Sorry, I hadn’t reached this before I posted.
Stealing Heaven was very interesting to me since I had only vaguely heard about Heloise and Abelard. Lots of bonus nudity too (Kim Thomson, anyone?).
No, he meant Ink. Another great film that I own; it just sits on a different shelf than the one I went thru for my previous post.
I saw that so many times on HBO in the summer… “She’s a looker… that’s what they say…”
Totally agree on this - the Opera scene is still one of my favorite comedic moments in film.
Some of my favorites, like* Frailty*, have already been mentioned.
I’ll add two others I absolutely love that I don’t think anyone else did.
The first is You’re Next, a deconstruction of the home invasion genre. It takes places during a family gathering of this upper crust WASP family where one of them, a college professor has brought him his new girlfriend. Suddenly, they get attacked by a group of your stereotypical masked, axe-wielding psychos intent on murdering the whole family break in. And then it turns out that several of the characters are not what they seem to be.
A really fantastic gem that was criminally ignored.
And, another that I think was the victim of the fact that it came out at the same time as a similar but vastly inferior movie called Olympus Has Fallen.
I’m of course referring to White House Down. No, it shouldn’t have gotten an Oscar, but it was a fantastic little film that deserved far better than it got.
Also, I’m not sure if it should be mentioned because it was a hit movie, but I will because unlike other similar teen movies of the 80s, it’s almost entirely forgotten.
My Bodyguard. I loved Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and some of the other movies and don’t think it’s better, but it deserves to be remembered to the same extent.
I think this is worth its own thread. I’ve seen both, and noted the similarities (or steals) but I’ve never really thought about them comparatively against each other.
I think these are among those which have fallen least through the caracks, here a least. With the possible exception of the first, all the others get pretty regular play on basic cable.
My favorite of the genre is Say Anything with a very young and brilliant John Cusack.
The one I was referring to as having “fallen through the cracks” was My Bodyguard.
My point is that all the others, and yes, I’d include Say Anything, have been remembered, while it has not been.
I’ve always thought that The Long Kiss Goodnight was just about the perfect movie. Geena Divis is believable her role as a woman with amnesia and her beginning to snap out of it. Samuel L Jackson is being his usual badass self, but this is a early role for him, its nice to see he has some petulance. Its a cool action/adventures/suspense thriller, with a Bourne Identity-like subplot, year before Bourne series of movies.
Everyone on Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB says its derivative and cliched. I think some people just see too many movies and have no sense of wonder.
While I like My Bodyguard a lot, I never thought it was part of the “teen movies of the 80s”. It came out in 1980, four years before Sixteen Candles, which is the movie that pretty much launched the 80s teen movie genre. My Bodyguard doesn’t look or feel like an 80s movie and doesn’t have 80’s style or an 80s soundtrack.
Also, Chris Makepeace’s career falling through a trapdoor relatively quickly after Meatballs and My Bodyguard doesn’t help the memorability of the movie either.
This is one of my favorite movies. I have a thing for female action heroines and Charlie is only bested by Ripley.
Well, not huge, but as much as I don’t enjoy gore in my dotage I’m glad I saw Bad Taste. It made me laugh, and it gave me the opportunity to fall on the floor years later upon seeing that Peter Jackson was making The Lord of the Rings, and that it looked to be really really good.
“I’m a Derek and Dereks don’t run!”
Bill Forsyth’s earlier movie, Gregory’s Girl, is also a wonderfully quirky movie set in a Scottish high school.
I’m going to go off the grid a bit with 1986’s Arion, one of the lost classics of 80s anime. Very few people could action like writer/director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (Dirty Pair, Crusher Joe, Venus Wars) could, and he put his skills to good use here. Arion* is a young demi-god in ancient Greece who gets drawn in to the struggle to free humanity from the tyranny of the gods of Mt. Olympus. It’s a huge, rip-roaring, swashbuckling adventure and has never been translated into English. Trailer
How has “My Bodyguard” fallen through the cracks? It produced more than its share of jokes on late night TV about the way she sang that song. The current season of the Netflix drama Sens8 even makes oblique comments about it (without naming it – that’s be impossible if this film had “falenm through the cracks”)
You’ve confused My Bodyguard (1980) with *The Bodyguard *(1992).
Ah, I see.
FWIW, I recall “My Bodyguard”, although it admittedly didn’t have as much attention as “THe Bodyguard”, and had no mentions in Sens8. They should had an over-the-top song.
I love Fandango. Kevin Costner’s best movie.
Comfort and Joy is a great movie. I like Local Hero form the same director better but I think that is not as much of a “fall through the cracks” movie.