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. Imagine a world where This is Spinal Tap and Repo Man hit theaters on the same day. That is the world of 1984.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly three dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1984 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 35th anniversaries. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory.
This time around it’s Nov. 21, 1984, and we’re off to see Supergirl.
(yes, we know we published this on Nov. 23… you’ll live.)
Falling in Love
Oh good… it’s another affair movie. We made it almost a whole month without one.
Frank Raftis (Robert De Niro) is an architectural engineer whose car breaks down on Christmas Eve, meaning he has to take the train into New York City for work. This puts him on a collision course with Molly Gilmore (Meryl Streep). After a completely improbably meet-cute in a bookstore as they shop for last-minute gifts. Despite both of them being married, the two of them find themselves drawn to one another and eventually are sneaking around despite Molly being the more reluctant of the pair.
While I have quickly grown tired of films depicting everyone being bored in their marriages and launching into affairs, this one is one of the worst. There is never a moment you believe Frank and Molly as a couple. Both of them are friends with people going through divorces, and it feels more like they’re doing it just to fit in most of the time. Their characters are two-dimensional at best and painted with the broadest of strokes. Neither of them is in a ‘bad’ relationship; they’re just bored with their current partners, and that means it’s okay to have an affair.
I was 13 at the time this movie came out, so I am sure I was unaware of a lot of things happening in the world, but this constant parade of films based around affairs is definitely growing tiresome.
Supergirl
(This review was originally published in 2019 when I first got this idea for the project. I watched the film again in 2024, and portions of the review have been updated.)
Lets get this out of the way: I think Helen Slater did a fantastic job with what she was given to work with. I loved her as Kara Zor-El, and think she made a very believable “fish out of water” type character.
That being said, this movie is freaking awful.
The movie starts in Argo City, which is a colony of Kryptonians that survived the planet exploding. You really don’t know because they never tell you why this city exists or how it exists. And then they throw in it’s in a pocket universe for kicks. When Kara accidentally loses the Omegahedron – a power source that keeps the city functioning – she has to chase after it and get it back to Argo City before they run out of energy and air.
Kara heads to Earth with this super important mission… and fakes her way into a girl’s boarding school to kill some time? And not only that, she fakes a letter from her cousin Clark Kent because she somehow knows Kal-El’s Earth identity.
But wait… there’s more!
The Omagehedron landed in the hands of a witch (I’m not kidding) named Serena (Faye Dunaway) who will use it to power her magic. And what is one of the first things she does? Cast a love spell on some random handyman she has never spoken to. But Ethan (Hart Bochner) wanders away before it kicks in and sees Linda Lee, Supergirl’s Earth persona, and falls for her instead.
Because, yes, when there is a time-sensitive crisis back home, not only do you have time to go to school, you have time for some romance as well.
Well, Serena is not having this and goes after the two of them for daring to ruin her love spell, and…
I can’t. I can not describe this asinine plot for one more second. It involves more love spell nonsense, and finally a trip to the Phantom Zone, and then a fight with a giant demon because… why not?
This movie just feels completely random. The sad thing is that it comes from the same producing team behind the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies.
I have no idea what went wrong here, but it went VERY wrong. And the thing is, I would be even harder on it if it wasn’t so abundantly clear that Slater was trying so hard to make it work. She gave it her all, and I appreciate that.
Other than Slater, however, this movie sums up what I’ve discovered throughout this project: that 1984 was just a wildly uneven year for movies. From fantastic movies to… well… Supergirl is no Bolero, thank goodness, but to these lower-rung movies.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on Dec. 7 with Beverly Hills Cop!
