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

Awards: Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton), Best Adapted Screenplay; Academy Award nominations for Best Actress (Mary Tyler Moore), Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Trivia: Richard Dreyfuss was originally considered for the role of the psychiatrist, but when Robert Redford called him Dreyfuss said, "I can't talk to you right now, I'm having a nervous breakdown," and he hung up the phone.

Emotion-driven family dramas often catch a lot of flack for being ‘melodramatic’ or ‘trite’. A shame, as the relatability of such subject matter – everyone’s had to deal with family issues in one form or another – should make all of them hit home, so to speak. Luckily, Robert Redford’s masterpiece Ordinary People hit with a force that knocked me flat, leaving me devastated, but also exhilarated. Everything is so refreshingly understated, from Redford’s direction, giving his scenes a quiet power and his actors real room for expression (everyone here gives a powerhouse performance) to the script, which mostly avoids the cliché of screechy arguments. The few times things do come to a head, it’s harrowingly raw and honest. A decade highlight for sure.

Awards: Included in the National Film Registry.

Trivia: The scene in which all characters sit in a circle on the floor in the library and tell stories about why they were in detention was not scripted. Writer and director John Hughes told them all to ad-lib.

Dear Wilcinema,

We accept the fact that The Breakfast Club didn't reach the top ten that it rightly deserved, but we think you're crazy for making us write an essay on how it's such a masterpiece. What do you care? You'll see it how you want to see it: In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You'll see it as overly earnest, simplistic, derived from the tropes of every other teen movie. Correct?

That earnestness, that straightforward, simple nature, is what gives this movie such a crushing power for those under its thrall. The Breakfast Club understands that people are simple. It understands the universal desire to not be forgotten, to reach out and find another hand there. It understands how that fucking elephant can be so consuming that our entire identity is fixed inside of its fucking trunk that doesn't. Fucking. Work. It knows that there are no easy answers, and in the end we'll go back to our simple, convenient definitions because they're safe and familiar.

It doesn't need to be smart to tell us what we already know. It just needs to be honest, to show us that somebody understands what those cigarette burns and god damn taped buns feel like as we finger the scars. There is no revelatory, advanced piece of filmmaking, or even deep characters with buried motivations to be found here. There are just five simple minds, tentatively reaching out, not wanting to be forgotten.

Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours,
The Breakfast Club voters

Awards: Best Actress (Isabelle Adjani) at the Cannes Film Festival.

Trivia: Isabelle Adjani is reported as saying: "Possession is only the type of film you can do when you are young. Zulawski is a director that makes you sink into his world of darkness and his demons. It is okay when you are young, because you are excited to go there. His movies are very special, but they totally focus on women, as if they are lilies. It was quite an amazing film to do, but I got bruised, inside out. It was exciting to do. It was no bones broken, but it was like, 'How or why did I do that?' I don't think any other actress ever did two films with him."

As some of you may have seen, I very recently wrote a bit about Possession after naming it the best movie I watched for the first time in 2020. It's already an impossible movie to put into words, and I've articulated my thoughts on it (and the haunting, strangely resonate impact if left on me) pretty recently, so it's hard to know what to really say about it at this point. But I will say this: the more time that's passed since first seeing it, the more I've become convinced that Possession might just be my favorite horror movie of all-time. And even if it's not the best horror movie I've seen, it's almost certainly the *most* horror movie I've ever seen. The way that this movie plunges you head-first into its pure nightmare fuel is unlike anything I've ever seen, and it's just exhilarating. It's not just that this movie doesn't hold your hand as it leads you down the rabbit-hole; this is a movie that kicks you to the ground, spits on you, and throws you down into the rabbit-hole as you scream in confusion, delirious amusement, and ultimately, ecstasy. It's an unrelenting assault on the senses, with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill giving two of the most fearless, "out-there" performances I've witnessed. A quintessential "not for everyone" movie, but a movie very, very much for us lunatics who are crazy enough to indulge in its madness.

Awards: Academy Award nominations for Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Martin Landau), Best Original Screenplay.

Trivia: Woody Allen commented on a private screening of the film to a group of Hollywood celebrities who praised the picture: "I know I must be doing something wrong if my film is being viewed in some Hollywood character's screening room and a group of people there are saying, 'It's his best film,' when many of the things I attack are what they stand for".

Woody Allen - often wrongly accused of being a one-trick pony - did something different here - he balanced his comfortable humor with (by far) his darkest and most outward looking plot and the result was one of his greatest achievements - and arguably his last masterpiece (he has at least 4).

A Woody Allen movie with some wonderful actors outside his usual collaborators - Alan Alda, Martin Landau, Anjelica Huston - it felt more weighty right at the start and the way this film balances tone is something of a complex, interwoven marvel even for Allen. Painfully funny and in its main plot painfully grim too - without once ever ringing false or showing its hand.

That’s particularly impressive given how many symbolic and disparate elements he’s written into this script - including physical elements (blindness), spiritual (in many ways), intellectual concerns (through a philosophy professor character), overt real life criminality and artistic parallels that remove us from that “reality” - films, music, novels. He also adds directorial dramatic flourishes which he rarely did - and Shakespearean devices too - think of the terrific storm scene that rages as Landau’s thoughts grow increasingly conflicted and dark.

Allen not only created marvelous entertainment, he also created a rarity in American films here - a movie that seems genuinely “wise”. We often talk about movies “that no one else could make.......in the case of Crimes and Misdemeanors it’s hard to imagine anyone else even conceiving it much less else writing and directing it.

There’s a great throwaway line in this movie at its toughest and most unsparing, spoken by Jerry Orbach to Landau to make his point - “I can’t afford to be aloof........Woody Allen never seemed less aloof as an artist than he was here - his worldview is all over this great movie.

Awards: Boston Society of Film Critics winner for Best Screenplay.

Trivia: Contrary to popular belief, Gregory and Shawn have said they are not playing themselves in the film and are merely playing characters with their own names. When asked about it, they said if the opportunity ever came to remake the film, they would switch roles.

Louis Malle puts together two of the great joys in life: the private joy of friendly conversation, and the shared joy of storytelling. Andre's tales open up to include more or less the whole vital experience of modern man—the "Dreamworld" as Andre puts it. Were the 60s the last truly "human" decade? What the hell's up with Westerners and funerals? How come Tibet is "real life" and New York isn't? And more importantly: how does an electric blanket affect your dreams? Malle allows his characters some proper foolishness. It's a Fools' Last Supper after all, and we listen in and observe, hooked.