1986 might be one of the most underrated years for movies. Or it might not. Maybe I’m just nuts, but, a year in which “Top Gun,” “Back to School,” “Ruthless People,” “Pretty in Pink,” “Rad,” and “Sid and Nancy” were released is pret-ty sweet.

It was the year that Oliver Stone became a household name. For better…and for…nah, for worse.

The Academy’s best picture nominees of 1986:

Platoon: The eventual winner. I’ve seen it a few times, and it’s a very ambiguous movie. Buried somewhere in this morality tale, is, I’m sure, a message. It’s real subtle, though

Hannah and Her Sisters: Woody Allen in fine form. Great ensemble cast. Best Supporting Actor winner Michael Caine called the Academy and said, “I’m going to miss the ceremony mates. I’m in Jamaica making the BEST MOVIE EVER.” He was wrong.

Children of a Lesser God: I think, I think…this might have been a play before it was a movie.

The Mission: There is nothing particularly wrong with this movie, but would it have killed them to make it a teensy bit fun?

What should have been nominated? Easy.

(more…)

A sports film that is almost entirely about losers?!

About that oft forgotten and abandoned piece of real estate called Indiana?!

It’s shot in a landscape-portrait, documentary style that memorializes a smaller than small town high school, basketball team?!

A movie suspended in a repeatedly evangelical universe that counts prayer as the major source of miracles?!

That set of profoundly un-Hollywood ideas had me thanking God for them as I watched ‘Hoosiers’ today.

Hadn’t I seen it before?

Well, portions of it.

That, however, was when I was merely on my way to one of the great fast-tracks for losers, full-blown alcoholism.

At that time, I was in too much of a hurry to contemplate even the possibility of being a loser. (more…)

Via The Telegraph: [emphasis added]

Against Hollywood typecasting, [Hopper] was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Republican Party. “I’ve been a Republican since Reagan,” he once said in an interview. “I voted for Bush and his father. I don’t tell a lot of people, because I live in a city where somebody who voted for Bush is really an outcast.”

Let us all now pause for Patrick Goldstein to scurry up an article trashing Hopper as an untalented whiner. It’s also worth mentioning that Hopper wasn’t quiet at all when he chose to support President Obama in 2008.

Here’s something else you might not have read about Hopper. Many of his obituaries include a colorful anecdote about an angry John Wayne chasing him around the set of “True Grit” with a loaded gun. But did you know Hopper credited Wayne with saving his career?

Via Wikipedia by way of a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose: (more…)

(more…)

***Update: Roger L. Simon writes today – to which I add a hearty Amen: So when you think of Dennis on that iconic bike in ‘Easy Rider,’ think of America at its best, out on the open road, optimistic and heading straight on with unflinching belief in liberty.

We all knew this was coming but that doesn’t lessen the blow. Dennis Hopper was a legend, an irreplaceable force of personality on screen, and a true Hollywood iconoclast who changed everything.  Below is an obituary from the AP and a wonderful tribute video put together by Matt Zoller Seitz, a critic and filmmaker.

Hopper had been ill for a while, and so sensing this inevitability I wrote something of a tribute just this last month. Great actor. Great director. Great American. Terrible loss.

God bless the wild man with the gentle soul. May he rest in peace.

—–

AP:

Dennis Hopper, the high-flying Hollywood wild man whose memorable and erratic career included an early turn in “Rebel Without a Cause,” an improbable smash with “Easy Rider” and a classic character role in “Blue Velvet,” has died. He was 74.

Hopper died Saturday at his home in the Los Angeles beach community of Venice, surrounded by family and friends, family friend Alex Hitz said. Hopper’s manager announced in October 2009 that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

The success of “Easy Rider,” and the spectacular failure of his next film, “The Last Movie,” fit the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favorites as “Apocalypse Now” and “Hoosiers.” He was a two-time Academy Award nominee, and in March 2010, was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. (more…)

One of the best things to happen to filmdom during the mid-eighties was the resurgence of The Mighty Dennis Hopper: “River’s Edge,” “Blue Velvet,” “Hoosiers…” From out of nowhere, this completely unconventional force of personality whose career reached all the way back to the tail-end of the Golden Age, was suddenly everywhere, livening up and taking to another level whatever movie was lucky enough to have him. Even the lousy ones, and there were plenty of those.

—–

The above video compilation is about as perfect an encapsulation of his career as you could hope for. Hopper’s a complicated guy who changed everything with his directorial debut “Easy Rider,” blew it all with the disastrous “Last Movie,” and then slowly climbed his way back to a career filled with a number of iconic performances. His portrayal of Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet” is one of my all-time favorites, his confrontation with Christopher Walken in “True Romance” is the stuff of legend, and what a testament to his range that this is the same actor who wrenched our hearts in “Hoosiers.”

There’s a taste of all those moments in the video, and much, much more. I would also urge those of you haven’t seen “Easy Rider” to give it a look. Not only is it a hands-down masterpiece regardless of your politics, but thematically it’s much more in line with conservative ideals (later in life Hopper would become a Reagan Republican) about liberty than anyone wants to admit to, especially the left. Just the fact that our easy riders don’t wear motorcycle helmets feels like a revolutionary statement in this burgeoning era of the oppressive nanny state. (more…)

David Letterman has been much in the news lately due to his fondness for the flesh of young female staffers, and the alleged blackmail plot regarding his exploits in that direction. It seems that old Dave is a bit of a lech who — like many powerful and wealthy individuals — uses his high social status to gain access to the sexual organs of women who would not look at him twice were he not so illustrious a figure. And so the furious debate rages in the papers, online and on cable news — will Dave survive the scandal? Will his audience follow him? The mystery for me however is much simpler — how did Letterman ever achieve the status he enjoys today? 

Allow me to explain. I’m not from around these parts. I grew up in Scotland, spent a decade in Russia, and arrived in the US three years ago. As something of a night owl I soon found myself confronted with America’s strange, televisual dream-world of nocturnal gibberish, and the even more perplexing national obsession with the personalities, rivalries and ratings battles that played out between the competing purveyors of this gibberish. The big one of course was Leno vs. Letterman, but who could forget the death struggle for comedic dominance between Conan and Craig Ferguson? Then there was the mystery of Jimmy Kimmel, floating around like some moth that had lost sight of the moon, detached from these wars as if no one expected him to succeed anyway. And lurking in the deep, deep darkness was the awful horror that is Carson Daly: charmless, entirely unfunny and visibly drowning in his own misery.  (more…)