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 40th 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 Sept. 14, 1984, and we’re off to see The Bear, Body Rock, Country, Heartbreakers, Impulse, Irreconcilable Differences, The Wild Life.
The Bear
As sports biographies go… this is one of them.
The Bear follows the story of Paul “Bear” Bryant (Gary Busey) from his brief stint as a man who fought bears to being the college football coach with the biggest winning record in history as of 1984.
While sports biographers are usually an interesting genre, they require the person to have had some sort of hook, be it a rough upbringing or something else. In the case of Bryant, he really seemed to have been just a guy who once wrestled a bear. Yes, he was a very effective coach, but there was just not enough there to keep you going as to what was happening or why you should care.
And then the film has the audacity when it hits a moment where someone had some drama and the film goes into how it won’t deal with it and they know the player was innocent.
Really? You brought it up, and now you’re just not going to discuss it?
The movie is just very dry. I don’t feel like I walked away knowing Bryant really beyond his accomplishments and the most surface of personality traits.
Body Rock
It’s out third break dancing movie of the year, and it has almost the exact same plot as Breakin’ and Beat Street.
Chilly (Lorenzo Lamas) is a man from the streets looking to make a name for himself. He forms a dance crew named Body Rock despite not knowing much about dance yet. The team makes it to being hired by a club, but it turns out all they really want is Chilly. He promises to take his friends with him, but, he gets seduced by his rich new friends and slowly forgets his roots. Luckily by the end of the film he realizes he has strayed and finds his way back to his friends.
It really feels like there was a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ break dancing script making its way around Hollywood for films released in 1984.
The film has a few interesting visuals, such as the day-glo skeleton dance sequence, but other than that, it is completely forgettable.
Country
Country is an interesting document (not a documentary, mind you) of the farming crisis of the 1980s that has largely gone forgotten at this point.
Gil (Sam Shepard) and Jewell (Jessica Lange) run a family farm that has outstanding government loans. When the government agencies start changing the way they value these loans, their farm is deemed to risky for the loans and the debts are called in. The family is going to lose the farm and everything they own if they can’t come up with the money within 30 days.
This was something that was actually happening during this time and led to the creation of the Farm Aid music festival.
The film is well shot and acted, but it certainly is not an uplifting watch. You feel nothing but horror at how they are being treated throughout the story and puzzled how anyone in any dept could feel it would be a good idea.
From a historical perspective of it’s an intriguing watch. From a film perspective it’s just a small film about a family’s trials and tribulations. It is a film where your mileage will vary depending on what you get from it.
Heartbreakers
It seems that everyone who was in their 30s during the 1980s was having major mid-life crises if the movies are to be believed.
Arthur Blue (Peter Coyote) and Eli (Nick Mancuso) are friends who are both going through some changes in their life. Blue is an artist who has had little success due to his temperament, and Eli is facing down a life working in a women’s sports clothing factory, constantly living in the shadow of his father. Both men are also having issues with their love lives and what the future holds for them.
We’ve seen a lot of this so far in the 80s with films such as The Big Chill and Windy City telling us about the problems children of the 50s and 60s were having with aging. In the case of these characters, however, so much of it seems to be self-inflicted. The two friends have done themselves no favors by keeping each other in a nearly juvenile state where their hedonistic desires take over much of their lives. So much of this could have been avoided if they simply had chosen to be more responsible.
And to say all that, I actually ended up liking the film. The characters, despite their flaws, were not bad people, they simply weren’t developed emotionally.
I will say, however, as a director, Bobby Roth did need to learn some things about camera angles. This film has some of the worst onscreen kissing I’ve ever seen, and it seemed to be all because Roth constantly wanted to shoot everything in profiles.
The story was interesting but not exactly anything groundbreaking.
Impulse
There was a familiar horror formula in the 1980s it seems: People come to a small town. Whole small town is out to get them. One or two survive.
Add in the government messing everything up, and it really was a popular trend.
Jennifer (Meg Tilly) receives a call from her mother who begins insulting her before she gets to hear her shoot herself. Jennifer immediately grabs her boyfriend Stuart (Tim Matheson) and heads for her hometown to see what happened. The two of them begin to notice that no one in the town is acting normal, and it becomes more and more obvious that people are lacking impulse control.
What we come to learn is some toxic waste is getting into the milk supply of the town, and anyone who drinks it begins to suffer the impulse issue. And, you guessed it, Jennifer hates milk and doesn’t drink it.
This film wanted to be a sexy horror story and fails miserably at the sexy part. Everything is actually pretty chaste and relies quite heavily on the horror concept of implying what is happening. Which is fine, but when you keep trying to set us up with the idea everyone is getting wild and sometimes it’s an older man urinating on a car, or a sheriff deciding to shoot a teenager for no good reason, it’s just not that exciting.
Then, late in the film, we get a throwaway incest subplot with Jennifer’s brother, Eddie (Bill Paxton). Stuart, who did drink the milk, kills Eddie when he finds the photos he had kept them from when they were younger. That’s fine; you wanted Stuart to go full impulse loss, but the introduction of the incest subplot is just really hamfisted and gratuitous.
I didn’t hate the movie, but it felt very “by the numbers” and that some form of restraints had been put on just how much they could show or even imply were happening.
Irreconcilable Differences
This movie shouldn’t work, and yet it is somehow charming enough that it does.
Casey (Drew Barrymore) is tired of the turmoil of her parents and is looking to divorce them. At the trial, we go through the full history of Lucy (Shelley Long) and Albert (Ryan O’Neal), and how the family ended up in this place in life.
While the movie spends an immense amount of time focusing on the parents instead of on Casey – which always seemed to imply it would be more about her – the movie still works. The directing is fairly run-of-the-mill, but the script and performances carry it through. There is nothing particularly original to the story other than Casey’s move to divorce her parents, everything else is pretty predictable and nothing horribly original.Through nearly every beat of the film you can predict what is going to happen, but it is delivered in such a way to still make it enjoyable.
Don’t go into this film expecting anything original, but just expect to be entertained.
The Wild Life
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that feels more like rejected moments from a previous film that was quite successful.
Cameron Crowe had a huge success with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and he had to figure out what his next project would be. The Wild Life follows a similar plot line of multiple teens trying to make big changes in their lives, and the similarities are amplified when Chris Penn, the brother of Sean Penn, stars in the film.
The main plot lines follow Bill (Eric Stoltz) who is just moving out on his own, Jim (Ilan Mitchell-Smith) who is obsessed with the Vietnam War, Tom (Penn) who keeps wasting his potential in pursuit of a good time, Anita (Lea Thompson) who is unknowingly sleeping with a married man, and a few more.
While Crowe is a strong writer, and it still shows in this film, it feels like these were all rejected concepts from his previous film. He tried to make a dinner from less spicy leftovers, and it just doesn’t work as quite as well.
The performances are fine, and there are a few laughs to be had, but you just can’t escape the feeling this is Fast-lite.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on Oct. 5 with The Bear, Body Rock, Heartbreakers, Impulse, Irreconcilable Differences, and The Wild Life.
