Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1982 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 1982 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 1982 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 September 17, 1982, and we’re off to see Hammett!
Quick side note: Since we launched this series this year, we’ve discovered that Vintage Video Podcast is doing the exact same project with two differences: First, it’s audio (naturally), and second, they are doing every major film. We’ve listened to numerous episodes and it’s fun checking off their thoughts against my own. Check them out over at Vintage Video Podcast.
Hammett
Hammett does nothing remarkable. It’s a neo-noir detective story. That’s it. That’s the whole film. The only wild card here is it’s very loosely based on an actual pulp detective writer named Dashiell Hammett who was active from 1929 to 1951.
There really isn’t a whole lot to say. It’s a gumshoe detective story with just a minor twist of the P.I. being a writer as well. The drama behind the scenes between the director Wim Wenders and executive producer Francis Ford Coppola is apparently far more intriguing and involves a massive amount of reshoots that may or may not have been shot by Coppola himself.
Whatever the case may be, the film is a good-looking production no matter who directed it. The story just feels wildly out of time. The detective line of stories was already in the realm of parody with films such as Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Hammett just ends up feeling like a day late and a dollar short for bringing any sort of relevance into the world.
1982 Movie Reviews will return on Sept. 24 with Amityville II: The Possession and Yes, Giorgio!
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