Alas the cold winter in which 1984 announced its arrival.  Since Wiki has failed me, I will be using the Box Office Mojo movie release calender.  There were apparently no new releases in the first week of January...a sordid omen.  The second week?  In the days before our dear Martin Luther King had received officious recognition?  Two Films: Hot Dog: The Movie and Angel ("Molly, a high schooler, secretly earns her living as Angel, a street prostitute whose only family and friends are the ones she works with on the streets. She has to survive against a serial killer who is targeting people of her profession.")

To this day, I have seen neither.  I will only proceed to discuss those films that I did, in fact, see, either in a very dark theater or under a very grainy VCR tracking.

Nay these lonely days, there were only two films released in January 1984 that I would eventually watch, probably both on cable:




Being a child of divorce adds a certain layer onto these kinds of films which indulge in the myriad mishaps of relationship difficulties.  It's not particularly optimistic.  If this had not been Steve Martin, I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered with it, perhaps put it aside to appreciate at a more mature and meaningful age where the fragility of affection wasn't an existential anxiety.  But basically, I didn't get it, and I was bored.  At this age, I preferred something like Modern Problems, because I could relate to that level of spite and self-pity and cartoonish self-abuse.  Nowadays, I prefer Brooks' Modern Romance, a keen compromise between the two indulgences.

I'm not even going to include Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose here because it would be several more years before I see that one.
 

Here's more of a mainstream sensation, and seems to be the first new film of note that I watched in the theater that year.  It's hard not to assume what everyone knows about it.  It's kinda dumb, but rebellious, in that way that the 80s tended to perversely reflect the 50s.  (ala Back to the Future a year later)  The soundtrack sold like white cakes, I had the cassette.  But I was really only enamoured with "Holding Out For a Hero".  Kevin Bacon, frankly, always seemed a little skeezy, and in his better later roles he would use that to his advantage.  And what else?  Lithgow?  Solid heavy.  Our school class wanted to do a field trip to watch this thing, and I made the very unpopular suggestion of going to the Rick Springfield movie instead.  I have no idea which is worse.

(I'm sure I've seen Tom Selleck's Lassiter in some medium, but I have no reliable memory of anything that happened in it.)





Now here's a more, um, seminal....  Alright, you have to understand that we're talking about a very sensitive twilight age here.  I found this film to be very exciting at the time.  I could identify with Michael Caine's awkwardness but in a completely different ethical context.  The film has clearly not aged very well.  Indeed, nowadays it's the friend, Demi Moore, that we'd rather bump into on the beach.  But I will extend one gracious hand to Joseph Bologna, who I still find incredibly funny here, and along with the same era's My Favorite Year was having quite a moment at the time.
 

I'm like, "what are they doing to me?"  Oh, yeah.  What if?  Some beautiful mermaid just happens upon your doorstep?  *Splash* indeed.  Tom Hanks has always made for a consummate virginal surrogate, which we can also see in Man With the One Red Shoe and, more obviously, in Big.  That latter film makes a lot more sense considering how he provided the role as 'adult stand-in' for hundreds of teen boys on the cusp in these days.  I never made it out to the theater to see this one (if I remember correctly, it was a bit of a sleeper), but it was one of the year's biggest video successes.  I watched it a few years back and it's very silly, sometimes in good ways, sometimes just in silly ways.





I was only starting to get into reading Stephen King at around this time, but this is one of those foundational horror films where I could quite confidently say that if it failed to scare a single hair on my skin then it must be a complete failure as a horror film.  Just garbage.  After reading the story sometime later, I felt like this could have been a slow-burn classic, but, as is the case, these execs don't trust the audiences' patience, so they have to frontload everything.  In a way, this film was very educational in my early horror viewing.
 

I watched this one in a theater, and I think the experience has greatly aided my appreciation of the film.  I can more objectively pinpoint the various flaws in the film now, but the sumptuous jungle cinematography is a very difficult thing to underestimate on the big screen.  During the first half of the film, I was completely transfixed.




And this also has some impressive jungle photography (this time in Colombia), and is generally a lot more fun, but not as immersive as Greystoke's best sequences.  Outside of that, this is clearly the superior film and theater experience, with a large crowd.  This is the kind of chemistry that Hollywood only rarely manages to get right.
 

Wanted to like, but never found it very engaging.  Tried an adult rewatch about 20 years back, but it still stalled.




Very eye-opening film at the time as an appreciation of the value of shit as a commodity, but more so as a tale of underdogs against behemoth agricultural bullies, this film is unfortunately a forgotten but quite subversive little tale.  And Scott Schwartz (The Toy, A Christmas Story) has his finest little Jimmy Stewart moment.





I've always respected Jamie Lee Curtis as a tremendous actress.
 

That Kidco movie looks so familiar. Like something I probably watched a hundred times one summer, and never thought of again.

Kind of like Six Pack, with Kenny Rogers. Doesn't that movie even exist anymore? Sadly, that was 1982, so no chance of existing here either.

Never seen Splash or Against All Odds or Footloose.

Police Academy was an 8 year old laugh riot. I have not revisted it since I was probably about ten. Man, did I ever love it though.

I liked Ice Pirates more when I revisted it about five or six years ago, than I did when I was a kid.
 

Rock wrote:

I do like Bachelor Party from the same year. Hope that makes an appearance.

Rock wrote:

Btw, are these any movies from the year or just what you want to see at the time?

I'm trying to keep it to the films I watched that year, in either theater, video or cable formats.  I can't always remember exactly when I watched some of the films on video or cable, so I'm trying to approximate around the year.  I do remember that I first watched Bachelor Party on cable in the summer of '85, which I think I might consider close enough to qualify.

Rock wrote:

Tank is pretty baffling

Curious to hear why.

Saw this in the theater.  I'm still a fan.  I think that what modern audiences miss in their moral calibration is that, despite whatever ethical issues that may arise, what the film is completely lacking is any sense of malice.  I don't think that's a small distinction.  It's still, behind maybe Fast Times and The Outsiders, one of the more empathetic teenager films of the 80s.




I have to admit to not taking "hip hop" very seriously in these nascent days, seeing it more as a novelty, party music, although I did have this cassette and some other adjacent contemporaries like Midnight Star and Gap Band.  The film was OK, I guess, it was mostly about the scene than plot, but I'm willing to bet that it's outpaced Footloose in watchability.




I still think this might be the best version of the Mutiny on the Bounty story.  I was down for any Mel Gibson post-Road Warrior, and the deep bench cast included Daniel Day-Lewis and Liam Neeson, neither of whom I was yet familiar.  I was familiar with Anthony Hopkins from Elephant Man and Magic, but I hadn't quite placed him in the 'GOAT' caste yet.





I hate to include this.  Through an older brother, I was able to see these kinds of videos at the time, but they were always disappointing even in the meager service they were supposed to provide.  The eye-candy was fleeting, they were never very sexy, and the protagonists were invariably frat-boy douchebags.
 

Much like Children of the Corn, these early Stephen King viewings were far more helpful in learning what not to do when making movies, and how some films seem to be inexplicably more dull than even the subject matter would suggest.





Another theater watch.  This is a film which has become an epitome of 80s crowd-pleasing blockbuster, but, honestly, I don't care.  I think it's a fine motion picture, however corny it can get at times, however golden its magic hour hues, however manipulative that confessedly rousing finale beams with all of the slow-mo sparks and fireworks.  Even in my cynical age, I hold an inner Wilfred Brimley which watches in silent stoutly stoic admiration.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

lol, I did see that one in the theater though.

I wanted to, but no one would bring me because it wasn't good enough for them. They were too busy bringing me to On The Right Track....and Under the Rainbow....and Hardly Working....and Zapped.