You might find that strange, given the consensus among many film critics and historians that it's one of film's weakest decades, and having been born in 1988 I could just be biased or longing for an era before my own. But I'm totally sincere here. So join me, if you like, as I try to defend the cinematic decade in which Marty McFly went Back to the Future, E.T. phoned home, Luke Skywalker learned his father's identity, and so much more.
Now, like the surrounding decades the '80s may not have seen quite as widespread in influence a new twist on cinema, like the '60s and '70s with the New Hollywood movement (which ended in 1980 with the flop of all flops, Heaven's Gate) or the Dogma 95 movement and hyperlink cinema in the '90s, but the '80s did give us another that has, mostly, held up flawlessly: the high-concept movie. Glossy, ambitious, enthusiastic and very suspenseful (and sometimes also very resonant) titles like Blade Runner (1982), Die Hard (1988), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Back to the Future (1985), Batman (1989), Top Gun (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987) et cetera. Now, I wasn't actually that fussed on those last two, but there's no denying the classics. They evidently worked, because they're now a T-shirt slogan or social media meme. And you can see their influence in contemporary films like Kick-Ass (2010), Detention (2011, in which Josh Hutcherson also puts his own spin on Patrick Swayze's Dirty Dancing (1987) routine, no less), Skyline (2011), Big Hero 6 (2014) and TV shows like Orphan Black. Walt Disney Studios also returned to the forefront with 1989's The Little Mermaid, which started the Disney Renaissance of the '90s.
I acknowledge, though, that this has commercialised cinemas, somewhat detrimentally, but then and now, art and commerce CAN combine. Hollywood in the '80s still managed to produce a great deal of beautifully made, more (explicitly) dramatic works like Raging Bull (1980, for me both Martin Scorsese's and Robert De Niro's finest hour), Dead Poets Society (1989), Platoon (the 1986 Best Picture Oscar winner and for me the best of all war films), Amadeus (Best Picture, 1984), Reds (1981), Empire of the Sun (1987) and my top horror film of all time, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).
But the rest of the world very much held its own here against Hollywood. Australian film surfed the New Wave at full force. Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981) is arguably the best Australian film ever made, and coming after Breaker Morant (1980) and the first Mad Max (1979), it began Australia's remarkable Hollywood invasion: Weir, Bruce Beresford (who directed 1989's Driving Miss Daisy to the Best Picture Oscar, and over Weir's Dead Poets Society, no less), Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, New Zealand's Jane Campion and Roger Donaldson, and stars Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Mel Gibson, Judy Davis and of course Paul Hogan, whose Crocodile Dundee (1986) remains the most lucrative Aussie film ever, and earned a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (he even also co-hosted that year's show).
In Japan, the seeds of the coming worldwide popularity of anime and manga were sown, with Isao Takahata's devastating Grave of the Fireflies (my favourite work from the remarkable Studio Ghibli) and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (both 1988). France's Louis Malle reflected on his wartime childhood with the powerful Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987) and a Canadian former truck driver named James Cameron broke through with The Terminator (1984). The rest is history there.
The '80s: their fashions may have sucked. But not the films. Not all of them, anyway.
Top 10:
The rest: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand by Me (both 1986), The Blues Brothers (1980), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), The Princess Bride (1987), The Color Purple (1985), Aliens (1986), Gremlins and The Killing Fields (both 1984).
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