1986: Movies Sorted By Tier
Submitted by stooky on Tue, 06/15/2004 - 11:52
Tags:
- Great
- Aliens
- Castle In The Sky
- **Another marvelous animated film from Miyazaki, a true master of his artform. Tells a story involving a floating castle, a princess, a charm, the army, pirates, birthrights, robots and much more. The animation is brilliant even by todays standards, bringing to life all manner of awe-inspiring visuals. A smart story and intelligent script keep fires stoked all coming to a head in an grand finale. The kind of daring spectacle never imagined outside of this directors work is just a pleasure to watch.
- The Decline Of The American Empire
- The Fly
- Hannah And Her Sisters
- Jean De Florette
- Manon Of The Spring
- Mona Lisa
- Platoon
- A Room With A View
- Round Midnight
- The Sacrifice
- The Singing Detective (6 Part TV Miniseries)
- **Jon Amiel’s brilliant adaptation of Dennis Potter’s novel Hide And Seek is a virtuoso blend of detective thriller, hallucinatory story lines and a case history of psoriasis. Over the span of 416 minutes the movie throttles the viewer with interweaving storylines which shard and bleed into each other with hysterical invention, Potter’s mélange of characters with sad, grim lives who disturbingly break into joyous song and dance at any moment materializing on the screen. Michael Gambon delivers a textured acerbic performance in his turn as Philip Marlow, a writer of detective fiction, who is imprisoned in a hospital bed by psoriasis that has robbed him of any motor function. He cannot use a pen to write so he’s taken to adapting the screenplay for his most popular novel The Singing Detective in his head. Yet bouts of severe pain cause hallucinatory interjections to overtake this story as reality and fiction start to blend together, forging an almost inseparable pastiche. A somewhat incoherent patchwork of scenes that blend the detective story, his hospital life and remembrances of his youth together in a somewhat strange case history of the character. Amiel never fumbles the daring narrative style and seems to flourish under this incredible visual juggling act. His Singing Detective is a masterful vision where characters fall from the fictional story into Marlow’s reality as well as his childhood and reality is in constant flux. This is mesmerizing, heavyweight material given depth and powerful clarity by an incredibly talented director, who as it happens went on to make a string of atrocious muddled films. This is an great film, no matter what medium it was released under, and should be seen by any serious film lover.
- Stand By Me
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
- Tampopo
- **During a lifetime a person makes hundreds of miniscule discoveries that shed light upon different mysteries. The cumulative effect of most of these revelations causes a loss of wonderment except for art, love and food. The makers of Tampopo seems to understand this and have made a film overflowing with enthusiasm, audacity and the simple ingenuous nature of people when subject to the wonders of good art, love and food. The film starts, a couple are being served a decadent meal inside a theatre, anticipation for the feature emanates from everyone. Suddenly the man stands up and walks toward the camera, “You came to watch the movie” he says. What follows is an inspired treatise on watching films in a theatre. This is the first of many curious and amusing interludes, each brilliantly funny yet having no obvious link to the rest of the film other than exposing “the power of food”. Somehow these scenes rather than having disrupting influence embellish the already rambunctious influences (ranging from westerns to samurai epics) creating an alternate reality bustling with covert chefs and secret recipes. “Tampopo” and her five Sansei scour Japan searching for the perfect noodle recipe, a seemingly simple task that takes on epic proportions. There are separate recipes, different noodles, strength vs. suppleness, clarity of soup, etc. The mind simply boggles with the variations through subtle changes and our quick-witted heroine proves equal to her challenges. Soon I realized that the film was a lot like it’s subject, adding elements of random flavours. The first half creating a subtle, strong stew with much vivacity, the second half creating a noodle of smooth yet strong feeling with a rich, complicated taste. The fun put into the style of the film translates to the viewer who will surely have a gigantic smile plastered on his probably hungry face. It’s understood that food intermingles with people on many obscure levels of structured symbiosis (including the most sexually charged scene involving an egg yolk ever) Tampopo proves the same can be true for film as well.
- Withnail And I
- Very Good
- The Assault
- Big Trouble In Little China
- Blue Velvet
- Crocodile Dundee
- Down By Law
- **A typical Jaramusch effort, sparkling with wonderful irreverence, defying convention with every scene. I enjoyed it greatly even if it was a tad long for my taste.
- The Great Mouse Detective
- Entrails Of A Beautiful Woman
- **Kazuo Komizu aka Gaira’s intense amalgam of graphic sex and gore Entrails Of A Beautiful Woman is a tantalizing morsel of repulsive mayhem. A seething masterpiece whose shock value has barely diminished in 15 years, reaching an apex of malevolence and horror that simply goes beyond the pale. The truly astonishing fact being that this film has excellent visuals, good acting and great unflinching direction that perfectly matches this style of exploitation. This elevates the film above other cheap exploitation flicks into the pantheon of Pink Flamingos and other great cult films of monumental perversity. The film starts with an extremely brutal rape scene shot in beautiful sepia-tones which lasts long enough to be very uncomfortable. The victim escapes to a hospital and informs a female psychiatrist of her ordeal before she commits suicide. In attempting to avenge the young girls’ death she suffers the same fate and dies of a drug overdose. From that point the film makes a drastic transition that is best left discovered by the viewer. This is a great exploitation filmmaking that pushes the envelope as far as possible, which is rare, even in this genre.
- Because I am placing this film so highly I feel the need to give this proviso: Although I rarely advocate discretion when watching movies, this film is has some of the most vivid (not realistic) scenes of rape, torture and violence I’ve ever seen. Do not rent this film is you are even slightly disgusted by the subject matter and it should NOT be watched by anyone under 19.
- Little Shop Of Horrors
- Manhunter
- The Name Of The Rose
- Ruthless People
- Salvador
- She's Gotta Have It
- Sid And Nancy
- Something Wild
- Good
- An American Tail
- Back To School
- A Better Tomorrow
- Children Of A Lesser God
- The Color Of Money
- Crimes Of The Heart
- Down And Out In Beverly Hills
- F/X
- Ferris Bueller's Day Off
- The Girl In The Picture
- **Lightweight romantic comedy in the vein of Bill Forsyth, that shares the likeable comic charm without the complexity or satire. It’s basically the story of a young man coming of age and in the process learning about love and life; in a movie land type way to be sure. Blessed with likable actors, especially the main characters sidekick, and some very funny sweet material the movie manages to never fall into the maudlin traps the plot seems bent on employing. An entertaining and satisfying film, what The Girl In The Picture lacks in originality it makes up for with charm; it’s a good, standard romantic comedy.
- Gung Ho
- Heartbreak Ridge
- Hoosiers
- Jumpin' Jack Flash
- The Manhattan Project
- The Mission
- Monster In The Closet
- Pretty in Pink
- River's Edge
- Short Circuit
- True Stories
- Working Girls
- Guilty Pleasures
- April Fool's Day
- Cobra
- Critters
- Highlander
- House
- Howard The Duck
- Maximum Overdrive
- Top Gun
- Average
- The Armour Of God
- At Close Range
- Band Of The Hand
- Club Paradise
- Deadtime Stories
- Extremities
- The Good Father
- The Good Wife
- Heartburn
- Kung Fu: The Movie
- Labyrinth
- Love With A Perfect Stranger
- Lucas
- Mosquito Coast
- Night Of The Creeps
- Peggy Sue Got Married
- The Quest
- Quicksilver
- Spacecamp
- The Whistle Blower
- Wildcats
- Dissapointing
- 8 Million Ways To Die
- 9 1/2 Weeks
- About Last Night...
- Armed And Dangerous
- Big Trouble
- Black Moon Rising
- Car Trouble
- Comrades
- Crossroads
- Dead-End Drive-In
- Family Business
- Frankie And Johnny
- From Beyond
- Half Moon Street
- Invaders From Mars
- Last Resort
- Legal Eagles
- Let's Get Harry
- Making Contact
- The Money Pit
- The Morning After
- No Mercy
- No Retreat, No Surrender
- One Crazy Summer
- Running Scared
- Star Crystal
- Tai-Pan
- Thrashin'
- Three Amigos!
- Transformers: The Movie
- Vice Wars
- Windrider
- Wise Guys
- Cellar Dwellers
- Act Of Vengeance
- Avenging Force
- Blue City
- The Clan Of The Cave Bear
- Class Of Nuke 'Em High
- Crazy Moon
- The Delta Force
- Dream Lover
- Eliminators
- Emma's War
- Firewalker
- Flight Of The Navigator
- The Golden Child
- Gothic
- Hamburger: The Motion Picture
- Haunted Honeymoon
- The Hitcher
- Hollywood Vice Squad
- Jake Speed
- The Karate Kid Part II
- Little Spies
- Murphy's Law
- Pirates
- Power
- Psycho III
- Rad
- Raw Deal
- Shanghai Surprise
- Sinbad Of The Seven Seas
- Slaughter High
- Solarbabies
- Terrorvision
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2
- Trick Or Treat
- Troll
- Twisted
- Youngblood
- The Big Stink
- Chopping Mall
- Devil In The Flesh
- King Kong Lives
- Police Academy 3
- Poltergeist 2
- Seize The Day
- Soul Man
- Vamp
- The Video Dead
- The Wraith
- Unfortunately Haven’t Seen
- Desert Bloom
- The Girl Who Spelled Freedom
- Man Facing Southeast
- Otello
- Project A-Ko
- Sherman's March
- Summer
- Therese
- Torment
Cloned From:
Mmm, favorite film of the year, nice tweak to the format! I'm just going to keep stealing from you left and right.
As a friend used to say,
Stay with me kid, I'll take you places and show you things.
Several very dirty are entailed in these travels that I will keep to myself for the sake of a nice clean PG-13 site.
Also, a question: how do you do colors?
Tallyho
:?)
The simplest is:
<font color="#ff0000"> target text </font>
... even if the FONT tag is going the way of the Dodo. Note that the color is defined by its hex code (the example above is red).
Thanks. I guess I should just look to simple html in most cases.
font tag is surely a dodo.
Tallyho
:?)
Well if you're comfortable with CSS you could stick a <STYLE> definition in your comments, and then use what you define there to style your lists. Do you grok CSS?
ze cascading style sheets you say. I have a vague understanding of such code-like trifles. Sounds fun to me.
IMHO you've underrated Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Mission. Oh, and Flight of the Navigator - nice sf for kids, I seem to remember.
You can try to change my mind, it has happened before. Except Flight Of The Navigator, I watched it again about a year ago and felt serious nostalgia crushing pain.
Tallyho
:?)
Nice to see stand by me on top tier list.
It showed so well what it was like to be a kid.
it showed them scared, happy and sad, it showed the friendship divides. Vern and Teddy got on well because they were more childish than the other 2. Chris and Gordie seem to have a connection because of their tough up bringing and the fact they sort of want to be any one but themselves.
a great movie
I agree. It shows a kids' point of view well. It also creates a nostalgic feeling...I'm not quite sure how.
Indeed a great movie.
T'ho
:?)
Indeed :p)
Curse you! Life is far too short to catch even a small portion of all the good movies there are for the first time, and now you've made me go and queue Tampopo, a movie I've already seen! Ahhh!
Great review, BTW. :-)
(snicker snicker) Not to say I intended to lure you but I did try and make my review as tantalizing as possible. Draw your own conclusions. :?)
:?)
So did you notice?
I'm glad you and Jim thought 'The Fly' was great. I've goaded Jim towards a discussion of it here, and would love it if you join in.