…when I was on a few long-lead invite lists and living a fairly fast Manhattan life in most respects, especially for a guy making a relatively shitty salary…parked in a comfy, semi-spacious studio on Bank Street, hitting screenings, parties and bars three or four nights per week, occasionally training to Connecticut on weekends and batting a healthy .400…late-breaking curves, sliders, fastballs, change-ups, spitballs, knuckleballs.
14 months ago I posted HE’s top 30 films of 1986. I’ve since rewatched Bruce Beresford‘s Crimes of the Heart, and I hated it so much I turned it off after a half-hour. So I took it out and popped in John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China and Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge.
So here’s HE’s top 23 films of ’86, along with 8 good ones that were compromised by minor flaws.
It’s very hard to accept that 1986 was 40 effing years ago.
(1) Oliver Stone‘s Platoon;
(2) James Cameron‘s Aliens;
(3) Oliver Stone‘s Salvador,
(4) David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet,
(5) Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild,
(6) Michael Mann‘s Manhunter,
(7) Neil Jordan‘s Mona Lisa,
(8) Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters,
(9) David Cronenberg’s The Fly,
(10) Jim Jarmusch‘s Down By Law,
(11) Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn,
(12) James Ivory‘s A Room with a View,
(13) Jean-Jacques Beineix‘s Betty Blue,
(14) Spike Lee‘s She’s Gotta Have It
(15) Adrien Lyne‘s 9 1/2 Weeks,
(16) Hal Ashby‘s 8 Million Ways to Die,
(17) Randa Haines‘ Children of a Lesser God,
(18) Martin Scorsese‘s The Color of Money,
(19) David Anspaugh‘s Hoosiers,
(20) Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge,
(21) Jamie Foley’s At Close Range,
(22) Sidney Lumet‘s The Morning After
(23) Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge
Generally Good but Slightly Second Tier:
(24) Roland Joffe‘s The Mission, (25) Claude Berri‘s Manon of the Spring, (26) Tony Scott‘s Top Gun, (27) Fons Rademakers‘ The Assault, (28) David Zucker‘s Ruthless People, (29) Paul Mazursky‘s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, (30) John Hughes‘ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, (31) John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China.
According to V. Renée’s 9.2.13 post on www.nofilmschool.com, John Sturges‘ Bad Day at Black Rock (’54) was shot in two aspect ratios — old CinemaScope (2.55:1) and flat Academy ratio (1.37:1). The MGM guys weren’t completely confident that CinemaScope would work out so they wanted a flat version as a backup alternative.
This was exactly the same thinking behind the dual-aspect-ratio filming of Daryl F. Zanuck and Henry Koster‘s The Robe (’53).
The flat versions of The Robe and Bad Day at Black Rock were never released, of course, although the boxy Robe is viewable as PiP feature in Fox Home Video’s 2009 special edition Bluray.
I would love, love, love to see the boxy version of Bad Day at Black Rock. I’m presuming it’s been trashed or otherwise lost, but this is the kind of thing that fans of classic films on Bluray tend to wet themselves over.
I didn’t like Grand Funk Railroad back in the day. Too metal, too muscular, too macho, too Michigan. But now they sound pretty good, or this signature song does at least.
HE will be catching a Project Hail Mary screening tomorrow afternoon….let’s let it lay until commentary is appropriate.
THR‘s Pamela McLintock has posted an encouraging report about increasing movie theatre attendance among Zoomers and therefore a hopeful trend as far as the future of brick-and-mortar cinemas are concerned.
McLintock: “Zoomers had been written off as anti-moviegoing since they were the first generation to bond 24/7 with an iPhone or other device. [And yet] social media has them craving a collective experience, resulting in a rise in theatergoing among those born between 1997 and 2012.
Comscore’s Paul Degarabedian: “GenZ is ironically drawn to the classic analog experience of going to the movie theater. They are able to blend this traditional activity with their digital lives, using theater outings as fodder for social engagement.”
This is all well and good except for one teeny weeny thing: Zoomers are not only plagued with short attention spans, but are sorely undereducated as far as exposure to rich, transcendent classic cinema is concerned. They regard the ’80s as ancient history and have barely delved into the late ’60s to late ’70s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era. And you can totally forget even a passing GenZ awareness of films made in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
If taste is a result of a thousand distastes, as Francois Truffaut once observed, being undereducated or under-exposed to the really good stuff from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (1986, don’t forget, was one of the greatest years ever!), it follows that Zoomers are incapable of having anything resembling good taste because they don’t know very much about what constitutes great cinema during the Mark Harris “Pictures at a Revolution” heyday. They just don’t know enough. Hell, they don’t want to know any more than what they know now.
I wouldn’t want to say that the vast majority of Zoomers, cinematically-speaking, are mentally smug chuckleheads who adore their own insularity and ignorance, but it sure seems this way.
And so they adore wank-off films like Sinners and Everything Everywhere All At Once and Deadpool & Wolverine and all the other cancer-causing shite out there. On top of which they’re wokeys, and so they believe in bullshit presentism (POCs costarring in historical European films set in the 1800s, 1700s and before).
Sidenote: The chart just below this paragraph is hilarious as boomers aren’t even tracking — their theatrical attendance is so minimal that they don’t even count any more. Dead to the world.
Forget the N-word…forget it, forget it, forget it in any present-day context.
Andy Klein sez…
Innocent civilians have been in the collateral line of fire and savagely murdered throughout history. When has this never not been tragic or ghastly?
How many terrified little girls died because of the aggressive battle strategies of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, William Tecumseh Sherman, Adolf Hitler, George S. Patton, Omar Bradley and William Westmoreland?
And how many little German girls died, by the way, from bombs dropped by Lieutenant Colonel James Stewart, who was the flight leader for a massive thousand-plane attack upon Berlin, and who also helped bomb the shit out of Frankfurt, Brunswick, Bremen and Nuremberg?
Why did the false legend about Orson Welles being an indulgent, profligate, financially unreliable director persist? Specific facts argued against this, but the negative rep stuck.
Touch of Evil star Charlton Heston repeatedly told interviewers that Welles was actually rigorous and efficient, often shooting quickly and effectively. Heston also noted that while Welles was a genius-level director, he often struggled with studio executives because he was unwilling to show the “tact, grace and humility” they required. Heston believed that while Hollywood hated Welles, Welles also tended to alienate the people who funded his projects.
It is HE’s belief that Welles’ obesity compromised his career more than anything else. A typical adversarial studio executive might have been told by Heston and others that Welles is a highly disciplined helmer, but one look at his hulking 350-pound physique told the executive one thing: “This man obviously can’t control his eating, so how can I trust him to respect a film’s modest budget?”
If Welles had somehow slimmed himself down to the weight he was carrying in The Stranger, his career path would have almost certainly been easier.
From Owen Gleiberman’s Project Hail Mary review, posted on 3.10.26:
“Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but [it’s] a cosmic adventure that feels diagrammed, if not programmed, to be The Movie We Need Right Now. It never stops figuring out ways to make you fall in love with it.
“Forgive me if I say it’s not very good.
“Ryan Gosling is a middle-school science teacher in nubby sweaters, because his research as a molecular biologist was rejected by the establishment as too radical. But it turns out that he was right about everything. When the sun begins to lose heat, he’s recruited by the powers that be in Washington, represented by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), an official of stoic Euro command who’s the head of the Hail Mary project to save Earth.
“Gosling’s performance in the Earth sections is quite winning, [but] the film feels padded, whether it’s stopping in its tracks for Eva to do a full-blown karaoke version of Harry Styles’ ‘Sign of the Times’ or spilling over into a finale that doesn’t know where to end.
“The sentimental dilemma of whether Gosling, at one point, is going to go forward with the mission or turn the ship around to save Rocky the alien is string-pulling of a very generic order.
“Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.”
Plus it runs 156 minutes, for Chrissake.
The Calvin Klein guys (women, gays) can produce this 1975 Playboy Centerfold-ish video with Dakota Johnson (something to do with CK’s “Spring 2026 Campaign”) and it’s all cool, chill and sanctified. But if a male viewer says “hey, this is tantalizing” and “it got my attention…hell, I’ve got half a stiffie”, he’s a sickening sexist dog.
Speaking of The Hollies, “Pay You Back With Interest” works as well as it does because of (a) the chimes (which kick in at 1:30 and again at 2:12) and (b) the lightly jazzy drum riff at the very end.
