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My Favorite Movie Year: 1986

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By Tasha Robinson
January 4th, 2008

4. Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki made more vivid, dynamic works later in his career with Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, but virtually none of his films have topped the sweet perfection of Laputa: Castle In The Sky, a family adventure about two children with a secret, on the run from pirates and kidnappers, heading toward a mythical floating island. It's Miyazaki at his best, full of not-quite-villains who show their kinder sides under pressure, and breathtaking setpieces that send the protagonists plunging deep underground and soaring high into the air, in a massive roller-coaster ride that doubles as a gentle love story.

5. Jim Jarmusch continued to redefine independent cinema throughout the decade, with 1984's Stranger Than Paradise and 1989's Mystery Train bookending 1986's Down By Law, a low-key existential character study in which Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni escape from a Louisiana prison, clinging together out of various shared needs, pushing each other away out of frustration and prickly irritation. It's less a narrative film than a beautifully shot cinematic poem—about Louisiana, about companionship, and about physical, personal, emotional, and even linguistic barriers.

Sleepers:

True Stories: This bizarre-but-enjoyable travelogue about a fictional Texas town—written by, directed by, and starring Talking Heads' David Byrne—is a must-see, if only for Byrne's straight-faced performance as the traveling narrator, and his weirdly quotable dialogue. Okay, that and all the Talking Heads music. And Jo Harvey Allen as a bubbly self-proclaimed psychic who explains that her powers come from the tail she was born with, which was surgically removed and stored in the medicine cabinet. In a way, True Stories sums up everything of interest in '80s cinema: quirk, of an unpredictable, accessible, but oddly personal kind.

Something Wild: Jonathan Demme's prototypical into-the-night movie reads as a shadow of 1985's After Hours and Into The Night, but it has its own charms, largely in the form of Melanie Griffith's trashy-trixie character.

She's Gotta Have It: Spike Lee's debut feature film earned praise as a turning point in black cinema and independent film—but while it was well-received by critics at the time, the biggest praise came after he made a huge splash three years later with Do The Right Thing, and moviegoers took a step back to look at his previous works. His first feature sums up a lot of the wonderful things about his work—keen observation, stylistic daring, the ability to do a lot on a little budget—as well as some of his most infuriating flaws, particularly his penchant for putting himself into his own films, as the most caricatured and irritating character. But while it's raw and amateurish compared to his later polish, and his Mars Blackmon character really needs to be smacked around the block, it's still an exciting and innovative character study, and a worthy entrance to the field for Lee.

When The Wind Blows: This terminally sad little animated British import looks like it was made on the cheap, but the voice characterizations are so perfect, and the proceedings are so touching that it's hard to fault it. A heartbreaking anti-war film in the spirit of 1988's Grave Of The Fireflies, When The Wind Blows follows two trusting British country types as they dutifully follow their country's instructions and prepare first for a nuclear war they can't begin to understand, and then for their own slow deaths, which they similarly don't comprehend.

Labyrinth: Almost the dictionary definition of a sleeper, Jim Henson's puppet-filled fantasia, led by a young Jennifer Connelly and a prancing David Bowie in very tight pants, flopped at the box office, found a cult fandom at home, and steadily crawled upward from curiosity to classic.

More notable films from 1986:

Top Gun: It's hardly fair to dismiss the year's top-grossing movie ($176 million, according to the IMDB, and that's in 1986 money) with a hand-wave and a grunt, and yet that's pretty much how I feel about it. I can see why people love it, but it does nothing for me.

The Color Of Money: What's way more fun than Tom Cruise in a jet plane? Tom Cruise in a pool hall alongside Paul Newman, in a Martin Scorsese film about an old hustler teaching a young hustler the ropes.

Ruthless People: Another box-office top-tenner for the year, and one I can't really defend critically, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for it. One of the last times I actually enjoyed either Danny DeVito or Bette Midler in a movie. I think it's the Keanu Reeves effect: They aren't necessarily better here than they are elsewhere, but they're so perfectly cast, it passes for quality.

Hoosiers: One of the last underdog-sports films to really capture me, back before I became heartless, cynical, and really tired of the formula.

Peggy Sue Got Married: Having a hard time understanding what Francis Ford Coppola is getting at with his new Youth Without Youth? You could do worse than approach the same ideas from a different direction with Coppola's dramedy about an unhappy housewife (Kathleen Turner) who faints at 43 and wakes up young and caught up in her own past, where she has a chance to make different life choices than she made the first time around.

Stand By Me: One of the more acclaimed (and least gory) Stephen King adaptations on the market, Stand By Me features a group of kids—including Corey Feldman, River Phoenix, and Star Trek: The Next Generation's Wil Wheaton—on a coming-of-age/bonding trip to see a supposed dead body. Also, there are crotch-leeches and an evil Kiefer Sutherland. It's overrated, as far as I'm concerned, but it beats King's other big 1986 project, the trucks-gone-wild horror film Maximum Overdrive.

Still unseen:

I'd feel guiltier about having never seen Oliver Stone's Best Picture winner Platoon a) if I didn't feel like I've seen enough Vietnam films to last me the rest of my life, and b) if I'd mentioned this fact to anyone over the past couple of weeks without getting the immediate response "You aren't missing anything." It made a lot of money and it earned a lot of status, but all the cinephiles around me seem to find it overblown and unworthy. I feel worse about having never seen Ross McElwee's Sherman's March, even though the prospect of a 157-minute documentary, half about the Civil War, half about McElwee's girlfriend dumping him, fills me with a vague sad dread, no matter how terrific Scott Tobias tells me it is. I've somehow perpetually managed to miss My Beautiful Laundrette (even though I'm told Daniel Day Lewis has never been in a bad film) and Roland Joffé's star-studded Best Picture nominee The Mission. Less shaming but still fairly iconic, and on the someday list: Troma's Class Of Nuke 'Em High. Finally, in keeping with my ongoing need to catch up on Federico Fellini, I've missed Ginger & Fred.

Runners-up:

Of all the years I researched around the 1940s, the one that stood out most was 1940 itself, the year of The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday (oh, that rat-a-tat dialogue…) Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Fantasia, Pinocchio, The Bank Dick, Gaslight, My Little Chickadee, Our Town, and The Great McGinty. But in the end, I just didn't feel like I'd seen enough of the minor films of the era to pull it off. And if Noel hadn't already tackled 1974, I would have happily ditched the '80s in favor of 1975: Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, Picnic At Hanging Rock, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Love And Death, Three Days Of The Condor, Tommy… Still. I can live with 1986. It made me happy enough as a filmgoer the first time through. No reason I shouldn't stand by it in return.