A Year in Film: 1984
1. A comedy about ghosts starring Bill Murray.
2. An uncharacteristically dark sequel to a beloved film that created a cultural icon.
3. A movie that was almost entirely improvised by its star.
4. Johnny Depp’s film debut.
On May 8th, the Soviet Union announces that it will boycott 1984’s Summer Olympics in LA. In Canada, a military veteran opens fire in the Parliament Building, killing three people, in an attempt to assassinate Premier René Levesque. In Chicago, it has been a hot, sweaty, seemingly endless cascade of baseball, and after 17 innings and 6 hours, it’s a cold 1 am. The Brewers and White Sox decide to pick the game back up the following evening. The final runtime of the game is 8 hours, 6 minutes.
Also, Temple of Doom was released!
Temple of Doom is the most uncharacteristic Indiana Jones movie, and part of the reason that the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating for movies. Some differences between this and Raiders. Harrison Ford is ripped. Also, it’s set before Raiders, and is an early example of the concept of a prequel. There’s a literal cult. A different love interest. A guy gets his still-beating heart gently torn out of his chest and is then incinerated by vague lava, while the heart-tearer laughs.
Some people don’t like this movie. I am not one of them. This movie is incredible. The opening sequence is a masterclass in establishing stakes and then immediately raising them, while doing so much to establish the two leads that we’ll follow throughout the movie. Indy is poisoned, and the female lead (played by Spielberg’s future wife, Kate Capshaw), Willie Scott, spies a diamond and is immediately infatuated. Gunfire breaks out in Club Obi-Wan (hah get it), and Indy is crawling desperately on the dance floor, his eyes never leaving the vial that contains his salvation. Willie is crawling, too, but it’s for a more financial, less life-threatening goal, her eyes never leaving the diamond. Just before this, Indy threatens Willie with a knife in order to get his payment from the mafia guys he’s giving his latest archaeological find to. So in the span of about 5 minutes, we understand Indy is kind of a jerk, and Willie is shallow and only interested in money.
We also get a delightful character that should have been brought back in the sequels, Short Round. A 9 year old boy (with cans taped to his shoes so he can reach the pedals in his car) who can out-race Vin Diesel.
The character of Indiana Jones in this movie is much more straight-edge and rough. He doesn’t have any time for Willie’s over-dramatic presence. He’s a spinning tornado of brutish competence and exhaustion.
He comes face to face with a horrifying cult under an old royal palace. This movie, like the previous installment, uses historic locations and tensions as a backdrop to a fantastical story. In Raiders, it was Nazis and Hitler’s conquests in Africa. Here it’s the British Raj and its unhappy subjects (extra Hot Take: The Thuggees are the good guys in this movie).
He gets poisoned into being evil! There’s a whole scene where he writhes on a too-small table precariously balanced over way too many candles. Then he sits up and gives the camera the trademark Harrison Ford smirk, but with too much wrathful glee. That’s when you know something’s wrong.
The rest of the movie is bonkers please go see it.
June 8th! An F5 Tornado flattens Barneveld, Wisconsin, causing $25 million in damage!
Ghostbusters also came out in theaters!
Ghostbusters. The genesis point for one more iconic piece of culture. Take three incredible comedians, put them together with Sigourney Weaver 6 years after Alien, as well as adding Ernie Hudson’s breakout role? And Rick Moranis running around being flustered? Boom. Instant classic.
Something about four guys in coveralls with huge laser vacuums on their backs driving around in a repurposed hearse really captured the imaginations of the general viewing public. It helps that the effects for the ghostly presences that the four guys combat were, generally, pretty good!
Going back to the feel of the movie… This wasn’t the example of ‘entirely improvised’ that I was thinking of, but almost none of the scenes in this movie were filmed how they were written in the script. There’s a particular long take that you might be aware of if you’ve seen the movie, where Rick Moranis is wandering through his party, making inane comments to the guests.
All of that was improvised. No kidding. Not only is it all one shot, but Rick Moranis just kinda, made up the whole thing on the spot? In addition to Moranis’ improv, Bill Murray’s improvisational skill, ad-libbing most of his lines, lent a sense of refreshing spontaneity to the character of Venkman, which is great because the entire movie is built around the guy.
This movie was really slapped together last-minute. A couple sequences were thought up by Ivan Reitman, the director, on his way to the set to film. I suppose the main draw was Bill Murray (and his aforementioned off-the-cuff style), coming off Caddyshack and Tootsie. But I think the central attraction was definitely the concept.
I mean, who doesn’t want to see a typical 80s business producing typical 80s ads, using industrial, realistic looking equipment to carry out the jobs they’re advertising for? That sounds boring, but hear me out… repurposed firehouse with a fire pole… and GHOSTS!!
BOOM INSTANT CLASSIC WRAP IT UP WE JUST CREATED CULTURE.
In all seriousness though, I think the movie really hits on an interesting aesthetic. They use the then-current New York landscape as a backdrop for some ridiculous events. It’s in the same ballpark as the twisted familiarity of Temple of Doom, just on completely opposite sides. They use a familiar place to anchor the exotically supernatural events that occur in the movie and, in the process, create an incredibly interesting and lived-in world. They accidentally recreated the draw of Star Wars in a non-Star Wars movie. That’s really great.
In November…
Yikes.
I guess it’s time to talk about Nightmare on Elm Street. The only movie in this article that I haven’t seen. And I’m never going to! I would cry and squeal like a little baby! Certain horror movies, I can watch, because I can imagine being able to fight off the villain, or can realistically distance myself from what’s happening on screen.
I know for a fact that if I ever saw Nightmare on Elm Street, I would never sleep again. Freddy, for all his goofy evolution in the sequels, is patently, bone-chillingly terrifying in the first Elm Street movie. He’s unstoppable, and wrathfully joyous about the horrific acts he commits throughout the runtime.
You also almost never see his face, and, in fact, the scariest moment of the film doesn’t even involve his on-screen presence.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
AAAAA.
AAaAAaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
WH-HOW DID THEY DO THAT? THIS MOVIE WILL MAKE ME SOB!
What works about Nightmare is that, like Ghostbusters, it sets its action in a familiar location, a typical American school and suburban community. This familiarity is for a completely different emotional goal, however. One of the genre of horror’s key components and strategies is to instill a feeling of ‘this could happen to you, at any moment.’ 1978’s Halloween does that with a similar familiar neighborhood setting. Nightmare does that with the familiar neighborhood, as well as with a wonderfully recognizable collection of characteristics that Freddy has: a song, a shirt pattern, a glove, etc. And you’re not ever really sure what’s real and what’s not until things go horribly wrong, usually cued to you by those characteristics. If a movie can make you afraid of stripes, it’s a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience.
I swear Christopher Nolan watched this movie and thought: “you know, I could do this better, and with Leonardo DiCaprio, and less scary.”
December 1st. NASA and the FAA blow up a plane on purpose to test crash survival technology.
Also, someone’s career got solidified with one movie!
Beverly Hills Cop. A patched-together script written specifically for Sylvester Stallone, and passed around Hollywood until it found its way to the eventual team that made this movie. There had been so many drafts by so many writers that the story was a mess. Luckily, they stumbled into having one of the greatest comedic talents in all history on board.
Literally, when the team was stuck, they’d turn to this guy and ask him to create a scene or improvise something so that it would sound better or be more cohesive. That guy also gives one of the best performances of his career here.
Eddie Murphy. That name brings up some mixed feelings for me in particular. He had so much potential in the 80s, and used that to become the unfunny punchline of a bunch of vanity projects in the 90s. He voiced Donkey in Shrek, and Mushu in Mulan as a comeback, got nominated for an Oscar, and produced a singularly Eddie Murphy project that got nominated at the Golden Globes. He’s on the rise again, but just imagine if he had maintained the momentum he’d been carrying with him since his incredible four-movie debut (48 Hrs., Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, Coming To America) for the rest of his career.
We might be mentioning him in the same breath as some legitimate perennial Oscar-contenders. That might be going a little too far. I think one thing that’s undisputed, though, is that, for all its faults, Beverly Hills Cop displays Murphy at the height of his eventually muddily remembered talents. This is a supernova of a film performance. He’s everywhere, doing everything, and is consistently at the center of the movie’s focus. His presence becomes that of a legitimate movie star. You can’t take your eyes off him.
This movie was put together with scraps. An actor the script wasn’t written for. The script, which wasn’t written for anything. A director who decided to direct based on a coin flip (that’s a real story, he has the quarter framed now). But like Tony Stark, if you will forgive the metaphor, with a box of scraps, they built one of the most memorable action blockbusters of the 80s.
We are four years in on a whole decade of these kinds of things. All those reboots and remakes and sequels? Like 90% of current Hollywood movies? Most of the original ideas for those came from this decade.
So buckle up. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.