my favorite movies of 1986:
(1) Something Wild
(2) The Fly
favorite of 1986:
(Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, Ray Liotta. Directed by Jonathan Demme.)
This movie starts out like a modern-day Bringing up Baby (my favorite of 1938): a quirkily effervescent woman brazenly flouts social norms, doesn’t seem to have a job, and suddenly becomes devoted to making a conventionally respectable man have a more adventurous life no matter how much he resists. Something Wild eventually turns into something less silly and more scary. The movie’s juxtaposition of genres could have felt disjointed, but it’s held together by three perfectly cast actors: Jeff Daniels (as the seemingly ordinary bank executive), Melanie Griffith (a “manic pixie dream girl,” at least on the surface), and Ray Liotta (in his breakthrough role, playing a charming creep named Ray).
Stream Something Wild on Amazon Prime (with ads), Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.
UPDATE (May 2022): Ray Liotta has died at age 67.
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2nd favorite of 1986:
(Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz. Directed by David Cronenberg.)
Stream The Fly on Max or these sites.
3rd favorite of 1986:
(Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Dianne Wiest, Barbara Hershey, Max Von Sydow, Carrie Fisher, Sam Waterston [uncredited]. Directed by Allen.)
The emotional anchor of this ensemble dramedy is Hannah (Mia Farrow), who’s so self-sufficient that other people resent her for it. One of her two sisters (Dianne Wiest), who nervously smokes cigarettes and uses cocaine, feels lost and insecure in her creative aspirations and her love life. Their other sister (Barbara Hershey) is unhappily living with a withdrawn artist (Max Von Sydow) when she clicks with Hannah’s husband (Michael Caine).
Meanwhile, Hannah’s ex-husband (Woody Allen) has a health scare that sends him into an existential crisis. He struggles to understand how life can be worth living when he can’t know if there’s a God or any larger meaning to life.
Woody Allen won an Oscar for the screenplay, and Dianne Wiest and Michael Caine both won Oscars for their performances.
“Hannah and Her Sisters” … is organized like an episodic novel, with acute little self-contained vignettes adding up to the big picture. Each section begins with a title or quotation on the screen, white against black, making the movie feel like a stately progression through the lives of its characters. Then the structure is exploded, time and again, by the energy and the passion of those characters. … By the end of the movie, the section titles and quotations have made an ironic point: We try to organize our lives according to what we have read and learned and believed in, but our plans are lost in a tumult of emotion. … When [the three sisters] meet for lunch and the camera circles them curiously, we sense that in some ways the movie knows them better than they will ever know themselves.
Here’s a clip from that scene:
I found the movie’s use of color rather “blah,” so I tried rewatching it in black and white. That helped me appreciate the movie’s visual choices — the way one character will often be disconcertingly blocked off from view, reflecting the characters’ distance from each other.
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Stream Hannah and Her Sisters on Tubi (free with ads) or these sites.
4th favorite of 1986:
(Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, James Belushi, Elizabeth Perkins. Directed by Edward Zwick.)
So many romantic comedies follow one of two paths: either the main characters heroically overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to get together in the end (and we’re supposed to assume “they live happily ever after”), or we start with a couple that’s all too familiar with each other when their dull world gets shaken up. This romantic dramedy, based on a David Mamet play called Sexual Perversity in Chicago, is different: it starts with two people (Demi Moore and Rob Lowe) who get together quite easily, but then About Last Night … follows the course their relationship takes over time. We see the joys and struggles of their day-to-day life together in ways that are often glossed over by movies.
If one of the pleasures of moviegoing is seeing strange new things on the screen, another pleasure, and probably a deeper one, is experiencing moments of recognition — times when we can say, yes, that’s exactly right, that’s exactly the way it would have happened. “About Last Night …” is a movie filled with moments like that.
Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.
Just watched "Something Wild", very cool movie. Thanks for the recommendation!
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