PRESENTATION: MAR's Top 100 Films of the 1980s [COMPLETED!]

Awards: Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design; Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Denholm Elliot), Best Supporting Actress (Maggie Smith), Best Cinematography.

Trivia: My Beautiful Laundrette and this movie opened in New York City on the same day, March 7, 1986. Both movies featured Daniel Day-Lewis in prominent and very different roles: in this movie, he played a repressed, snobbish Edwardian upperclassman, while in Laundrette, he played a lower-class gay ex-skinhead man in love with an ambitious Pakistani businessman in Thatcher's London. When American critics saw Day-Lewis, who was then virtually unknown in the U.S., in two such different roles on the same day, many (including Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times and Vincent Canby of The New York Times) raved about the talent it must have taken him to play such vastly different characters.

This excellent adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel has many extraordinary qualities; it not only administers to being a gorgeously shot romantic film but furthermore as an overriding social critique which ridicules English sensibilities. It's both romantic and delightful and director James Ivory, who most recently received an Oscar for the screenplay Call Me by Your Name, breathes genuine animateness into the lives of its characters in thoughtful ways.
The entire cast is extraordinary with a breakthrough role for Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch and supporting roles for Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis, the latter of who, despite mostly depicting a heartbreakingly tragic figure, demonstrates his comedic authority too. A Room with a View was nominated for eight Oscars at the 59th Academy Awards and submits an incredible portrait of England at the onset of the twentieth century and the modifications taking place within its society.

Awards: Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress (Cher).

Trivia: The film's one set was actually one double-set with two-way mirrors which were utilized for the flashback sequences. The two-way mirrored double-set was operated by computerized lighting modules which caused their own unique problems for the production.

Cultural memory, the movies, our idols of worship mingle lyrically and damnably in this film. A fabulous concept—six women reunite in a fictional Texan town to commemorate the 20th anniversary of James Dean's passing. The distorted memory of 50s Americana is so powerful that it deprives these women of even the concept of a present time. Adapted from a play, it uses a single setting (the Five & Dime, a sort of mythical crumbling diner): the film is the very definition of a stage, but it's astoundingly cinematic. With a never-better Cher, Karen Black as a mysterious woman, and an all-time great perf by Sandy Dennis.

Awards: Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects, Best Original Song.

Trivia: As part of the film's promotion, the "Audrey II" plant was occasionally interviewed, in character, by the press. On at least one occasion, the interview concluded with Audrey II "eating" the interviewer.

One of the sharpest and funniest satires on American consumerism, Frank Oz’s utterly brilliant adaptation of the Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors is every bit as biting today as it was in 1986 (arguably even more so, since we now have access to the shockingly brave original ending in the far superior Director’s Cut, largely viewed as the “true” version of the film). In this wicked, sweet, and sexy romp, my personal favorite of the musical genre, the delights of 1950s Americana (Harleys, poodle skirts and doo wop) archly co-exist alongside a searing postmodern sense of humor that traces in delirious sci-fi absurdist fashion the society-leveling destructive path of unchecked Capitalism. The songs are achingly beautiful, the tone is joyful, the jokes are hilarious… until you begin to see where it’s all going, and then gasp slack-jawed at an ending so uncompromising, so cynical, so gleefully mean, that you’ll absolutely understand why it was just too punk rock for 1986. Picture the greatest milk shake you’ve ever seen with a cyanide-dipped cherry atop the whipped cream and you've got a taste of the devilish pop confection that is Little Shop of Horrors.

Awards: Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival.

Trivia: The third of director Éric Rohmer's six "Comedies et Proverbes" series of movies of the 1980s. The other five, in chronological order, are The Aviator's Wife (1981), A Good Marriage (1982), Full Moon in Paris (1984), The Green Ray (1986) and My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (1987).

Endless Rohmer summertime. But it isn't so much freedom as promiscuity that fills the air. What the (adult) characters have are illusions as to how liberated they are, lies they tell each other and themselves and that they must perpetuate at all costs. The worldly playboy who's convinced himself detachment makes him free; the woman who claims freedom is dependant on the passion she ignites in men... their smallness and single-minded commitment to their personal fantasies gradually revealed to us. It's a holiday filled with warring points of view with only fleeting moments of intersection. Pauline is the only one who may be free: an observer of human follies, she's no slave to any philosophy.

Awards: Academy Award winner for Best Supporting Actor (Haing S. Ngor), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing; Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Sam Waterston), Best Adapted Screenplay.

Trivia: In real life, Haing S. Ngor's wife died under the Khmer Rouge regime, hemorrhaging during childbirth (the baby also died). She knew that she couldn't contact her husband as doctors were all being murdered by the regime so by keeping her silence and dying of internal bleeding, she effectively saved his life..

There are many films that challenge us, film that move us, film that horrify us. There are very few films that are capable of doing all three without ever resulting phony or melodramatic: Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields is one of those movies. Set during the brutal Cambodian civil war, and filmed with ferocious anger and burning passion, the movie tells the story not so much of the war, but of the men that war has bound together, the New York Times’ war reporter Sydney Schanberg and his interpreter Dith Pran, in the fight to let the world know what the hell is going on in Phnomh Penh. Sam Waterston is magnificent as Schanberg, and the rest of the supporting cast (Malkovich, Sands) is excellent, but it is Haing S. Ngor, the real-life survivor of the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, that gives the movie its heart and its soul by making Dith Pran one of the greatest heroes in the history of modern cinema. In its overwhelming cinematic intensity, The Killing Fields tells an extraordinary human story, one that has left an indelible mark on me.