An unofficial sequel to a lesser Peckinpah is part of a weird kickoff to January 1981
Plus a proto-POLICE ACADEMY and the weirdest film I've reviewed yet
The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.
Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…
JANUARY
The US minimum wage was raised to $3.35 per hour.
A deal was closed to release 8 million dollars in frozen assets in order to secure the release of the 52 US Embassy workers being held hostage in Iran, and they were returned home on January 25th.
Hill Street Blues made its debut on NBC.
And finally, Elijah Wood was born the same day that President Reagan signed an executive order that ended all federal price and allocation control on gas and fuel oil.
I’m pretty sure I saw exactly one of these movies released in January of 1981 in a theater.
January is no longer the wasteland it used to be. At this point, studios have turned pretty much every single spot on the release calendar into a battleground, and the right marketing seems to be able to turn any weekend into a potential blockbuster weekend. That was not always the case, and all you have to do is run through this month’s full line-up to see just how bad it could get.
As we go through this project, there are several different types of reviews I’m writing. There are films that I saw in the ‘80s that I remember well and have revisited repeatedly. There are films I did not see in the ‘80s, but that I was familiar with for one reason or another. There are films I am genuinely discovering for the first time, and there are movies that I saw and don’t remember and it almost feels like they’re brand-new.
One of the most common occurrences is embodied in one of this month’s titles. There are two different films, both released during the ‘80s, with nearly identical titles, and I have had the two of them merged into one vague thing in my mind for decades. I finally watched My American Uncle for this month’s newsletter, and I’ve always thought this was a drama about a Canadian girl and her much-older relative who comes to visit. Turns out, that’s My American Cousin, and we won’t get to that one for a few years. There are so many films that got tangled up in my memory because of similar titles or similar posters or some other coincidental connection.
There was a title this month I would have desperately wanted to see in the theater, but at ten, there was no way I could have gotten to New York for the Radio City Music Hall presentation of the restored silent epic Napoleon. They were sold-out events, and they used the original three-screen process that director Abel Gance designed to showcase the climax of his movie. I’ve never seen it presented that way, but I did see the movie on the big screen in 2007, which may have been the last time it screened in Los Angeles. I read everything I could find about it in 1981, fascinated by the notion of this five-hour movie being presented in this very experimental way. Roger Ebert wrote of the 1981 experience, “The presentation of Abel Gance’s Napoleon is one of the great entertainment events of the 1980s, and the logistics of the event are little short of miraculous,” and I spent much of January and February seething that I wouldn’t get to see it even though, at age ten, I had barely seen any silent films at all.
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