Prof's Choice
• "Body Heat," Lawrence Kasdan, 1981. Forties film noir and "Double Indemnity" meet Florida and the eighties. Barbara Stanwyck and Fred Mac Murray become Kathleen Turner and William Hurt.
• "Return of the Secaucus Seven," John Sayles, 1980. Sayles, a man of old-fashioned conscience and good will, was one of the few to make unique (if somewhat old-fashioned) independent films on social issues in the eighties (labor wars in "Matewan," lesbianism in "Lianna," race in "The Brother from Another Planet"). Here, he juxtaposes sixties radical consciousness with seventies and eighties careerism, anticipating Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 film "The Big Chill."
• "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Steven Spielberg, 1981. Too popular for most best-of-the-decade lists, it's nonetheless a seminal film, drawing on serials and adventure films beloved by its Hollywood-steeped auteur, but freely improvising on and even spoofing them. Some old-time Hollywood people who were puzzled by it asked me, "Was it meant to be funny or straight?" The answer is both.
• "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," John Hughes, 1986. Another film too popular and conservative for any sophisticated critic's ten-best list. But Hughes is one of the decade's originals remarkable both for his empathy with teenagers and his collage-like pictorial styles, which here attain some of the same elan as Matthew Broderick on his day off in town. The film is something of a visual tour of Chicago that includes museums, restaurants, and a rock parade, all done in a high style reminiscent of thirties comedy.
• "Risky Business," Paul Brickman, 1983. Apart from John Hughes's teenage movies, this is the only other good one. It satirizes the rat race to the Ivy League and the ethics of success. Brickman's ironic tone and fresh visuals were given richness by an energetic and charming Tom Cruise going wild while his parents were away.
• "Tampopo," Juzi Itami, 1987. A totally new comic voice from Japan, Itami depicts and satirizes the Japanese frenzy to imitate and triumph over American business techniques. All about food, the film is not only about the race to make the best noodle, but about food in all its human import. It's simultaneously both story and essay.
• "Thief, "Michael Mann, 1981. The story of ex-con James Caan's one last caper before going straight isn't much. What's really great here is the visual style, the familiar made hyperkinetic, surreal, and charged. Even on TV it's starding. The postmodern look antedates both MTV and Mann's own "Miami Vice."
• "Dreamchild," Gavin Millar, 1985. This neglected British film, scripted by Dennis Potter ("Pennies from Heaven") juxtaposes Alice Liddell in her eighties getting a degree from Columbia, her reinterpretation of her idyll with Lewis Carroll in the 1850s (now seen as sexual), and her hallucinations (portrayed by Jim Henson's puppets). Running with that plot line is a thirties-style story about two young lovers.
• "Patty Hearst," Paul Schrader, 1988. Patty Hearst as postmodern personality. Throughout all her contradictory experiences and positions, she remains Patty Hearst, puzzled but unruffled and uncontradictory. With- out taking sides, Shrader makes an "objective" film that is also about the elusiveness of contemporary identity.
• "Something Wild," Jonathan Demme, 1987. The old romantic road movie like "It Happened One Night" revisited and revised, with its denouement radically altered in tone into a terrifying thriller. All of this is surrounded by a new kind of third world America awash with Caribbean and Latin music.
• "Blue Velvet," David Lynch, 1986. This film goes beneath a small town's quiet norms to find evil, mystery, and sexual horror. Certainly the decade's most bizarre major film, it freely mixes Andy Hardy, film noir, underground surrealism, and a commentary on the voyeurism of movies themselves.
• "The King of Comedy," Martin Scorsese, 1983. Scorsese's "Raging Bull" is seen by most critics as the decade's best movie. I prefer this less ambitious, comic-scary effort about TV and its relationship to viewers. Robert DeNiro and Sandra Bernhard would make you think twice about wanting to be Johnny Carson—here replicated by Jerry Lewis, whom they kidnap and hold hostage.
• "Salvador," Oliver Stone, 1986. Stone's debut film was one of the decade's few films to deal with Central America. Featuring James Woods as a sleazeball sixties journalist, the film collides images of the sixties with those of the eighties.
