Important Anniversaries Marked in 2015

* The Oscar winners noted were released in the previous year, but given the award in the year noted.

10 Years Ago (2005)

Pierce Brosnan resigned at James Bond after four films and later in the year Daniel Craig was named as his successor.

Number of films I've seen: 87
My average rating: 6.89 / 10
My best of the year: Cache dir. Michael Haneke
My worst of the year: Fantastic Four dir. Tim Story

directing debuts 
Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin)
Lee Daniels+ (Shadowboxer)
Rian Johnson (Brick)
Joss Whedon* (Serenity)

* past Oscar nominee NOT for directing +future Oscar nominee

notable deaths
Playwright and screenwriter Arthur Miller (89)
Director Robert Wise (91)
Actor and comedian Richard Pryor (65)

Top grossing film for the year (domestic): Revenge of the Sith ($380.3  million)
(worldwide): Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ($896.9 million)

Academy Award Best Picture winner*: Million Dollar Baby dir. Clint Eastwood

Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner: L'Enfant dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Movies from my collection
The 40-Year Old Virgin
Brokeback Mountain
Cache
A History of Violence
Match Point
Wedding Crashers

Non-movie related
- Iraq had its first free Parliamentary elections since 1958 on 30 January
- Pope John Paul II died on 2 April
- Pope Benedict XVI elected 265th Pope on 19 April
- Variety revealed the identity of Deep Throat to be FBI Associate Director Mark Felt on 31 May
- Four coordinated bombing attacks in London killed 52 people on 7 July, the day after the city was announced as host of the 2012 Summer Olympics
- Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on 29 August

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning Movie Review

This is one of twoFriday the 13th films that I remembered best. It must have played on TV a lot at a crucial time when I was growing up. Despite how stupid this movie is, it scared a great deal as a child.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

With the fourth Fridaythe 13th sequel Paramount attempted to take the series in a new direction by having the killer be someone other than Jason. Friday the 13^th: A New Beginning picks up with a traumatized Tommy Jarvis (the boy who did Jason in at the end of Friday the 13th: TheFinal Chapter) looking for Jason’s grave and finding two boys there to dig him up. The sequence turns out to be Tommy’s nightmare. He’s been sent to an alternative psychiatric center run by a caring and understanding doctor who treats troubled teens in a communal farm setting.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge Movie Review

Mostly I remembered this as being a kind of stupid sequel that didn't exactly fit in the series. I always had this innate sense that it was just a sub-par effort and it turns out I was always right. This one had much less effect on me as a kid than the next in the series.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

For A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, New Line Cinema didn’t manage to bring back anyone from the first film except Robert Englund as the burned and scarred dream tormenter Freddy Krueger. Without the creative mind of Wes Craven, who created the character and the first story, this sequel just goes straight to pot. It’s clear they wanted to try something slightly different without repeating the formula, but in a story that involves a teenage boy who is, by all evidence, possessed by Freddy and doing his killing, there is mostly chaos and confusion with scant narrative cohesion.

John Cusack Focus: Better Off Dead Movie Review

Revisiting favorite old films from your childhood can go one of two ways. In most cases you can be fairly certain that it’s not nearly as good, interesting, clever, or funny as you remember. But you can be sure that you’ll either be supremely disappointed to discover there’s little redemption to be found within its frames or that there’s actually a lot more to discover than your innocent and immature brain was capable of comprehending at the time.

Better Off Dead… is one of two bizarre comedies (along with One Crazy Summer) from the mid-80s written and directed by Savage Steve Holland and starring John Cusack. What was Holland thinking? Can you imagine a film being made today whose main character is a depressive teen who tries to kill himself several times over the course of the film’s 90 minutes – and oh yeah, it’s a comedy?

25 Years Ago This Month: December 1985

In typical movie release calendar tradition, December 1985 was packed with the studios' various prestige movies vying for awards consideration.

One such film was Runaway Train starring Jon Voight, Eric Roberts and Rebecca DeMornay. Roberts earned his one and only Oscar nomination (to date) for the film. He went on to become a trashy B-movie star. The director, Andrey Konchalovskiy, went on to later direct the wonderful Sylvester Stallone/Kurt Russell buddy copy film Tango & Cash.

The eventual Best Picture Oscar winner, Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa opened to rave reviews and went on to become the number 5 box office success for 1985, just behind...

25 Years Ago This Month (November 1985)

Following the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a Wes Craven horror classic that still holds up really well today, November 1985 saw the release of the first of man sequels: A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge. For reasons surpassing understanding and logic, Freddy possesses a teen and makes him do the killings instead of invading their dreams. It was directed by Jack Sholder and written by David Chaskin, neither of whom ever had a higher profile Hollywood job. It still managed to gross nearly $30 million.

Jim Carrey played a high school teen who finds sexual satisfaction from Vampiress Lauren Hutten in Once Bitten. Not Carrey's first movie, but it was his first starring role.

To be filed under the Films That Time Forgot heading there was Santa Claus, a fantasy adventure film that attempts to seriously explain the origins of the mythical hero starring David Huddleston in the title role and Dudley Moore as an elf.

The two big films of the month were Rocky IV in which Rocky faces down the Russian Ivan Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren, and White Nights in which Mikhail Baryshnikov plays a Soviet ballet dancer and defector whose plane crash lands in Siberia. After being recognized he is placed under house arrest and meets and befriends an American dancer and defector to the Soviet Union played by Gregory Hines.

Outside of film history:
-The comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" debuted on the 18th.
-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time in Geneva on the 19th.

Deaths:
-Stepin Fetchit, who popularized black stereotypes on film and television, died on the 19th at age 83.
-Anne Baxter at age 62 from a brain aneurysm on Madison Ave. in NYC. She was most famous for her role as the young eponymous theater ingenue who takes Bette Davis's place in All About Eve. She also won a supporting actress Oscar for The Razor's Edge.

25 Years Ago This Month: October 1985

Incredibly, October 1985 didn't see the release of a single truly noteworthy film. Sure there was the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Commando and the Jeff Bridges thriller Jagged Edge, which was the box office winner for the month, but everything else falls into the long or mostly forgotten list.

Of course there was the cult classic Re-Animator - a pretty amusing updating of the Frankenstein story. Also on the cult classic list (albeit on a much smaller scale) was Remo Williams - The Adventure Begins starring Fred Ward as cop turned government assassin.

25 Years Ago This Month (September 1985)

It seems there was hardly anything worth mentioning in September '85. Personally, I remember it was the month of Hurricane Gloria hitting the Atlantic coast - my first hurricane experience. I remember we had to put tape on the sliding glass door to keep it from shattering if it should have been hit by flying debris. I recall lots of tree branches coming down and I remember going out on the front lawn when the eye of the storm passed over.

Movies of note that opened this month include Martin Scorsese's After Hours, a weird wild trip through the NYC underworld during a single night, and Agnes of God, a mostly forgotten film now that earned Meg Tilly an Oscar nomination.

In historical news:
- An earthquake of magnitude 8.1 struck Mexico City killing some 10 - 12 thousand people.
- Robert Ballard located the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.
- Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb's hit record.
- The first of five deaths occurred from Tylenol laced with cyanide.

There weren't even any really notable celebrity deaths or births. Well, the Yankees' Joba Chamberlain turns 25 this month.

25 Years Ago This Month (August 1985)

*Clicking the label "1985" below will take you to a list of all posts related to movies of that year including other "25 Years Ago This Month" entries.

August 1985 was the month of teen comedies with the release of the John Hughes comedy Weird Science in which geeks Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith create Kelly LeBroc from a doll. I used to watch it a lot as a kid, but it's a lesser Hughes film.

Next up was Real Genius, still one of my favorites, starring Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarrett as two super geniuses at a super genius school unwittingly designing a new powerful laser to be used as a military assassination weapon.

Fittingly, time has not been kind to My Science Project starring Dennis Hopper as a hippie high school science teacher whose students bring him a glowing orb they found which can transport them to different times and places. Yeah, you didn't miss much.

Another classic from my childhood released this month was Better Off Dead with John Cusack as a recently dumped, suicidal teen who screws up each suicide attempt. Sounds hilarious, doesn't it? It really is though. And it's totally bizarre with the two Asian characters who learned their English from watching Howard Cosell on "Wide World of Sports" and the paperboy who chases Cusack around for the "Two dollars!" he's owed.

Less classic was Teen Wolf. Despite starring the hot-at-the-moment, fresh off the release of Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox, this film only took $33 million. It was enough to be #1 for August releases but only 26th for the year.

25 Years Ago This Month (July 1985)

Back to the Future opened in July 1985 and was the king of the summer box office, taking in $210 million during its run to finish at number 1 for the year and number 9 all-time. It's currently sitting at number 91 on the all-time list. This was one of my absolute favorites as a child and I watched it repeatedly. Michael J. Fox became a major film star as a result, although he'd already achieved big success on his television sitcom "Family Ties." He shot both the TV series and the film simultaneously, acting on the TV sound stage by day, and doing the film shoot by night. That "To be continued..." teaser at the end dogged me for what seemed like an eternity when in actuality it was only 4 years before the much-anticipated sequel was released. Of course, these days the sequel is planned and written while the first film is being shot so they can release it the next year or two years later. Because nowadays the first film is little more than an extended commercial for the sequel. How things have changed in 25 years.

25 Years Ago This Month (June 1985)

One of my favorite childhood movies was released this month.

That movie was The Goonies which went on to finish the year at number 9 on the box office list with $61 million. I didn't see it in the cinema, but I watched it incessantly once we had it on video (taped off cable, I'm sure). I knew about every line, although not as well as I knew every line to Star Wars. The Goonies still holds up as a decent pre-adolescent adventure movie.

One movie from 25 years ago that doesn't hold up so well: Red Sonja, which took in only $7 million at the domestic box office. I remember watching it a couple times on cable. I enjoyed it because it was a Conan: The Barbarian spinoff and I loved Conan (still do, by the way).

Cocoon also opened that month. I remember watching it on cable, but it was a bit cerebral for my 7 year old mind. And it was about people who just seemed absolutely ancient to me, which is why it still surprises the hell out of me that while every other elderly actor from that film is dead (Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Maureen Stapleton, Jack Gilford, Gwen Verdon), Wilford Brimley is still alive! But that's because he wasn't even a senior citizen at the time. He was only 50 at the time of filming. And Stapleton, who played his on-screen wife was a youthful 59. All the other actors were well into their 70s. Cocoon took in $76 million to finish sixth for the year.

John Huston's second to last film and last Oscar nomination came for Prizzi's Honor starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner and Anjelica Huston.

Also opening in June 1985 were the forgettable D.A.R.Y.L. starring Barrett Oliver, also known as the kid in Cocoon; Perfect starring John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis which rates a 3.8/10 on IMDb and a 19% on Rotten Tomatoes; the Brat Pack film St. Elmo's Fire; and Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider.

Births 25 years ago:
-Michael Phelps - American hero of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, winner of a record 14 Olympic gold medals, winner of the most gold medals in a single games when he won 8 golds in Beijing setting 7 world records in the process - celebrates his 25th birthday this month.
-German footballer Lukas Podolski also turns 25 this month. Look for him to score a bunch of goals for Germany starting on the 13th against Australia in this month's World Cup.

Nazi history 25 years ago:
-A body believed to be Nazi criminal Josef Mengele a.k.a. Angel of Death (that wonderful man who performed grisly experimental surgeries on Jews in Auschwitz - in the name of science, of course) was exhumed in Brazil. Several years later DNA conclusively proved it was Mengele's body.

Non-movie related history 25 years ago:
-The Discovery Channel was launched.
-Air India flight 182 exploded from a bomb over the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland killing all 329 people aboard. A Sikh terrorist group was responsible.
-Route 66 was officially decommissioned putting an end to a seminal route through the American heartland.
-Claus von Bulow (portrayed by Jeremy Irons in the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune) was acquitted of trying to murder his wife.

Classic Movie Review: The Purple Rose of Cairo

It came time for me to have a second look at a couple of films from Woody Allen’s undervalued 1980s period. It turns out I myself had undervalued The Purple Rose of Cairo, a sweet little love letter to the magic of cinema. It moves along at a quick pace and clocks in at a crisp 75 minutes.

I remembered it as a forgettable little yarn about an unhappily married woman who meets with the ultimate fantasy of a cinephile – a character from one of her favorite films steps off the screen and falls in love with her. The truth is there is a so much more going on than I was capable of recognizing when I first watched it some twelve years ago.

Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, housewife to the unemployed, gambling and abusive Monk (a quintessential Danny Aiello performance) and part time diner waitress in Depression era New Jersey. Cecilia, like so many others in that time, turned to the movie house for escapist entertainment to forget the terrible troubles of the world for 90 minutes or so. And in those days you could spend all day in the cinema on only one ticket.

After one particularly rough encounter with Monk, she spends all afternoon watching The Purple Rose of Cairo (the film within a film shares its title) until one of the characters, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) notices her and comes down off the screen to meet her and spend some time in the real world. In one motion, Allen blends the world of reality with the fantasy we all secretly want to be our reality.

Daniels actually plays a dual role as both Baxter and the actor Gil Shepherd, who plays Baxter in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Confused yet? At the time Daniels was cast he was not a well-known movie star, but he had the looks and the charisma to pull off playing the cocky actor and the humor and light touch to play the naïve Baxter. Seen today, he comes across as an odd casting choice because his career never really took off to bring him the kind of movie star success that this film suggests.

Allen’s writing, which earned him his fifth Original Screenplay Oscar nomination, is in fine form. It’s got some biting Hollywood satire including this brilliant exchange between Cecilia and Gil:

Gil (speaking about Baxter): He’s my character. I created him.
Cecilia: Didn’t the man who wrote the movie do that?
Gil: Yes, technically. But I made him live. I fleshed him out.

There’s also the sheer absurdity of the Hollywood moguls debating how to handle the fact that one of their film’s characters has walked off the screen. They accept the story as true without verification and discuss the matter in terms of potential lawsuits should he do anything wrong.

But the film goes much deeper than the clever quips as it tries to get at the heart of why we return time and again to the movies for enjoyment. For one thing there’s the security and the comfort – with rare exceptions we generally know what to expect given the genre and a brief plot summary. Hence another wonderful line delivered by a woman at the cinema where the other characters have been milling about on screen waiting for Baxter’s return: “I want what happened in the movie last week to happen this week; otherwise, what's life all about anyway?” This line, with its existential quandary, perhaps best sums up the movie. If we can’t be certain of what’s coming in a movie of all places, what does that say about my existence?

The film has some fascinating comments to make about the nature of fiction writing and character development. Surely there was something at work in Allen’s mind with regard to the common assertion by writers of fiction that their characters come alive within the work, that at a certain point they cease to be the product of the writer’s mind (at least consciously) and begin acting on their own. Allen just drives the point home literally.

SPOILER ALERT: Allen is most interested in the lure of Hollywood and its effect on people. First Cecilia falls in love with Ted Baxter: “I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything.” She is drawn in by his charm, his childlike naiveté and fascination with the real world. Later she meets Gil Shepherd, the actor. He’s everything Baxter is, only more, because he’s real. He’s the unattainable. Sure, we can have Cary Grant or Tom Cruise whenever we want by popping in a DVD. But you’re only getting a small part of them – the characters they create. With Gil, Cecilia can have it all. She falls for his charms as he promises to whisk her away to Hollywood luxury. And she wants it, as most of us would deep down.

But alas, it’s not to be. Gil used her to get Baxter back on the screen before skipping town, leaving Cecilia stuck with her crummy life and the vicarious pleasures of the movie house. It may seem a sad ending, but at the end of the day we all have to realize that the movies aren’t real. Real life is here in front of us, no matter how much time we spend in the dark, looking at flickering images on the silver screen.

25 Years Ago This Month: May 1985

I'm now at that age where I have memories of things that happened 25 years ago. And to realize that those things were 25 (!) years ago is sometimes startling.

Events not connected with movies are at the end.

2010 Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan (An Education) turns 25 this month.

Deaths of 25 years ago include actress Margaret Hamilton - best known as The Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz - at age 82.

Also Disney animator and director Wolfgang Reitherman at age 75. He was one of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men" (original core group of animators). He worked as an animator for Disney starting in 1934, eventually directing 6 animated features from One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) to The Rescuers (1977).

The 37th Cannes Film Festival was held with Milos Forman serving as President of the Jury. Amir Kuristica's When Father Was Away on Business won the Palme d'Or. Alan Parker's Birdy won the Grand Prix while William Hurt took Best Actor for Kiss of the Spider Woman (he would later win the Oscar for the same role) and Cher won Best Actress (in a tie) for her role in Mask.

May 1985, the month I turned 7, saw the U.S. release of Gotcha! starring a very young Linda Fiorentino and Anthony Edwards. This would have been Fiorentino's film debut had it not been for February's release of Vision Quest starring Matthew Modine. Fiorentino would have a hell of a debut year with a role in Martin Scorsese's After Hours released in October. She would make little impression for the next 9 years until her starring role in the neo-noir The Last Seduction. Edwards was hot off the success of 1984's Revenge of the Nerds. And wouldn't you know it, this movie about a college student and champion of a campus paintball assassination game who gets caught up with a strange Czech woman and some East German Cold War intrigue is having its DVD debut next month! It made a paltry $8.9 million at the domestic box office.

Also released in May that year was Rambo: First Blood Part II which provided an unnecessary sequel to a fairly decent parable on the social exclusion of the Vietnam veteran. Rambo II is little more than a revisionist history tale in which the lone American soldier goes back to single-handedly win the Vietnam War and bring home his lost comrades. It was the number two box office draw of the year raking in $150 million.

These were two movies I recall watching fairly often when they played on what I imagine was HBO because I don't think we had any other pay cable station back then.

Roger Moore's final turn as 007 in A View to a Kill opened in May, eventually taking in a middling $50 million to place it at 13 on that year's box office list, just behind...

Chevy Chase's comedy, ahem, classic Fletch. Admittedly I've never seen this oft-quoted film. Along with Caddyshack it's one of my comedy classic holes. Somehow I don't think I'm likely to find either very funny at this stage in my life. Surely high school is when you have to see Fletch and, for better or worse, I'm well beyond that era.

The John Candy/Richard Pryor comedy Brewster's Millions (also unseen by me) was released in May 1985, as well ($41 million and number 20 on the list).

So was Chuck Norris's Missing in Action follow-up Code of Silence, ranked 44 on the box office list with $20 million.

Non-movie-related:

-Michael Jordan was named the NBA Rookie of the Year.
-Israel trades 1150 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners for 3 Israeli soldiers yet continues to be responsible for all the ills in that region.
-Britain agreed to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.
-Madonna had her second #1 hit in "Crazy for You" from the soundtrack of the aforementioned Vision Quest.
-Olympic gold medal figure skater Sarah Hughes was born
-Juventus defeated Liverpool 1-0 in the European Cup Final but not before a wall in Heysel Stadium in Brussels collapsed, killing 39 and injuring 600. They felt that not playing the match after the tragedy would create more problems, so they went ahead with a bit of footy anyway.