The 25 Best Films of the Eighties

Ultimately any "Best of" list is opinion, and mine is no different. I've seen a lot of different lists online of the "best" eighties films, but they seem to all revolve around the same set of movies. Labyrinth, Die Hard, Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, etc. Sure, those are all great films (except Labyrinth, fight me), but those lists get boring after awhile. So this is a list of my favorite movies from the 80's, and therefore to me they're the best.

The Top 25 Films of the Eighties

25. Vampire's Kiss
(1989, dir. Robert Bierman)

Knuckle

There’s something admirably primal about boxing. It’s a pure and honest sport. Two men agree to step into a ring and pummel each other to their last breath. It’s that simple. What boxing does is that it seems to speak to our innermost desires. It’s the unleashed Id, running wild and delighting in the blood and ruin the sport entails.

In order to box, one must be able to withstand as much pain as he can deliver. The boxer must be ruthless, but calculating and strategic. It’s a sport that simultaneously combines our most primitive tendencies towards senseless violence and the most advanced, tactical parts of our minds. But most importantly, the boxer must be willing to self-destruct.

 

Ian Palmer’s Knuckle is a film that gets to the heart of the sport. This documentary, filmed over the course of twelve years from 1997 to 2009, chronicles the decades-long feud between three Irish traveler families – The Quinn McDonaghs, The Joyces, and The Nevins’. Despite all being cousins, the longstanding feud regularly leads to challenges for bare-knuckle boxing matches.

Unlike professional boxing these bare-knuckle fights are fought outdoors and without rounds. They merely go until one man knocks out the other or one man gives up. There are referees to enforce a clean fight but otherwise it’s purely a raw and personal brawl between two men who fiercely hate each other.

Palmer mainly follows the Quinn McDonaghs, who repeatedly claim that they don’t instigate the fights, they only accept the challenges. To them boxing seems more like a chore that must be done once every couple of years. 

In contrast, the Joyce family, lead by the aging “Big Joe” Joyce, seems to breathe boxing. Big Joe is a loud and rough figure akin to a WWE wrestler with his constant threats and tirades. When it’s his turn to fight, Big Joe unleashes a flurry of punches, protecting his title as “King of the Travelers.” 

Unlike many boxing movies, Palmer doesn’t shy away from the fights. In fact, he shows them in their entirety. Many films tend to only use the fighting as a backdrop for character studies (Raging Bull, Rocky), but Knuckle is as much about boxing as it is about the families involved. There is a gaze during the matches that makes them exciting. They could be horrifying, but they’re just the opposite. 

That’s not to say Palmer doesn’t also focus on the personal stories of the people involved. There is as much of the film about the fights as there is about how this feud has destroyed the relationships between these people. When he interviews the wives of the boxers they all express a desire for the fighting to end and for the families to finally get along again. Palmer also focuses on the children, especially the young boys who have grown up watching their fathers fight and are learning to continue the cycle of violence.

But even Palmer is not immune. Through narration he finally realizes that at some point he had stopped caring about the documentary and had let himself become a part of this bare-knuckle boxing culture. He was no longer going to the fights for the film; he was going because he enjoyed them. And I think that speaks to boxing’s primal appeal. Even those who recognize it’s horror and devastation are still drawn in. He can acknowledge that this feud has caused endless damage, but even he can’t deny the seduction.

And at its core that is what Knuckle, and really boxing itself, is about. It’s watching destruction in action. But Knuckle goes far enough to show what happens when it bleeds outside the ring and it’s no longer fun.

Spring Breakers

Harmony Korine has pulled one of the greatest bait and switches in film history. The advertising for Spring Breakers was expertly designed to lure in teenagers and twenty-somethings with the promise of a wild T&A party movie a la Project X. Well, in a way it delivers on that promise. It gives audiences the nudity and the chaos that is expected from a film like this, but it doesn’t feel quite right. It feels dirty and wrong, as grimy as the drops in its dubstep soundtrack. It’s a college T&A movie, but it’s not the one most people want.

The film opens with four college-aged friends, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachael Korine) trying to figure out how to raise the money they need to go to Florida for spring break. While Faith attends Bible study (and is warned of how wild Candy and Brit are), the other three rob a local restaurant and make off with enough cash to hop a bus to St. Petersburg. 

After a night of partying the group is arrested for possession of cocaine, but they are quickly let go when the evidence doesn’t hold. They then meet rapper/drug dealer Alien (James Franco) who promises to show them a good time, but instead acts as the gateway to a criminal underworld.

Make no mistake Spring Breakers is an arthouse film. To those familiar with writer/director Harmony Korine this is no surprise, but for those who have never heard of him I’ll just say that he’s responsible for a movie called Trash Humpers (and that title should be taken literally).

One aspect of the film that has turned off a lot of audiences is that it plays out like a deranged nightmare. The editing is choppy and nonlinear, full of droning narration repeating phrases like “Pretend it’s like a video game” and “spring break forever” ad nauseum, digging them deeper into your skin with each reframe. It’s like something made by the Bizarro World version of Terrence Malick.

But the editing serves a purpose. Franco’s constant whispering of “spring break” casts a dark specter over the film. Spring break becomes this sinister concept where hypersexuality reigns and oppresses. Women seductively suck on lollipops, men hold beer bottles to their crotches, everybody’s drunk and looking for sex. But to the audience it isn’t titillating. It feels disgusting and perverted. Were this exact footage being shown on MTV or in a Girls Gone Wild video it would be praised and even enforced. But in Spring Breakers it becomes dark and twisted. The veil covering the rape culture of spring break is torn down and revealed for what it is.

Spring Breakers may be the most purely American film of the 21^st century thus far. It’s an exploration into excess and greed that shows a depravity that makes Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas look like a family vacation. Korine holds a mirror to us, the college kids who partake in this yearly ritual of hedonism and debauchery. Of sex and violence. He shoves our faces in our mess. We made our bed and now we must sleep in it.

Some may disagree with me on this, and I wholly understand it. I’ve read several reviews from critics who found the film to be incredibly sexist, and I’m sure plenty more people are going to see it and feel the same way. Harmony Korine has always been as aware of social issues (as in Kids) as he has been intrigued and in admiration of those who indulge in their most primal instincts (the aforementioned Trash Humpers), and Spring Breakers is a bit of both.

The characters of Candy and Brit are sociopaths who show no remorse for their actions. They always want to dig deeper and deeper into the underworld of spring break. They lead their friends, and the audience, on a Heart of Darkness-esque descent into Hell, each step of the way peeling back another layer of the sex-violence conglomeration.

The film’s climax feels like the bastard child of Girls Gone Wild, Grand Theft Auto, and Michael Mann. “Pretend it’s like a video game” becomes words to live by. “Spring break forever” becomes a mantra. Candy and Brit are the people that the spring break lifestyle is made for. They’re the ones without empathy, who care nothing about the dignity of others, who have no regard for human life. They only want to satisfy their own selfish desires.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Spring Breakers has been misrepresented in its advertising. Those going in hoping for something fun and light are going to be sordidly disappointed and they may not know why. They’ll say it’s because of the unconventional free-flow narrative. They’ll say it’s because it’s too dark and creepy. But hopefully it’s because they’ve finally been shown the true darkness hidden within the culture they’ve come to idolize, and that takes time to digest.

Idea for a Film Festival

Strike (1925)
Metropolis (1927)
Modern Times (1936)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Salt of the Earth (1954)
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Killer of Sheep (1977)
Blue Collar (1978)
Matewan (1987)
Office Space (1999)

The Legend of Bigfoot

Obsession. It’s a force of immense power that has guided men to greatness, and driven them to madness. Some strive for wealth, others pine for love. Many become devoted to art, music, and literature. And then there are people like professional animal tracker Ivan Marx, who spent his life looking for something else, something thought unattainable. He wanted Bigfoot.

Marx’s long struggle to prove the existence of the legendary Sasquatch is documented in the obscure 1976 film The Legend of Bigfoot, which can be watched on Youtube. It’s a curio of a movie, like something found off the last exit of a desert highway. Watching it feels like a dream, as if this movie can’t possibly exist and it’s all the result of some weird delirium, and yet there it is.

Not much is known about the film. It was put together from footage shot by Ivan Marx himself by director-for-hire Harry Stuart Winer, whose other credits include several episodes of Veronica Mars and Dawson’s Creek.

As Marx begins the narration which encompasses the entire movie, he tells the audience that the film chronicles the past ten years of his life, which has been spent tirelessly globetrotting in an attempt to document incontrovertible proof of Bigfoot’s existence. Ten years. A decade. Marx’s journey is fueled by an unnatural mania. It’s the perfect mixture of obsession and insanity that has the makings of a Werner Herzog protagonist.

It becomes clear that this is a man who is not only attempting to prove something to the world, but is trying to prove something to himself. He often expresses self-doubt, even questioning his own sanity at times. He will become energetic over what is most certainly undeniable footage of Bigfoot, only for it to be revealed as a bear. When discussing the experts who claim there’s no sufficient evidence, he becomes bitter, speaking with venom. 

Eventually he comes to the conclusion that Bigfoot must be a migratory animal. Following the path, he is led to Alaska, where natives tell him bizarre stories about the creature, such as the time a hunter killed a Sasquatch only to have its spirit come back to bring its wrath upon the people. Rivers of blood flowed from the sky turning the snow red and the “battle of a thousand warriors” was fought.

At times Marx seems to lose his direction. Much of the footage is of various wildlife. There’s a minutes long sequence of a squirrel attempting to pull another dead squirrel out of a road, edited so that it appears that other forest animals are watching. Marx also has a way of trailing off into philosophical rambles on nature, the frontier, and life – but somehow always managing to connect it back to Bigfoot. More than once does a deep discussion of his own life suddenly leap into confirming the existence of Sasquatch.

It’s almost impossible to judge The Legend of Bigfoot on the merits of its filmmaking because the clumsiness of the production feels entwined with its subject. It’s a personal journey, a window into the mind and emotions of a man who has devoted his life to Bigfoot. When we finally see the beast on camera it’s ethereal, even dreamlike. It’s as if I have been fully absorbed, in as much awe as Marx. It doesn't matter that it's fake, because with the entirety of his being Ivan Marx believes it is real. To him the footage is the evidence he needs to prove the experts wrong. We don't know if he just got so fed up with being called crazy that he staged the scenes himself or if he is being duped by somebody else. It's kind of beyond the point. What this film does is open you up to the world of a strange and dedicated man. By the end, despite all scientific evidence, despite his dumbfounding jumps in logic, you want to believe with him. And it’s beautiful, truly beautiful.

Winning Your Wings

Since it's Veteran's Day weekend, I thought I'd share this. The film is called Winning Your Wings. Made in 1942, it was directed by John Huston and is essentially James Stewart telling the audience to join the Air Force. It's classic American propaganda.

What's striking is you can see the ways the film attempts to manipulate it's viewers. Clearly the target audience is men in their late teens to their mid-twenties, and so how do you go about winning them over? Well, you make them feel special. Stewart talks right to the audience, as if he's addressing you. Yes - You! And don't forget about all the pretty ladies you'll woo with your air force pin. 

But what sets Winning Your Wings aside is that it's a fantastic film in it's own right. The cinematography is phenomenal, particularly the flight choreography. There's one shot in particular near the end where lines of planes appear out of the fog. It's mesmerizing - like T.E. Lawrence emerging from the desert.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and frankly, it deserved the nod. It may be have been a recruitment tool, but it's engaging and enjoyable nonetheless. The way the in-the-air shots are framed, the way eager young cadets are so effectively painted as heroes, the way Stewart breaks down at the end into a flurry of rage. Plus, you've got to love the way the filling station attendant reacts when Stewart tells him he "could grow wings any minute."

Some Thoughts On The Grey

At its surface, The Grey appears to be a simple tale of Man vs. Nature. But in actuality, it is a tale of Man vs. Self. It is about Ottoway’s struggle to survive, or whether he should he even try to survive. 

We begin by seeing him with a shotgun in his mouth. And we end by seeing him with broken bottles of whiskey in his fists.

The wolves are harbingers of death. An unstoppable force than can be staved off, but is ultimately inevitable. They are Grim Reapers, who with their mere touch cause men to die where they stand. And they are collectors, who harvest the body and souls of those who falter along the way.

There is a recurring poem:

Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know
Live and die on this day
Live and die on this day

I think more of Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And immortality

When Ottoway yells to the sky demanding something real, something tangible, there is silence. But is there already something real? Are the wolves that sign, that tool of God? A symbol of the destructiveness of God and nature itself? He giveth and he taketh away.

There may be no way to outrun death, but it is up to the man whether he tries.