Specifically movies made in the 80s, not movies about the 80s.

Our company Christmas party has an 80s theme this year. The invitation emphasized bright colors, shoulder paddings and, for some reason, dancing around handbags. Well, I was alive in the 80s and this isn’t my 80s. My 80s was the death of Ian Curtis (although I was only 3 at the time), Blixa Bargeld experimenting with whatever he could find, Sisters of Mercy clad in full black driving on a sunny day singing about the death of the planet, rise of hardcore punk and thrash metal, industrial music becoming another form of counterculture, but then going mainstream, fear of nuclear war and “gay cancer” (which was what AIDS was called at one point), kids’ shows turning into toy commercials, rampant financial mismanagement, trauma from WWII was still lingering and the trauma of Viet Nam was just becoming part of the discourse with veterans often taking the brunt of the negative backlash, even though they often had little choice in the matter, rise of both neocons and neolibs… 80s definitely wasn’t fun and my favorite movies from the era definitely reflect this (with one exception).

On movies in general, this was the era where auteur culture of the 70s started to fall away as the big action films started to rise. While Star Wars had already come out a few years earlier, it heralded the arrival of the franchises with Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Die Hard and so many others. With equipment becoming cheaper, there was a bunch of cheap slasher films in the early 80s, but there were also kid-friendly gateway horror movies, like Gremlins, Ghostbusters and The Gate. Dramas could still do great business regularly, like Dead Poets Society, Rain Man, The Color Purple and Terms of Endearment all doing great business.

It was also the beginning of a new stage of globalization in movies. Often the international releases of movies were slow before. For example, Star Wars was released May of 1977, but only started to be rolled out, despite huge success, internationally months later and not being released in the UK until early 1978 and in Japan, its biggest international market, over a year after the original release in the US. In contrast, Die Hard (1988) was released in Lesotho on the same day it received a wide release in the US (it had a short limited run before that). The roll out was just that much faster.

Also, the limited release… That used to be a thing for many more movies. Now movies are very frontloaded in their release, but in those days they would take their time. That’s of course mostly due to Internet, but in those days movies would remain in discourse much longer.

Do my favorites reflect any of this? Not really. My favorites reflect the trauma that was still felt from WWII (quite a bit actually) and Viet Nam as well as the fears regarding technology, but there’s also another side to these. There’s also a longing for culture and then there’s that one shining piece of art that was dismissed for a very long time before gaining a repraisal in the 2000s. In a way these reflect a new interest in movies from across the world in a way that we hadn’t seen before. Mostly anime. Sure, Japanese movies had been popular for a long time in the West, especially those of Kurosawa, but it wasn’t until the late 80s that anime really gained any real foothold.

In chronological order… (well, close at least, as I didn’t check actual release dates, just the release years).

Das Boot (1981)

It is weird that Wolfgang Petersen, a very mediocre director with a very hit-and-mostly-miss career, has this masterpiece in his filmography. For the longest time I only knew this movie from a hit song in the 90s that sampled the theme heavily, but when I had the opportunity to see this, I was immediately mesmerized. This is a very different take from what we usually see in war movies. It does live up to what I heard from someone who participated in WWII: was is mostly boredom and then moments where you hope you could just get back to the boredom. Not that the movie is ever boring, which is in itself an accomplishment considering the length of the full six hour version.

Idi i Smotri aka Come and See (1985)

More WWII fun! A young kid finds an old rifle and ends up joining the partisans in Belarus to fight against the Germans. He is completely out of his depth and the movie brings this into the fore by not focusing on the threats. Instead, we see the panic and fear the kid experiences. Now, I don’t like the lengths they went to get this effect (using live rounds at some points in the movie, for example) and I’m not going to defend that. Don’t do that to your actors, especially kids. They are actors. They should be able to get those emotions out without that kind of help.

Robocop (1987)

Moving onto fears of Fascism through technology. Verhoeven’s movies are often misunderstood, but this should be quite clear. Corporate control is taking away human rights and while they attempt to take this even further by enslaving a police officer to do their bidding as a machine, the human spirit overcomes. Also, the movie is just very funny.

Princess Bride (1987)

The light that shines… so, of course, it wasn’t a hit at the time. It made little over 30 million on a budget of 16 million, which, considering the exhibition fees for theaters, marketing, higher distribution costs in the age of movies shown on film (each copy cost over a thousand dollars) and lack of secondary income streams meant that the movie was kind of a failure. And I remember the attitudes around this movie. It was seen as just a joke and not something a serious person could like. Gladly, it has since become a something that’s considered a classic. For a good reason as well. It is just very unique. There just isn’t anything like it.

Der Himmel über Berlin aka Wings of Desire (1987)

An angel starts to long for human life, because he sees that he can’t have experiences in his current form. It turns out he wasn’t the first to think of this.

I’m kind of iffy on the role of the female love interest here. The movie puts a lot of pressure on someone who is basically being stalked by an angel and then has to take responsibility for someone who seems to be an adult human with no papers or money. Still, forgetting that, this is a great look at the mundane beauty of being a human.

Hotaru no haka aka The Grave of Fireflies (1988)

Getting back to the WWII trauma. This isn’t from the frontlines, but has a different point of view. Two kids try their best to survive in Japan during bombing raids. Its a crushing portrayal of the miseries these two face. Sure, they lived in a country that was in a war, but the kids never did anything wrong. *Cough*Palestine*Cough*.

Akira (1988)

…and back to those fears around technology and the fascism it enables. Well, this is a pretty current topic right now. While Robocop isn’t explicit in regards to the year its all supposed to take place, this movie is set in the faraway future of 2019. The army is fighting protesters on the streets while gangs, like that of the eponymous Akira, are battling each other just for fun and bragging rights. Here, a power that had already decimated the city once, begins to awaken. Nothing to do with nukes, I swear.

Full Metal Jacket (1988)

There’s a sample in a song by Paul Hardcastle called 19 that says something along the lines “in World War II, the average age of a combat soldier was 26, in Viet Nam it was 19”. While our bodies might be fully adult by that point, our brains don’t reach that point until about 25. So, the war was fought by kids. Also, in WWII very few soldiers would actually shoot at the enemy. In Viet Nam most would. That’s probably partly racism, but also just a whole different level of indoctrination that we witness in the first part of the movie. The latter part mostly focuses on the results of this brainwashing.

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)

A lighter movie. An Italian movie about cinema itself as told through the eyes of movie fan who grows up to be a director. The local theater is the center of the city (at least in the eyes of the kid) and many of his experiences are tinted by his understanding of movies (like he can’t describe his love interest except in terms of physical beauty, because that’s what movies focus on).

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)

Greenaway’s movies are pretty timeless, so I’ve never thought of this as an 80s movie before, but you could easily draw a line between the Thief and the Tory rule of the time. The Thief is a bully who takes over a restaurant in an attempt to be more cultured for the sake of the Wife, but its mostly just for show as they tear the restaurant down with their antics while the Wife has the affair in the toilets with a man that is actually cultured. That’s probably what I love about the movie: it is very in your face about the bullying and sometimes it does things that might feel disgusting, but it is also beautiful. I guess you could say that the message is to find something in life that makes that life worth living, even if you are risking everything.