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OT: Best movies of 1980

Fk_Pitt

Fk_Pitt

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Inspired by Pitt Poker and Ski, it's probably better to take the great movie decade of the 80's and break it up by year. So the first of a 10 thread series, here is the thread on best movies of 1980. Explore this link and discuss. We could probably get a few days out of this before moving on to 1981.

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1980&title_type=feature&
 
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1) Empire Strikes Back (The best Star Wars movie ever made)
2) Caddy Shack (maybe the best comedy film of all time)
3) Airplane (of course!!)

Honorable mention
Flash Gordon- cheesy but awesome for a young kid, which I was, and the Score by Queen was awesome.

Smokey and the Bandit 2 - Burt Reynolds and the cast!!

Can't Stop the Music- The Village People and Bruce Jenner/probably one of worst movies of all time...but Valerie Perrine was so hot.

The Nude Bomb- I was a kid, and watching a cheesy movie on HBO and seeing some skin was a must. Plus Maxwell Smart was kind of funny.
 
What year was “The Warriors” made? One of my favorite old movies. Always thought they should remake it into a TV show.
 
fkthomas said:
Inspired by Pitt Poker and Ski, it's probably better to take the great movie decade of the 80's and break it up by year. So the first of a 10 thread series, here is the thread on best movies of 1980. Explore this link and discuss. We could probably get a few days out of this before moving on to 1981.

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1980&title_type=feature&
Click to expand...

The lack of Star Wars (and Indiana Jones) is what prompted my comment. Hard to argue with your top three. I did quite like Raging Bull though.
 
If anyone is interested, try to find a Caddyshack documentary and watch during the stay at home. I recently watched one on A&E and it was really good. Bill Murray and Chevy Chase hated each other of course, and that made production very challenging but their chemistry together was off the charts in that scene in Murray’s (Carl’s) shed. The movie also had terrible reviews and I believe bombed at the box office. Now it’s an all time classic.
 
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The Shining - simple plot, complex themes, visually hypnotic. A child riding a big wheel becomes eerie and suspenseful. The people featured in that Room 237 documentary from a few years ago are mostly insane but I understand their obsession with decoding meticulous details in The Shining.

Empire Strikes Back - 40 years later it stands as the best episode in the Star Wars series. So much to praise but I'll just mention the first shot we see of Darth Vader in that movie: the back of his polished, shiny helmet, staring out of a Star Destroyer watching TIE fighters zip around in space, as the Imperial March plays on the soundtrack for the first time in the series. Cinema's greatest villain but in that movie he takes on interesting dimensions.

Raging Bull - Scorsese's best work, which is no small assertion. Not really structured like a traditional sports genre movie, but I would say the best movie ever made about an athlete. Scary when it needs to be. Funny when it wants to be. Beautifully photographed.

(Those three movies are in their own class.)

Elephant Man - about as close as David Lynch gets to making a "normal" movie, and it's still pretty weird.

Dressed to Kill - De Palma is the kind of director where you're either on his wavelength or you're not. The real psycho in this movie might be De Palma himself.

Airplane! - pretty damn funny.

Popeye - I was three years old when this movie came out and dressed as the titular hero for Halloween that year. Haven't seen it in ages, but I have to mention it for purely nostalgic charm. (And Shelley Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl.)
 
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"Best" films? Depends if you're judging with a critic's eye or not. Raging Bull is 1980's best and, of course, the Academy got that wrong (as it does around 50% of the time). Other great ones from that year:

Breaker Morant
The Elephant Man
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
Ordinary People
The Shining

Airplane! most definitely is the great comedy of that year and a classic.

Crazy footnote: I have watched every Best Picture winner dating back to 1927, except Green Book and Parasite. And I have watched 90% of the 563 Best Picture nominees. ;)
 
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fkthomas said:
but their chemistry together was off the charts in that scene in Murray’s (Carl’s) shed.
Click to expand...


In that documentary they noted that that scene wasn't even in the script originally. They had contracted to have Murray on the set a certain number of days and when he had like two days left to work they realized that there were no scenes in the whole movie with Chase's and Murray's characters together in them, so they basically wrote that scene overnight and filmed it in the next day or two.
 
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There are tiers to 1980.

The 5star movies were:
Empire Strikes Back
Raging Bull

There were also 3 high 4star comedies:
Caddyshack
Airplane
The Blues Brothers

Given the plethora of mid-level 4stars like The Gods Must Be Crazy, Ordinary People, The Elephant Man, Flash Gordon, Dressed To Kill, and My Bodyguard, clearly it's one of the best years ever.

And then you see the ridiculous number of popular horror flicks like The Shinning, The Changeling, Friday the 13th, Manic, The Fog, Humanoids From The Deep, etc, and you wonder if this might just be THE BEST YEAR of all.
 
Joe the Panther Fan said:
In that documentary they noted that that scene wasn't even in the script originally. They had contracted to have Murray on the set a certain number of days and when he had like two days left to work they realized that there were no scenes in the whole movie with Chase's and Murray's characters together in them, so they basically wrote that scene overnight and filmed it in the next day or two.
Click to expand...
Most of it ended up improvised I believe??
 
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CougarClaws said:
There are tiers to 1980.

The 5star movies were:
Empire Strikes Back
Raging Bull

There were also 3 high 4star comedies:
Caddyshack
Airplane
The Blues Brothers

Given the plethora of mid-level 4stars like The Gods Must Be Crazy, Ordinary People, The Elephant Man, Flash Gordon, Dressed To Kill, and My Bodyguard, clearly it's one of the best years ever.

And then you see the ridiculous number of popular horror flicks like The Shinning, The Changeling, Friday the 13th, Manic, The Fog, Humanoids From The Deep, etc, and you wonder if this might just be THE BEST YEAR of all.
Click to expand...
Yeah. This is just the first year of the decade. I can’t believe how many classics are in there. I only skimmed through the first 200 titles in that list. I’m not sure how it was sorted. But a ton of good ones there.
 
King Of All Message Boards said:
One of the more bizarre movies in that the first hour or so was great and the rest was just meh.
Click to expand...

I would say the Vietnam portions of Full Metal Jacket are better than "meh," (I actually think they're really good) but I know what you mean. There's a discontinuity. The portions in boot camp, the performances of Lee Ermey and Vincent Donofrio are so propulsive, so intense. Probably the most colorful use of profanity ever recorded on film. The shot compositions were so exact in those scenes. Really inspired filmmaking. Kubrick might have been better suited to shooting on indoor sets. Anyway, I would still say easily one of the best movies of the decade.
 
Thee Jackie Treehorn said:
I would say the Vietnam portions of Full Metal Jacket are better than "meh," (I actually think they're really good) but I know what you mean. There's a discontinuity. The portions in boot camp, the performances of Lee Ermey and Vincent Donofrio are so propulsive, so intense. Probably the most colorful use of profanity ever recorded on film. The shot compositions were so exact in those scenes. Really inspired filmmaking. Kubrick might have been better suited to shooting on indoor sets. Anyway, I would still say easily one of the best movies of the decade.
Click to expand...

Based on my own personal experience, the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket is easily the most accurate I have ever seen in a film. Lee Ermey's performance was realistic, and came natural for the former Drill Sergeant. I can find some humor in it now, but it wasn't one bit funny at the time.
 
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Gary77 said:
Based on my own personal experience, the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket is easily the most accurate I have ever seen in a film. Lee Ermey's performance was realistic, and came natural for the former Drill Sergeant. I can find some humor in it now, but it wasn't one bit funny at the time.
Click to expand...
You're mean.
 
CougarClaws said:
There are tiers to 1980.

The 5star movies were:
Empire Strikes Back
Raging Bull

There were also 3 high 4star comedies:
Caddyshack
Airplane
The Blues Brothers

Given the plethora of mid-level 4stars like The Gods Must Be Crazy, Ordinary People, The Elephant Man, Flash Gordon, Dressed To Kill, and My Bodyguard, clearly it's one of the best years ever.

And then you see the ridiculous number of popular horror flicks like The Shinning, The Changeling, Friday the 13th, Manic, The Fog, Humanoids From The Deep, etc, and you wonder if this might just be THE BEST YEAR of all.
Click to expand...

There are some excellent films from this year, but on the whole it was sub-par. Enjoy...

https://nighthawknews.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/the-nighthawk-awards-1980/
https://nighthawknews.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/the-history-of-the-academy-awards-best-picture-1980/
 
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Gary77 said:
Based on my own personal experience, the boot camp portion of Full Metal Jacket is easily the most accurate I have ever seen in a film. Lee Ermey's performance was realistic, and came natural for the former Drill Sergeant. I can find some humor in it now, but it wasn't one bit funny at the time.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your service
 
fkthomas said:
Inspired by Pitt Poker and Ski, it's probably better to take the great movie decade of the 80's and break it up by year. So the first of a 10 thread series, here is the thread on best movies of 1980. Explore this link and discuss. We could probably get a few days out of this before moving on to 1981.

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?year=1980&title_type=feature&
Click to expand...
I voted for Ordinary People. Suppose I'm in the minority, but hated the Shining. Thought it was nothing more than a heavy week of drinking for Nicholson. Chinatown? Now that's Jack at his best.
 
fkthomas said:
1) Empire Strikes Back (The best Star Wars movie ever made)
2) Caddy Shack (maybe the best comedy film of all time)
3) Airplane (of course!!)

Honorable mention
Flash Gordon- cheesy but awesome for a young kid, which I was, and the Score by Queen was awesome.

Smokey and the Bandit 2 - Burt Reynolds and the cast!!

Can't Stop the Music- The Village People and Bruce Jenner/probably one of worst movies of all time...but Valerie Perrine was so hot.

The Nude Bomb- I was a kid, and watching a cheesy movie on HBO and seeing some skin was a must. Plus Maxwell Smart was kind of funny.
Click to expand...
You should have stopped after three. The HM's are outright horrible.
 
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Quite a year for Best Original Song, I have to say!

  • Best Original Song:
  1. “Late in the Evening” (One-Trick Pony)
  2. “I’m Alright” (Caddyshack)
  3. “America” (The Jazz Singer)
  4. “One-Trick Pony” (One-Trick Pony)
  5. “Fame” (Fame)
  6. “Call Me” (American Gigolo)
  7. “Flash” (Flash Gordon)
  8. “How the Heart Approaches What It Yearns” (One-Trick Pony)
  9. “Nine to Five” (Nine to Five)
  10. “Out Here on My Own” (Fame)
 
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