[imagesource: United /Everett / Rex Features]
The 198os were a hell of a time.
Fancy a trip down memory lane to unpack the best films of the decade?
Like many things in life, what makes a good film or a bad film is subjective, but some are almost universally regarded as masterpieces.
Don’t shoot the messenger in this case because it’s Rolling Stone that has ranked the top 100 films of the 1980s, with a little intro to boot:
So it wasn’t that hard, after many Zima-fueled nights of popping VHS tapes in and out of our video cassette recorders, to come up with a definitive ranked list of the 100 greatest movies of the 1980s. Some of these went home with Oscars. Some dominated the box office for weeks on end. Some of these became instant cult classics and some were smaller films championed by few at the time, and have only recently — and belatedly — been rediscovered as true treasures.
The good news is that you might just find a few gems that slipped past your radar to add to the watchlist.
Without further ado, number five.
Ran (1985):
…Akira Kurosawa remains the greatest of all Shakespearean interpreters in cinema — and Ran, his majestic Sengoku-era spin on King Lear, is perhaps the most ravishing of all his films.
The legendary Japanese filmmaker had already given us one samurai stunner in the ‘80s with Kagemusha, his gorgeous, three-hour medieval war epic, yet that was effectively a dry run for the sound and the fury he’d conjure, sorcerer-like, here.
We’ll drop the trailer for each film in to save you venturing to YouTube yourself.
4 – Blue Velvet (1986):
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” The difference between the two is negligible in David Lynch’s sumptuous, sadomasochistic coming-of-age story about the skittering creatures crawling underneath the surface of small-town Americana…
Blue Velvet is one of Lynch’s most accessible films — albeit not exactly a family-friendly one… Add a thick layer of deadpan irony, unexpectedly silly humor, and a grotesque take on ‘80s-meets-’50s retro kitsch, and you have a movie that could only come from the strange world of a singular, warped imagination.
Lynch is still going strong – you might have seen that 17-minute oddity on Netflix – but this is among his finest work:
3 – Raging Bull (1980):
Martin Scorsese’s filmography long ago grew past the point of any critical consensus over his best film, but his brilliant, bruising Jake LaMotta portrait may be the most immaculate and all-encompassing of his major works — an American tragedy and an American Dream story in one, marked by some of the director’s roughest, most lacerating storytelling and his most poetic craft.
Whatever its place on the Scorsesemeter, however, Raging Bull inarguably stands as one of the great biopics…
Robert De Niro nails the role of LaMotta and rightly won the 1981 Oscar for Best Actor.
2 – Videodrome (1983):
James Woods (at his James Woodsiest – which is to say, slimy, sleazy, and completely amoral) is Max Renn, CEO of a UHF television station catering to the lowest common denominator. Scouring the airwaves, he happens to stumble across something that shocks even him: a pirate signal of indeterminate origin, featuring “just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. It’s very realistic.”
The longer he attempts to track down the source and exploit it, the more Renn is drawn into both a shady underground conspiracy and the darkest recesses of his own mind, resulting in a quintessentially Cronenbergian mixture of unnerving imagery and disturbing body horror.
Alright, calm down.
Here we go. The greatest film of the 1980s.
Spoiler alert – it’s not what you might expect.
1 – Do the Right Thing (1989):
You can feel writer-director Spike Lee channeling a decade’s worth of real-life racial strife, urban anxiety, American culture clashes and class struggles into this powder keg of a movie, dropping audiences into the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood (“Bed-Stuy, Do or Die!”)…
Old-world prejudices bump up against modern demands for representation and a blatantly racist police force. Tensions start to rise quicker than the thermometers on the wall of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. And then Lee turns up the heat a little more, in the form of a match lighting the end of a very short fuse.
I’ll be honest and admit I’d never even heard of this film.
In case you were wondering, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was only good enough for 27th, The Terminator for 28th, The Shining for 16th (come on!), and Die Hard for 15th.
Hang on – This Is Spinal Tap was 29th? Eish.
Anyway, see the full 100 here and pick out the rankings which irk you the most in your own time.
[source:rollingstone]
