Favorite 80’s Movies

I only skipped mentioning Empire Strikes Back, because I guessed it had already been said, but I guess not.

Tin Men is not as highly regarded, but I think it's worth checking out, just because of the casting team up: Danny DeVito and Richard Dreyfuss playing competing slimeball salesman of tin siding for houses. Less known movie that's pretty fun. Made by the same director as Diner and Good Morning Vietnam.

Near Dark is a cool biker vampire gang movie by Katheryn Bigelow, who is more known for her later movies with Mark Boal, Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Bill Paxton is having a lot of fun in this movie.

The Grave of the Fireflies is like the saddest movie ever made.

Come and See is a depressing war movie about a kid stuck in the middle of all the death and carnage of war. Essential foreign movie, but a pretty miserable time, haha.

Haven't seen early Jarmusch, but I know Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law are supposed to be great. I mean, you got Tom Waits trying to break out of prison in Down by Law -- what more could you want?

Uh, Die Hard, anyone?

I don't really f**k with horror, but Poltergeist.

It's kind of acquired taste material, I guess, but Purple Rain is a gem.

I also recently rewatched the first two Back to the Futures, this past Saturday. Man, that first movie is one of the best blockbuster/popcorn screenplays ever written. Everything in the plot happens so logically and naturally. It's a great rubics cube. For example, the whole reason Marty ends up in the past is because he's trying to escape the Libyan terrorist dudes who just killed Doc, so that means that Marty's goal of returning to the future is a conflicted one, because he'll be returning to Doc dying. It's an amazing detail. God, what a movie. The only problem with it is the cultural appropriation stuff, where we're told that Chuck Berry's music actually came from a white kid. But even that is a circular time travel logic thing that I guess can be shrugged off?

The sequels have some script problems, but are still a ton of fun as well. Like, for all Doc's talk about not f**king up the space time continuum, BTF2 is predicated on Doc wanting to risk the health of the whole universe just to save Marty's kids... And Doc needing Marty to solve that problem is quite a stretch. Compared to the great logic of the first movie on why Marty's the one that ends up in the past, BTF2's reasoning for involving Marty in the plot needed more drafts. But whatever, the movie jumps the most timelines, it's fun.

Never realized before this rewatch (because I haven't watched these in over a decade, at least), but they switch the actress playing Marty's girlfriend in the second movie. She has a super small role in the first movie, so I guess they just casted some eye candy, but then for the second movie they needed someone who could act, so they recast. But that's just an unfair assumption; for all I know, they wanted the initial actress, but she was busy, or something. I mean, they recast Marty after a few weeks of shooting, because the first guy wasn't working out, so I wouldn't put it past them.