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

Awards: Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival; BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress (Rosanna Arquette).

Trivia: Martin Scorsese could not figure out a suitable ending for the film. He asked Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, and Terry Gilliam to watch the film so they could give him their opinion on how the film should end.

After Hours is Scorsese’s darkly pitched, darkly theme dark comedy. A movie that much like his other films Taxi Driver and Bringing Out the Dead exposes the harder life of New York City after Dark but in a more overtly darkly comedic fashion. Griffin Dunne stars as an office worker schlub named Paul who has a date with a girl, that leads to complete and utter chaos. Paul gets everything thrown on him, and we the the audience are forced to see him suffer through each bit of misery that’s thrown on him that somehow, he absolutely deserves to happen to him. Scorsese’s direction is pitch perfect, and the movie never lets up a beat in terms of its inherent comedic gloominess and dread, it’s actually remarkable how much Paul survives a wild night in the city. The film is absolutely helped by its supporting cast too, possibly one of the best and most colorful in a Scorsese film period. From stalwart character actors like Verna Bloom and Dick Miller to comedic greats such as Catherine O’Hara and Teri Garr, these actors help bring the movie and the feel of the city in it to life. After watching the movie, I wouldn’t want to walk around New York City at night, but I wouldn’t mind experiencing it via the Scorsese way either.

Awards: Academy Award winner for Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects, Special Award for Richard Williams; Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing.

Trivia: Bob Hoskins said that, for two weeks after seeing the movie, his young son wouldn't talk to him. When finally asked why, his son said he couldn't believe his father would work with cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny and not let him meet them.

It was 1985. Disney was desperate for another hit, as it had been almost ten years since the release of The Rescuers. They had an idea to film a detective story set during the Golden Age of Cinema, in Los Angeles. The only problem was that it involved humans and cartoons. Who in their right mind would agree to make a technically impossible film that was also too risqué for younger audiences and too bland for adults?
Robert Zemeckis was your typical film school graduate, and he was just coming off the huge success of Back To The Future. He had the backing of Steven Spielberg and his powerful Amblin Entertainment, and he was also guaranteed large creative control over the picture. Despite all of this though, the task felt like climbing the Mount Everest with bare hands.
What made Who Framed Roger Rabbit such a massive hit, both critical and commercial? Wanting to put it simply, nobody had ever seen anything like it. The combination of animation and live action had never been so seamless, but if this might seem like a superficial reason to justify its success, the film offered way more than that. It featured an instantly iconic animated character in Roger (a children’s favorite for decades to come) in an unlikely partnership with the Philip Marlowe-inspired detective Eddie Valiant (the wonderful Bob Hoskins) to hunt down a killer among the streets of Hollywood and Toontown. What seemed to be the obstacle at the beginning at the production became its biggest asset afterwards: kids loved the animations, their parents were intrigued by this noir story so clearly indebted to Chinatown. That is how Who Framed Roger Rabbit, one of the most fun film experiences I’ve had, both as a kid and as an adult, became one of the biggest hits of the 1980s, and deservedly so.

Awards: BAFTA winner for Best Film, Best Supporting Actor (Daniel Auteuil), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography; BAFTA nominations for Best Director, Best Actor (Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu), Best Foreign Language Film, Best Production Design, Best Makeup.

Trivia: During pre-production 12,000 carnations had to be planted and a dozen olive trees, each several hundred years old, had to be transplanted.

When I first watched Jean de Florette/Manon of the Spring in high school, I was floored - I had seen a masterpiece that somehow went even beyond that. There are other masterpieces, but how many are on this level? It connects with or might remind you of a Greek tragedy, or the ironic fate of Shakespeare, or something Biblical in its motifs (the baptism of Ugolin as King of Carnations). There’s the stunning music, inspired by Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino… and the narrative actually traces back to the very first English tragic play in blank verse The Tragedie of Gorboduc (“they more the mischief….for the want of water….and work in vain”). It’s rare and ambitious enough for a film to share in these, but to be worthy of them too? It leaves you simply in awe.

Writer-director Claude Berri produced Tess in ’79 and doubles down on making another all-time beautiful looking movie. Bruno Nuytten’s last project as cinematographer (the greatest dp mic drop ever) is breathtaking, painterly, with compositions of poetic-terror. At an epic 4-hour length, there are no bland patches - the movie only gains as it goes. Everything matters, every little thing even the tiniest of details (if I was writing a book on movie props I’d call it: Florette’s Comb). And it all leads to a climactic twist so rattling it might leave you sobbing or lapidified. Whenever I replay the twist in my head..... I get chills every time.

Emmanuelle Béart as titular Manon is one of the most beautiful women ever put to screen - and what’s beauty without the beasts - Daniel Auteuil gives an all-time performance of puppy yessing, pathetic passion, and meltdown heartbreak. Ugolin is like an agrarian Igor to Uncle Cesar, played by Yves Montand with aged greed... he’s intelligent-seeming, estimable, yet badly fallible and there’s a chilling sinking-feeling to his perf as he realizes this. Depardieu as the hunchback Jean de is refreshing and deeply affecting. These three live around shame….. either as something always present to be endured, or lifelong and deflected until it’s far too late to make it right.