go away and leave
them to snap up that land for themselves. Over the course of hours, the story
sprawls out into an epic of bad choices, poor excuses, and finely calculated
poetic comeuppances. It's Shakespearian tragedy in a luscious French setting,
with brilliant performances to set it all off.
2. David Lynch already had three films under his
belt in 1986 (Eraserhead, Dune, and The Elephant Man) but he truly launched his career in
professional weirdness with Blue Velvet, a dread-soaked, moody exploration of the secret horrors
lying in wait behind all those suburban picket fences and carefully groomed
lawns. Fresh off Dune, a young Kyle
MacLachlan kicks off the horror when he finds a severed ear in a field, and
follows a trail back to a grown-up world of death, sex, and violent games that
threaten to bridge the two.
3. Equally promising but nowhere near
as successful, director Tim Hunter peaked early with River's Edge. Had it come
a year later, he might have been derided as a Lynch follower, especially given
Dennis Hopper's iconic presence; as it is, River's Edge feels more
like a dark, bitter echo of early-'80s Brat-Packy angst-fest films like The
Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire. A dark, creepy, pervasively
despairing examination of alienation among the young, River's Edge follows a
pack of high-schoolers (among them, Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover) as they
apathetically react to the discovery that one of their number has killed his
girlfriend and left her body lying by the river. And yet the film has a
bitterly hilarious edge, delivered largely through baffled deadpan humor.
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