Following my reappraisal of the 1984 Oscars, let’s do the same to the year 1983.
These feature eligible movies appearing in 1983, according to the Oscar’s rules.
Terms of Endearment
The Big Chill
The Dresser
The Right Stuff
Tender Mercies
“Terms of Endearment”
The crop of original Best-Picture nominees was pretty good. As you’ll see below, I rate “The Dresser” and “Tender Mercies” highly. These are great movies I recommend to any moviegoer.
“The Right Stuff” has its enthusiasts. I have never felt that way about it. It falls far short of the Tom Wolfe book it’s based on, which I’d probably put up in my ten favorite books I’ve ever read.
But they didn’t choose these. They picked “Terms of Endearment.”
In some future Substack, I will pick on this movie, maybe even try to annihilate it. Superficially, it’s a tender-tough humanistic film that really makes you feel for the main characters, especially the Boomer-mom played excellently by Debra Winger.
But his movie’s value-system is so out of whack that I think in 200 years they could study this one alone as “what was wrong with late 20th-century civilization?” The answer, in a word, as named by Tom Wolfe: “Me.” That is, the self-centered interests of individuals who have no group-loyalty or tradition and who abandon common ties for the sake of their own “needs.”
The people who suffer the most when this happens: the kids. This movie’s kids, I’d argue, predict all that late ‘80s/early’90s angst and social/spiritual disturbances found in youth culture and music.
My initial draft of the Best-Picture nominees is rather massive:
A Christmas Story
The Draughtsman’s Contract
The Dresser
The King of Comedy
Fanny and Alexander (the 3-hour version)
Koyaanisqatsi
Local Hero
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Nostalgia (Tarkovsky’s film – not eligible)
The Return of Martin Guerre
Return of the Jedi
Risky Business
Rumble Fish
Silkwood
Tender Mercies
Videodrome
The Year of Living Dangerously
Zelig
Mostly you can’t go wrong with this list, as a list of recommendations. In retrospect, as usual in the 1980s, any Gen-X-type list I come up with — grungy, cynical, pointed, honest — beats the schmaltzier, nostalgia-driven cheese of the Best-Picture nominee list.
Pick any five movies in the list above out of a hat, and it will be a better five-picture viewing experience for most people than the original Best-Picture nominee list.
To highlight a few of these:
“The Return of Martin Guerre” is a fascinating movie set in early-modern France, at a time when all people had was their memories, and no photographs or videos to confirm them. That’s crucial to the plot, in which a man goes off to war, returns to his village many years later, and people accept him as the real Martin Guerre. But he might be an imposter. That man is played by Gerard Depardieu, who may have the best filmography of this decade.
“Zelig” is one of my favorite Woody-Allen films, an alternative-history PBS-like documentary that seems extremely narcissistic — Allen plays a gadfly who was involved in the lives of everybody famous during the 1920s — but it’s a self-deprecating wish-fulfillment writ large. This movie spawned a film-rarity: a ubiquitous noun still in use, “a zelig.”
“Koyaanisqatsi” is a hypnotic movie that deals in another movie-rarity: a film that tries to encompass nearly everything in the universe (ala “2001” and “The Tree of Life). In it’s own way, it’s about everything, while being part-documentary and part-ambient trance.
“The King of Comedy” to me is one of Martin Scorsese’s greatest movies, his rare social commentary about something other than really terrible killer-types. This one’s about mass media and the way viewers interact with it. Today, this movie would’ve been nominated; back then, it was mostly misunderstood. But it has lasted and aged very well, in comparison to almost all 1980s Best-Picture nominees.
“Rumble Fish” is Francis Ford Coppola’s arthouse ‘50s-Teen romp, a weird film in comparison to his more straightforward offering of similar content, “The Outsiders.” I love the score, the first created by ex-Police drummer Stewart Copeland. Few movie scores have ever taken the risks that this one has.
The Draughtsman’s Contract
The King of Comedy
Local Hero
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Tender Mercies
This is what I meant by a Gen-X list. Films 1, 2, and 4 on this list fit the “darker, cynical, honest” label that for sure.
Yet the other two I unabashedly recommend to you and yours. “Tender Mercies” is a classic Robert Duvall masterclass on acting, a movie drenched with country-music sorrow. Duvall plays a former country music star whose life is in the dumps. He’s tries to remake his life at a remote gas-station, befriending a young boy and his single-mother. Besides the garrish country-music scene of the early 1980s, this movie remains deeply affecting.
But the winner is . . .
“Local Hero.”
One of the most magical movies ever made.
One of my older videos tried to convey how great this movie is.
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