The 1980 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1980

VOTE THROUGH FEBRUARY 29

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add these two shorts:

Strangulation Blues (Leos Carax)

Robert Haller’s Wedding (Jonas Mekas)

[swo17]

Added, thanks!

[yoshimori]

I would vote for Larry Jordan's "Carabosse" if it becomes eligible.

[swo17]

Added

[knives]

I highly recommend Paul Mazursky’s Willie and Phil for the list. Mazursky gives the roadmap to early PTA and Tarantino by using a film as a jumping off point for a story that is radically different in all ways. Instead of young, tragic love this becomes a mature look at a sort of ‘incestuous’ as one character puts it homoreciprocity.

More than Jules and Jim which it remakes this has a kindred spirit to Mazursky’s debut as if he were revisiting the characters from a decade of perspective or making a sequel to Next Stop, Greenwich. I couldn’t help but view this as coming from a place of autobiography and regret.

This is anchored, ironically given her secondary status, by Margot Kidder’s quiet freight train. Where does love and modernity go? Her performance is the way to find out.

[Maltic]

The Shock of the New

[knives]

My first little dump of thoughts.

Gregory’s Girl is a pretty massive step up from That Sinking Feeling. Forsyth ties his go with the flow tendencies to a thorough line that really adds strength to the ramble. It’s kind of fascinating how the more story there is the better he does considering how his strengths aren’t usually associated with a strong narrative approach.

Private Benjamin
Wasn’t expecting a film like this at all. Thought it was going to be some staid thing like those awful adult Blake Edwards comedies from the same era. Instead I got a winning and vibrant comedy that charmed with its cultural specificity. Hawn’s central performance in particular sells this movie. It’s got to be one of the best comedic performances of the decade and takes an actor who I hadn’t paid mine to before and makes her someone I’ll be more careful to observe in the future.

The whole thing imbues the modern need for realism with a classical comedy flavour, with Zieff doing a great visualization of Meyers’ voice, that seems otherwise impossible to pull off. The early scene with the recruiter is the best example of that. It makes no sense and needs to be played in a form of absurdity like you’d see with Harold Lloyd and it does feel that way, but it’s shot with such straightness that I never felt like I was in the hyper reality of low comedy. It’s just exhilarating and might just make my list.

The Shadow Box is definitely Newman’s weakest as a director and that says quite a lot as this is a really good movie merely hampered by the television budget insisting on a more theatrical style. That makes the film more dependent on the actors then ever before. Plummer and Woodward fair the best able to convey with subtlety ideas of love and death. I have to admit though I adored Sidney’s showy piece of overacting the most. It’s just a fun confrontation of a subject, dementia, which gives me the deepest chills possible. Poor Harper is probably best not mentioned in all her redundant glory.

[knives]

My second drop off.

Out of the Blue
While not anywhere as abstract and experimental as his previous two features Out of the Blue still feels alien in a way that is shockingly powerful. I really began to realize just how unlike other pictures of contemporary America it is during one of the driving scenes where a lack of seatbelt was so prominent. The concerns and cares of contemporary society just don’t exist even before Hopper lifts up the rock to show the ecosystem underneath. This is just a jean covered exposè on the happy living of the ugly America. How did he go from this to Colors in under a decade?

American Gigolo
Usually when I think of art transitioning from one decade to the other it usually takes awhile. Think, for example, how the ‘00s style didn’t really come about until 2002 or so. That left my jaw on the floor as Schrader with a heaping help from Bruckheimer and Moroder especially bring the ‘80s in with full force from the word go. It’s such a powerful aesthetic statement that with toxicity drags the audience to this world where all connections have a cost that the fact that Schrader has so dramatically improved on each of these beats since doesn’t seem to matter.

[the preacher]

Missing:
Baddegama (Village in the Jungle)
The Final Countdown
Honeysuckle Rose
Kontrakt (The Contract)
El nido (The Nest)
Night of the Juggler

[swo17]

All added, thanks

[knives]

Linked is the Letterboxd cheat sheet. Now, no else watch great movies Swo has never heard of.

[Toland's Mitchell]

I've never seen the infamous Heaven's Gate, what better time than now? However, I'm seeing there are multiple versions. There's a 2.5 hr cut streaming on Prime and Pluto, while the original 3.5 hr cut is a little harder to come by, though still accessible. But that's the version that was so poorly received, it was pulled almost immediately after release. Which version should I watch?

[therewillbeblus]

I've never seen the infamous Heaven's Gate, what better time than now? However, I'm seeing there are multiple versions. There's a 2.5 hr cut streaming on Prime and Pluto, while the original 3.5 hr cut is a little harder to come by, though still accessible. But that's the version that was so poorly received, it was pulled almost immediately after release. Which version should I watch?

Coincidentally, I just revisited this the other day for the first time in like a decade. It's still just okay, but worth seeing the longer version for the experience. It's messy and the battles are overlong and really spin into aimless yarn in the last act, and a lot of character moments go on for a while without a sense of characterization.. But that all seems to be part of its authenticity. Violent battles are wild and chaotic and unromantic, so there's a Peckinpah inspiration here yet without the same kind of sharp urgency at capturing it all - Cimino does want that control over getting it 'right' but I don't think he cares as much if we hone in on that one detail that Peckinpah uses the medium to ensure we take away. Cimino's film comes across as more laxed, more of an epic, picturesque approach to all the details coexisting. He captures a sense of atmosphere with dirt and pathos and banality and silent yearning and all the tension that reveals an undercurrent of respect amongst two male foes, or a strange form of love between Huppert and her suitors that we're not really invited into understanding, because they can't really communicate with one another or themselves to truly understand it either - they just feel it. The attention to immigrants in America and the systemic politics occurring in real time is powerful and respectable. There's a lot of action occurring around languid souls. In a way, it feels like a film about power dynamics in America leading to lonelinesses (perhaps kicked off by the contrarian speeches about education's utility and function), transmitted into an epic surrounding micro-examples of individuals suffering as stand-ins for the nation and all of us to come.

I don't believe the truncated version captures this well, and I also think you may be slightly mistaken with those facts: First, the longer cut is the one released on boutique labels (it has a Criterion blu!) but also, I think both cuts were poorly received - If memory serves, the studio pulled the original longer cut and released the edited one a year later, but then also pulled that one immediately when it was bashed, maybe even harder. It's the 2.5 hour version I always hear critics referring to as one of the worst movies ever. So give yourself the extra hour, just in case it helps. I have yet to hear or read of one person who prefers the short version, though, so if that person is here, I'd love to hear why!

[Toland's Mitchell]

That is correct according to my research. The original 3.5 hr cut was pulled after one week in 1980, poorly received. To try to save face and recoup some losses, the 2.5 hr cut was released in '81, and it didn't help save the film from critical and financial disaster. However, that 2.5 hr cut is the one that's just a click away on Prime and Pluto. I'm merely seeing if the longer version is worth the extra effort to seek out. We have one vote for yes. I'm also curious if someone prefers the shorter version, but if nobody comes to its aid, the longer version is the one I'll go with.

[Matt]

I think the cut that is on the Criterion disc is a newer, third, sort of “Final Cut” version that Cimino made specifically for the release. It seems there is no way to see the original theatrical cut unless there’s a vintage print in a film archive somewhere, which I seriously doubt given its very short release.

[therewillbeblus]

I never knew that! Thanks, Matt

[Roger Ryan]

As I understand it, the Criterion edit is pretty much the original three-and-half hour cut with a couple minor adjustments that Cimino requested; it’s not a significant revamping. I’m not a fan of the film, but the longer version is better as the entire opening Harvard sequence was deleted for the shorter version and that’s the footage that sets up the main characters (John Hurt’s character especially; his later appearance doesn’t hold as much weight without the introduction to him). Now, it’s not that the sequence sets up the story all that well, but I’d rather have it than not. Beyond that, the main appeal of the film is how great the art direction is and you get to see more of that with the extra hour.

[therewillbeblus]

That's basically how I feel too, except I think the film's strongest moment is the ending. All of the dull, quiet, droning movement whilst lazing around finally builds to this deeply sad coda that just hits, at least it did for me this watch - like you could finally exhale a bit, and shed a tear to cathartically acknowledge that truth, only without actually giving it the care it really needs. It's a cumulative effect where, in a very odd fashion for an epic, I didn't feel sad for any character in particular, but for the many stoic sufferers who did, until we gained some strategies and skills and assets and then discarded most of them typing irresponsibly all the time about dumb things

[BrianB]

I've never seen the infamous Heaven's Gate, what better time than now? However, I'm seeing there are multiple versions. There's a 2.5 hr cut streaming on Prime and Pluto, while the original 3.5 hr cut is a little harder to come by, though still accessible. But that's the version that was so poorly received, it was pulled almost immediately after release. Which version should I watch?

Amazon lists the runtime as 151 minutes for some reason but it’s actually the 3:37 minute version.

[therewillbeblus]

I've never seen the infamous Heaven's Gate, what better time than now? However, I'm seeing there are multiple versions. There's a 2.5 hr cut streaming on Prime and Pluto, while the original 3.5 hr cut is a little harder to come by, though still accessible. But that's the version that was so poorly received, it was pulled almost immediately after release. Which version should I watch?

Amazon lists the runtime as 151 minutes for some reason but it’s actually the 3:37 minute version.

That silly Amazon

[geoffcowgill]

I highly recommend Paul Mazursky’s Willie and Phil for the list. Mazursky gives the roadmap to early PTA and Tarantino by using a film as a jumping off point for a story that is radically different in all ways. Instead of young, tragic love this becomes a mature look at a sort of ‘incestuous’ as one character puts it homoreciprocity.

More than Jules and Jim which it remakes this has a kindred spirit to Mazursky’s debut as if he were revisiting the characters from a decade of perspective or making a sequel to Next Stop, Greenwich. I couldn’t help but view this as coming from a place of autobiography and regret.

This is anchored, ironically given her secondary status, by Margot Kidder’s quiet freight train. Where does love and modernity go? Her performance is the way to find out.

Thanks for this recommendation. This one hadn't been on my radar, but I really enjoyed it (albeit via YouTube). Many of Mazursky's movies were ubiquitous on cable and as VHS rentals when I was growing up, but I don't remember liking any of what I saw, so until recently he'd been a filmmaker that I had no interest in. Recent viewings of An Unmarried Woman and now Willie & Phil are inching me close to making it a point to take in his entire body of work. He'll be a mainstay in my 1980s' queues, to be sure.

The film is fascinating as an immediate end-of-the-decade review of "what were the '70s," or the first half of it, anyway. Without larding on a host of overt cultural signifiers, and while staying true to the self-centered concerns of the characters, Mazursky does a remarkable job of imbuing subtle specificity in recreating an era and spritzes a light mist of zeitgeist. That last scene is particularly impressive in that regard. I can't help but compare the movie to Annie Hall, and as much as I love Allen's film, Willie & Phil comes off better in the comparison in a couple of ways. Despite the meet-cute of the title characters at a screening of Jules & Jim and the eventual love triangle they find themselves in, Willie & Phil proceeds with very little cultural referent pretentions. Alvy Singer takes dates to The Sorrow and the Pity and Face to Face; Mazursky's characters take in screenings of of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. And while the trio goes "beyond" social mores in their relationship(s), there is an ironically shocking lack of sensationalism throughout the movie. I struggle to put it in words, but both Willie & Phil and An Unmarried Woman have such an assured mellowness of tone, somehow akin to Rohmer. It's lovely.

I agree that Kidder is very good in this, but Michael Ontkean was a revelation to me. I had seen him in little else but Twin Peaks, where I always thought his performance was pretty poor, but he's very affecting as Willie.

-------

My under-the-radar recommendation for this year is Mike Leigh's Grown Ups. I've seen Abigail's Party, but otherwise am pretty ignorant of Leigh's TV work. Grown Ups is a delightful little comedy of menace, like a loosey-goosey Pinter. Forget Darth Vader or Jack Torrance; Brenda Blethyn's Gloria is 1980's greatest villain.

[Toland's Mitchell]

Got around to Heaven's Gate this weekend, all 216 minutes of it, and I liked it more than other posters here. But no, this was not a great film, rather, a film with great ingredients haphazardly tossed in a mixing bowl, leaving a mess. As great as Huppert's performance, the production design, and the cinematography were, there were very noticeable narrative and pacing problems. The love triangle felt under-cooked. Why did Sam Waterston mysteriously disappear from the movie for what felt like 75 minutes after being developed as the film's main antagonist? Why did so many scenes (e.g. graduation, skating rink dance, Kristofferson's reading of the names, etc.) linger beyond their welcome? They didn't so much as build momentum, but sometimes did the opposite. However, Cimino's revisionist Western was an admirable, ambitious reach for the stars. There was something to be said here about 19th century treatment of immigrants, the ideals of the Eastern US placed in the lawless frontier. And for the most part, I found those elements were strong, which made the very ending deal a solid blow. Furthermore, the cinematography was incredible. There were a couple times I found myself looking at the gorgeous scenery in the background, and not paying much attention to the action and dialogue. For me, the setting added meaning to the film's title more than simply the name of the immigrant's skating rink. If we were to associate heaven as a place of death and beauty, the film certainly provided a lot of both. In sum, I found this Heaven's Gate flawed, but respectable. On a slightly-related note, its critical and commercial failure reminded me of 2022's Blonde. While both films felt unnecessarily long and had their glaring problems, I found the negativity blown out of proportion, as though critics and audiences were ready to scathe the film before they even finished it, too focused on the flaws while ignoring the positives. And both films unjustly went on to win some Razzie Awards. I'm glad Heaven's Gate has received some positive reassessment decades later, maybe Blonde will too (though let's not call them masterpieces).

[knives]

Submitted my list which has to be the oddest I’ve done so far. A short at number one and five films over three hours.

[domino harvey]

I submitted but this is the least enthused I’ve been about a year’s releases since we started. Hopefully the 80s look up as we go