Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1984 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1984 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s April 27, 1984, and we’re off to see Love Letters.
Love Letters
You know how sometimes your mom dies and you find all these love letters from a 15-year affair she had, and that makes you think “The best way for me to deal with this is to have an affair of my own”? Yeah… that’s Love Letters.
Anna Winter (Jamie Lee Curtis) is a woman in her 20s dealing with the passing of her mother and how to handle her alcoholic father (Matt Clark). In the midst of this turmoil, she learns of her mother’s secret affair. As chance would have it, she meets an attractive, older photographer (James Keach) who is a fan of her DJing on a local public radio station (yes… you read that right), and quickly begins an affair with him. As with most affairs, it spirals out of control and things go from dreamy to dark in short order.
With Love Letters I broke one of my own rules and looked to see what reviewers were saying at the time, and they seemed to have enjoyed it. I, personally, hated this movie. From the bizarre concept of “This is how I get to know mom!” to Anna’s dark turn at the end, there is just no joy in this film. The only moment I even halfway liked was at the very end when at her mother’s grave she meets the man her mother had an affair with, and I was thrilled he was played by Rance Howard, father of Ron Howard.
This is yet another entry in a trend I’ve noticed in 80s films where the leads of the story are just wholly unlikable people. You don’t care what happens to them because they are a misery to watch. You know throughout this film that Anna is headed for a bad ending, you know that Oliver (the photographer) isn’t going to leave his wife, and you’re left wondering, “Why am I spending 90 minutes watching people I don’t care for make each other miserable?”
I will say the acting was all top-notch, but the script left me cold at best.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on May 4 with The Bounty, Breakin’, and Sixteen Candles!
