POLL RESULTS: Top 100 Films of the 1980s

Do the Right Thing (277 points, 11 votes, 3 first-place votes)

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00004XQMV.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

It's hard to remember now how incendiary this felt at the time. Spike Lee's liveliest, most colorful, most electric movie. It simmers on screen. And Danny Aiello confounds any attempt (including Spike's) to unmuddy the waters. Plus, of course, it has "Fight the Power."

-- gypsy mothra

his tremendous skills and his glaring weakness are generally all tied up in the same knot i think — he is good at really unexpected things which he then completely distracts you from by some shouty bit of business (that said, rosie perez shouting in do the right thing is just some of the funniest, sexiest acting in cinema)

-- mark s

i watched do the right thing about six months ago because nancy had never seen it and i must say it holds up remarkably better than i expected it to from the last time i saw it as a freshman film student.

-- mohammed abba

Spike vs. Spielberg is a tough call for me, Lee's such a sloppy filmmaker. He's almost the antithesis of Spielberg - the pedantry without the style. He really only has one great, perfect film and that's "Do the Right Thing". There's good stuff scattered in his other movies (I haven't seen 25th Hour) but by and large its one trainwreck after another... Girl 6, Get on the Bus, Bamboozled, Summer of Sam, etc. Has there ever been a Spike Lee movie that *doesn't* end with someone getting murdered...?

-- Shakey Mo Collier

just this past Sunday I was randomly flipping channels, and I found Do The Right Thing somewhere, about a third of the way into it. I decided to watch because I hadn't seen the thing in ... heck, maybe a decade. It totally made me weep. I'm not really even sure why. I didn't cry when I first saw it as a 17 year old in 1989, even though I knew it was of the most intense things I'd ever witnessed. I'm not prone to crying at all. I guess I never joined in on those crying threads that were active recently, but honestly I can count the number of times I've cried in my adult life on one hand.

-- Mr. Diamond

Blue Velvet (409 points, 15 votes, 4 first-place votes)

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000063JDE.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

It's an obvious choice, but it's obvious for a reason. Blue Velvet (made by a Reagan fan, don't forget) is all the bullshit of '80s Americana, not just exposed (that's easy) but celebrated. Wallowed in. Lynch wants it both ways, the robins AND the beetles, Laura Dern's simpering blondie by day AND Isabella's fuck-me-hit-me brunette by night. And it lets its hero have both. It is a stupendously fucked-up movie, hypocritical and callow, like a Disneyland S&M weekend tour package. And like America, its hypocrisy is what makes it work. It's what makes it honest. I like to imagine Frank Capra emerging from a screening of Blue Velvet, horrified and blinking into the Hollywood sun, and Lynch hollering in his ear, "It's great, isn't it? Just like one of yours!" (Also, on a technical level, the colors and sound and blah blah blah, Lynch is a genius but you already knew that.)

-- gypsy mothra

This film is all about one man. Frank. Indeed, what Hopper and Lynch achieve with this film is something rather spectacular. It is this: To bring to the screen the most utterly fucked up, distressingly disturbed, genuinely terrifying plane-crash of a mash-up man. Frank is unlike any screen character I can think of in that he operates beyond the more recognisable parameters and conventions of fucked up. For a start he’s alarmingly unpredictable, veering dangerously between pussy-cat mewling to screaming psychotic rage in the space of a few seconds. He’s loaded up with more weird idiosyncrasies than a troupe of necrophiliacs, and he’s not afraid of a spot of sudden sickening violence, which he administers with charismatic, almost charming, surreal enthusiasm. He’s an out of control missile, a cataclysm, and every time he lopes onto the screen you actually fear for what he might do. Hopper’s Frank is a fascinating view into the surely tortured imagination of his authors. And though he might be one of cinema’s greatest time-bombs, he is never less than convincing.

-- Five Eight

"Girolamo Savonarola will return for the 60's poll."

(xpost) No idea - that's how the email identified him.

Hahaha, that joke justifies the thread.

I can see how it might have seem as though I was attacking Dee when the controversy all started.

Since I've bumped this thread, here's as good as any to talk about the AFI 100 Years ... 100 Movies list redux.

http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/Movies_ballot_06.pdf?docID=141

Which is to say, I was exactly what blount said I was: a troll.

You people are not the same kind of people as I.

Thank god critics can now vote for Ray and Shrek!

David Bordwell celebrates '80s cinema:

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=3036

Quite a bit of overlap between ILX100 and Bordwell.

I think Andrew Sarris's (RIP) list is a decent one

01. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
02. Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Eric Rohmer)
03. The Singing Detective (Jon Amiel)
04. After the Rehearsal (Ingmar Bergman)
05. A Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat)
06. Therese (Alain Cavalier)
07. L'Argent (Robert Bresson)
08. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg)
09. Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth)
10. Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick)

https://www.austinfilm.org/2019/09/watch-this-richard-linklaters-2019-jewels-in-the-wasteland-qas/