The MoFo Top 100 of the 80s: Countdown

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Young Skywalker. Missed you, I have...
My updated list:

1. The Breakfast Club (13)
2.
3. Scarface (14)
4. Batman (52)
5.
6.
7.
8. The Evil Dead (49)
9. The Outsiders (91)
10.
11. The Temple of Doom (25)
12.
13.
14.
15. Robocop (44)
16. A Nightmare on Elm Street (42)
17.
18. The Thing (12)
19. Predator (36)
20. Poltergeist (51)
21. The Lost Boys (61)
22. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (31)
23.
24.
25.

Mine are going to have to start showing up! LOL! I have done pretty good, better than usual.
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Other than the millennium list, I've never strategized over my
It's. Just made lists of favorites with no tinkering of rankings.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
My comments about Do the Right Thing. Better late than never (I hope). Not a big fan of the Leone. I might add some comments about today's four later.

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)


I put up a quote earlier this week where Spike said something along the lines that critics give filmmakers too much credit for things they never intended to be in their films. Spike was still a pretty immature filmmaker and human being, at least in my opinion, when he made this, his third feature film, but it stands out to me as even better than I originally thought almost 20 years ago. Maybe it's an accident or maybe Spike was a Baby Genius, but either way, this film is much more complex, in far more many ways than even its champions thought in 1989. First off, there's Spike's screenplay. It seems to be something comparable to a 1930s/1940s play about urban America. It's set in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, so it incorportes plenty of big-city stories, but it also seems to tell very small stories, almost along the lines of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Most all of the characters in the film live out in the streets and they all watch, observe and look out for each other.

Most of the inhabitants of Bed-Stuy are black, but they also seem to gravitate toward Italian-American Sal's (Danny Aiello's) pizzeria. Sal employs his older son Pino (John Turturro) who is a blatant racist and his younger son Vito (Richard Edson) who doesn't believe in racism. It's an unanswered question in the film, but how could such a good man as Sal raise a racist son? On the other hand, there are some local blacks who don't like the fact that Sal loves to populate his wall with Italian-Americans, and Buggin' Out (Giancalo Esposito) basically calls Sal a racist for not having any Brothers on the wall. Another major character is Sal's pizza deliverer Mookie (Spike Lee), who ends up being perhaps the most important character in the film. Mookie only seems to care about getting paid. True, he has a young son he fathered with a Puerto Rican woman (Rosie Perez), but Mookie does very little to support his family. Mookie is in fact sponging off his younger sister (Joie Lee) for his living arrangements, yet he has the audacity to give her "big-brother" lectures.

I haven't even gotten into Lee's color theme and musical accompaniment for the flick. Do The Right Thing is supposed to take place during the hottest day of the year. Lee uses red filters during the entire film, and although they usually imply that it's really hot, near the end of the film, the red filters imply that it's not only climatically hot, but that everyone in the neighborhood is really hot under the collar and fire just naturally erupts. The score, as with most of Spike's early films, is credited to his father Bill Lee, and although most of it is highly reminiscent of Aaron Copland in the 1940s (another homage to the classical theatricality of the film), it's also suffused with Bill Lee's natural inclination toward late 20th-century jazz. By the time this film reaches its climax, most viewers should be well aware that they have seen a complex film about a complex subject, and I, for one, do not find it racist at all, from any of the possible "racist" angles. I feel a little bit stupid that I haven't mentioned the following characters yet: Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), Sister Mother (Ruby Dee), Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) ["Fight the Power"], the wisdom-spouting triumverate chorus sitting opposite of Sal's pizzeria, the Korean convenience store couple who refuse to stock Miller High-Life, the two local racist cops, the four kids who love to debate but still love to get a slice at Sal's, etc. Tell me what you think of the film when you see it.
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My list had none of these four. My dislike and, more importantly, total lack of artistic respect for DePalma's Scarface have been well established, but as for the other three, I don't really have a problem with any of them, and The Thing was in the mix for making my list. A top fifty for me, for sure, though not top twenty-five.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra



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Yup, you said it Mark. Great characters in Do The Right Thing. And I love it's setting. Spike Lee has the ability to make great films, idiot or not.



Yup, you said it Mark. Great characters in Do The Right Thing. And I love it's setting. Spike Lee has the ability to make great films, idiot or not.
*A great film. He should've stopped after that.



OH! I forgot one of the most important reasons why I had Aliens at #1 on my list.

It's a PART TWO.

It's a sequel.

And you know how I am with sequels -- I often like part two more than part one.

That was another reason why I had it at #1. To represent my sequel love.



Why I Put Aliens at Number One



Various reasons. Let's start with the small ones.

It's a James Cameron movie and James Cameron got unfairly, disturbingly, disgustingly, repulsively screwed beyond all comprehension in the '90s list with the total lack of Titanic. This was my revenge. Sort of. (Further revenge still forthcoming.)
James Cameron died in 1992. An impostor took over since.

Seriously, his movies declined abruptly in quality since T2.

Aliens was the first Alien movie that I really saw and I absolutely loved it. I believe I was in either the 6th or 7th grade when I first saw the movie. It became my new favorite film at the time.
Aliens was the last Alien film I watched among the 4. It's the best one, closely followed by Alien. A very rare case of a sequel better than the original. Aliens is one of the top 5 best action movies ever made and one of the best science fiction movies ever made as well. Love the heavy metal designs if compared to the more plastic look of Star Trek.



Titanic is good. There's plenty of haters out there and, with the amount of Oscars it won I can understand that, but it's a decent film and particularly effective on the big screen.
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Titanic was a colossal cultural event. SexyC loves those, so not surprised to see it brought up again

i liked Titanic when it was released in 1997, but that was pretty much only bc i was a 5th grader getting to see Kate Winslet's tatas... which for some reason was a big deal then



Titanic is actually my favorite Cameron film (not that I'm a big fan of his films in general).
It has such a lovely classic feeling to it. It may be cheesy sometimes, but hell, I don't care. It's a MAJOR Hollywood romance picture at its best.

His other films never really did something special to me. I can't get over the huge timetraveling plothole in The Terminator, Aliens is worse than Alien (I still might rewatch Aliens someday though as it has been a VERY long time ago since I've seen it for the first and only time), Terminator 2 is brilliant in terms of special effects, but it lacks the grittiness and atmosphere of the first one and Avatar has some nice looking scenes, but the story is uninteresting crap.
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Cobpyth's Movie Log ~ 2019



Anybody who closely reads the latest additions to my review thread, HERE, if you do some detective work you may be able to piece together one of the films on my MoFo '80s list that is not making the cut.
#ShamelessPlug
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A system of cells interlinked


i will say i find the conspiracy theory stuff around the Shining to be cuckoo. but that's just what people have tried to read into it

anyways, saying the Shining is boring would be like saying Drew Barrymore sucks. i don't think either are right, yet i'm sure there are people out there who think so
Just to be clear...

I know I posted all that stuff, which I do find kind of interesting, and I don't put much faith in most of it, but the parallels with the Theseus myth and some other classic themes are obviously there. The moon landing stuff is from the documentary Room 237, and seems fairly shaky, but just why is Danny wearing that shirt?

Most likely, Kubrick is trolling the viewer - the guy allegedly had a 200 IQ after all.

Or is he?
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



Anybody who closely reads the latest additions to my review thread, HERE, if you do some detective work you may be able to piece together one of the films on my MoFo '80s list that is not making the cut.
#ShamelessPlug
Well, according to Google Images, your movie is Pennies from Heaven.

1981. Starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters. During the Great Depression, a sheet music salesman seeks to escape his dreary life through popular music and a love affair with an innocent school teacher.



Just to be clear...

I know I posted all that stuff, which I do find kind of interesting, and I don't put much faith in most of it, but the parallels with the Theseus myth and some other classic themes are obviously there. The moon landing stuff is from the documentary Room 237, and seems fairly shaky, but just why is Danny wearing that shirt?

Most likely, Kubrick is trolling the viewer - the guy allegedly had a 200 IQ after all.

Or is he?
i do agree that Kubrick included that stuff to make people think & look into it, he's the man

my only point is that the movie can be enjoyed even if you don't think that much into it