Best Score – 1984

Official Nominations: A Passage To India. The Temple Of Doom. The Natural. The River. Under The Volcano. Purple Rain. The Muppets Take Manhattan. The Songwriter.

Maurice Jarre picked up an official win for A Passage To India – a score with a lot of different styles at play, from big band jazz and orchestra epic pieces to more subtle sitar and mario-lava-level pieces. It’s big and bold, but it’s lacking in any great hooks to pull me in and doesn’t have a lot of deep resonating emotion. Similarly trawling the depths of Eastern culture and mysticism is Temple Of Doom, the sequel/prequel to Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Most of the best moments are borrowed from the first film, but there are one or two wonderful new pieces and changes to the classics to make it higher in my estimation than the official winner. John Williams was also nominated for The River this year, but it’s a bland enough score to go along with a bland film.

The Natural is a film about baseball, so I’m already not particularly interested, yet there’s something about the sport that makes it apparently the best candidate for translating to screen. There aren’t many great sports movies, but most of them are based around baseball. Randy Newman’s score is fine, moving from inspirational, oft copied ditties to era-specific pieces that I’m not so keen on. Under The Volcano always makes me think of the terrifying kids show Under The Mountain, though the two are in no way related. It and Moondial were pure nightmare fuel. Anyway, Alex North’s score has a lot of South American influence, but even in its more unusual moments it isn’t memorable.

Purple Rain unsurprisingly won the award for Best Original Song score but as I’m not a huge fan of the dearly departed star’s music, it’s not getting my vote. Joining him in that category were The Muppets with another collection of faintly riotous songs and Kris Kristofferson for Songwriter which has too much Country for my tastes.

My Winner: The Temple Of Doom

My Nominations: The Temple Of Doom. Beverly Hills Cop. Birdy. Body Double. The Company Of Wolves. Conan The Destroyer. Ghosbusters. Gremlins. The Karate Kid. The Killing Fields. The Last Starfighter. A Nightmare On Elm Street. Once Upon A Time In America. Police Academy. Splash. Starman. Supergirl. The Terminator.

Only my winner makes it to my list. Beverly Hills Cop gets a nod mostly for the great Axel F track and a variety of other early electronica. Peter Gabriel’s score for Birdy feels like a stark departure from his usual hits, a poignant, dreamlike collection of minimalist mood pieces. Pino Donaggio work well together once again on Body Double to make a score which apes Hitchcock and Hermann but has plenty of its own unique 80s pieces. You can’t talk about dreamlike without mentioning The Company Of Wolves – one of the first horror movies I ever saw and a score which never fails to send chills through me. Conan The Destroyer as a movie is, well, crap in comparison to Conan The Barbarian with the score being one of the major redeeming things. The score isn’t as wonderful as the first movie’s score (what is?) but it has a couple of excellent standalone themes and updates enough of the original’s tracks to remind us what a huge talent Poledouris was. Berstein’s Ghosbusters isn’t merely a bunch of ‘who ya gonna calls’ but has plenty of instrumental pieces of note, from the creepy museum intro to the madness of the ghostly caperings around New York later in the film.

This category is ripe for WTFs, as already discussed in my 1982 post. Gremlins not getting a nod this year is another of those. You have a conductor already recognized as an Academy favourite doing some of his most recognizable work, yet they pass it over. Gizmo’s theme and the main theme are both iconic, fantastic, and more deserving of a mention than most other pieces on this post. The Karate Kid must surely get a nomination too – Bill Conti another previous winner passed over. Sure I’m biased with a lot of these 80s movies as I grew up with them, but even removing yourself from that nostalgic viewpoint these films still have rip-roaring, rousing, inspirational scores – it’s not quite on the level of Rocky but it has a more youthful feel and if anything has more going on than Rocky with a great variety of styles.

Mike Oldfield’s score for The Killing Fields  score is gut-wrenching, epic, haunting, and memorable. There are too many great choices this year. The Last Starfighter may be a Star Wars clone but at least it tries to plough its own musical groove. All good slashers need a good score, or at least a great central theme – A Nightmare On Elm Street has one of the best yet most underrated. Funhouse fairground style sounds collide with child-like rhymes and simple melodies played with menace on the keys. There’s a lot of 80s rock influence there too and a touch of the industrial all meshing together in one nightmarish whole. Morricone’s Once Upon A Time In America – you already know it’s a masterpiece before you hear it. What’s surprising perhaps is how gentle and tender and melancholy it all is, eschewing the usual dramatic overpowering strings with more subtle softer moments, taking in South American, Asian, and European influences. Police Academy has, hands down, one of the best main themes in movie history and while the rest of the score doesn’t live up  to it, it still has other notable once-heard-never-forgotten arrangements.

This is truly the category that never ends. Splash is another romantic, dreamy string led soundtrack which remains beautiful without becoming cutesy. Starman is one of those rare John Carpenter movies where he didn’t provide the score, with Jack Nitzche providing the music instead. His main theme is one of the most gorgeous of the decade, complimented by other romantic and tension filled synthetic tracks. Supergirl… not the greatest film but fun in its own way and it has another great Goldsmith score even if it is a bit too similar to Star Trek. With The Terminator soundtrack Brad Fidel stamped his name on the industry making a score which merges dark techno and rock into a beast unlike anything else at the time. The main theme we all know, the beat in the original being slightly different to the more popular main theme of T2 and taking on a more synthetic and threatening tone than the industrial and emotion led follow-up. The central beat of course has become synonymous with the series and has taken on a life of its own outside of the film. I love how the beat becomes more aggressive as the track progresses, that sense of approaching danger growing, and it is balanced by pulsating chase themes and heartfelt, heart-breaking piano-led track which remain in regular rotation in my iPod.

My Winner: The Terminator

Let us know your winner in the comments!

Top 50 Moments Series – Dialogue – Part 3

It’s back! The series that opens the manhole cover of my mind to let my most fanatical followers get a glimpse of my truest loves, has returned. Please enjoy these exclusives!

Tary too long and you may become ill-scented carbonite

21. Jaws. (1975, Spielberg): Everyone’s favourite film about sharks eating children, Jaws is undoubtedly timeless. Everyone has their favourite moment, and everyone has their favourite piece of dialogue. For such a momentous film, the dialogue is not something which gets a lot of respect, aside from the famous ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat’. Much of the dialogue is delivered in such a way that it doesn’t sound scripted, which may be reason enough for why there aren’t many memorable one-liners. My personal favourite then will likely be a favourite of others, and due to its length, I won’t re-post it here; Quint’s Indianapolis speech is flawless – stunningly delivered, powerfully written, and the most chilling moment in the film, all the more so as it doesn’t really have a lot to do with the plot.

22. Assault on Precinct 13. (1976, Carpenter): It took quite some time for this film to get the recognition it deserves. Even after the recent John Carpenter resurgence, thanks to a raft of remakes (including one for this), Carpenter’s second film is still something of a cult gem. Brimming with pulp dialogue, the focus is most definitely on cool, on making a memorable impact with each word. Each character is almost defined entirely by their one-liners meaning that the almost mute father character fades into the background, but opposingly, the voiceless bad guys lack of speech makes them all the more menacing. The main group each have their moments, but the best bits go to one of the greatest anti-heroes of them all – Napoleon Wilson. Even his simple refrain ‘Got a smoke?’ becomes gold, but I’m especially partial to his ‘I was born out of time’ line. For such a tense film, Wells provides some brilliant comedy moment, particularly with his save-ass plan: ‘I got this plan. It’s called “Save Ass”. And the way it works is this – I slip outta one of these windows and I run like a bastard!’

Woops

23. Big Trouble in Little China. (1986, Carpenter): From one Carpenter classic to another, and from one anti-hero to another. Jack Burton is the 80s Napoleon Wilson, born out of time, always in the wrong place at the wrong time, always ready with a bullet and a quip. This movie has more quips than a stand-up comedian forced to make a deaf, dumb, and blind man laugh or be killed, whatever that means, and the dialogue comes thick, fast, and hammy. It also has a guy with the best/worst sunglasses ever (insert pic) but then again, it also has this (insert freak monster pic). While Wilson was born out of time, Burton was ‘born ready’ and has plenty of inspirational sayings like ‘it’s all in the reflexes’, whatever that means, but it’s when he is panicking that the real gold bubbles to the surface: ‘Tall guy, weird clothes. First you see him, then you don’t.

24. Jurassic Park. (1993, Spielberg): You would think a film about dinosaurs wouldn’t have all that much dialogue in it betwixt all the ROOARRGGHHs and SKKKEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAARRKs and chewing of flesh, but you’d be wrong. Jurassic Park contains several hundred words, and an all-round dialogue filled script, although clearly the focus was on the thunder lizards at release. This was one of the last old-school Spielberg romps and as such we can expect a particular eye for detail and script flourishes. Much of the dialogue does not feel rehearsed, seeming improvised instead, and most of the best moments fall on Jeff Goldblum’s leather clad shoulders. Actually, now that I think about it, this movie would have been so much better if the dinosaurs had had all the lines. Just imagine it from their perspective – Violently ripped from the eternal peace of extinction, a collection of dinosaurs must face off against a horde or white Americans, Santa Claus, and Samuel L Jackson. Classic moments include a husband and wife tag team of raptors attempting to snare a meal of snivelling kids to stave off starvation; a single, sexually tormented T-Rex must resort to eating from a toilet in order to survive; a spittysaurus tries to make friends with an obese man but instead tries to romance him in the back of a jeep. As for dialogue, I find myself shouting ‘Hold onto your butts’ at inappropriate, non-dinosaur related social events.

Poops

25. Leon.  (1994, Besson): Luc Besson is a French guy who looked at Hollywood and thought ‘Hmm, ze films are not bon anymore, ze need some le garlic, le baguette, and le Johavich’ and lo, Leon was born. Besson already had made a decent career back in gay Paris with a string of hits, including the excellent Subway (which tells of Christoper Lambert’s immortal quest to find the perfect sandwich) and the breakthrough smash Nikita. Leon is an almost perfect movie, with career best performances from all the main stars. Gary Oldman is a baddie, Jean Reno is a baddie too, but because he’s nice and cuddly we’ll forgive him for being a cold-blooeded killer, and Natalie Portman is a little girl whose hateful parents are blasted into oblivion. It’s a thinking man’s action movie, which is unfortunate as thinking men do not typically watch action movies. The film has rightly earned a following over the years, and will soon be remade as ‘Cody’ starring Bieber as the lovable rapist/killer Cody, Emma Whatersface as Natalie Portman, and Ben Kingsly as Baddie, the bad man who wants revenge on Bieber for being the little freak that he is. I’ll let young Miss Portman get the final say here, with a child’s apt view of revenge: ‘Forget? After I’ve seen the outline of my brother’s body on the floor, you expect me to forget? I wanna kill those sons of bitches, and blow their fucking heads off!’

26. Commando. (1985, Lester): Growing up in the 80s and 90s was a wonderful time for movie geeks and those who lurk in everyday water-cooler conversations, waiting for the perfect moment to inexplicably drop a one-liner from a movie no-one else involved in the conversation has seen. If you grew up in the 80s you are action an action movie fan, or a woman. And for action movie fans who love to mix up their mundane daily speech routines with some spicy zingers, you need look no further than any Arnie movie. Commando is probably the most genuine cult movie of his repertoire, as most of his other films from that era are no regarded as classics or worse than drunken sex in a toilet with what you assumed to be a superstar but turned out to be a mushed collection of soiled bog roll. Camp characters with names better than Biceps McTouchem and Napoleon Bonerhard, approximately 14 thousand on screens kills, (and a zinger for each), actors and actresses with either past or future soft-core porn careers, guns, knifes, bombs, and the single greatest ‘preparing for war’ moment in movie history, Commando could be a contender for best movie ever. Roll a few of these around your laughing gear – ‘I eat Green Beret’s for breakfast’, ‘He’s dead tired’, ‘I lied’, ‘Let off some steam, Bennett’, ‘Wrong!’, ‘I’m not going to shoot you between the eyes, I’m going to shoot you between the balls’, and my personal favourite – ‘Fuck you, asshole….Fuck YOU, asshole!’

Sullyoops

27. Beauty And The Beast.  (1991, Trousdale, Wise): I was an ugly child. I am an ugly man. It is no wonder that this is one of my favourite movies ever, as it speaks to the beautiful, tortured romantic inside me, and the hairy, fanged creature on the outside. Actually, that’s not true, I was a cute kid, and I’m currently sexier than Liz Vicious wrestling with Ivana Fukalot in a giant tub of Hoi Sin sauce (which needs to be a scene in the next Bond movie. Or else). I was, and still am to an extent, a socially awkward buffoon who resorted to fantasy, movies, books, games, music, writing, anything that would shatter the reality of me being a hopeless-with-women bloke. Like all kids I liked a good Disney animation, but it wasn’t until I saw Beauty And The Beast that I truly appreciated the art, and uncovered the truth and cliché that sometimes the underdog can find love – you just need to kidnap a woman and/or her father to get it. Unfortunately, ladies, countless rewatches has turned me into a weirdo as I hold Belle up as the most perfect figure of womanhood who ever had life breathed into her, and you just can’t live up to her. Contemplate that before sending me a sexy Private Message. As for lovely dialogue, hows about the one that most frequently slips from my lips as I hide outside toilets – ‘Zut Alors! She has emerged!’

28. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s dead. (1991, Herek): If you know anything worth knowing (and the fact that you’re reading this tells me that, sadly, you don’t), you’ll know that 1991 messers Cobain,Grohl, and Novelisc made a wee album called Nevermind, which is named by man as single-handedly putting the 80s to bed, and gently placing a pillow over its face. Music was changed forever, almost overnight it now seems. Movies changed too, but at a more leisurely pace, and in 1991 we got one of the last great cheesy rock movies. The touch of Geffin is all over it, reeking of MTV, 80s cool, and a mix of heavy metal, cock, rock, and cheese. I loved this at the time, but it wasn’t until much later when I revisited it again, and realised what a great script it has, filled with unexpectedly strong humour, one-liners, and satirical twists on The American Dream. So, as much as I like to say ‘The dishes are DONE!’ after cleaning up, and shouting about the ‘buttcrack of dawn’ when I get up, and although Kenny gets the best lines, my favourite line, and joke, in the movie is ”No, I’ve never been to Santa Barbara’.

Yeeooops

29. Night of the Living Dead. (1968, Romero): The original modern indie, made by a bunch of amateurs, friends, and family, and going on to being one of the most well-renowned horror movies ever made. The strength of the dialogue is in its realism – everyone is on guard, everyone is constantly in a panic, nobody trusts anyone, and the words coming out of mouths are exactly what I would expect people to say in such a dire situation. I love that it is so cold and, like this article, contains zero humour. Although there are few typical one-liners aside from the obvious ‘Hey Barbara, I’m gonna get ye!’ you would be hard pushed to find a stronger realistic script in the decade. We have to go to the Sheriff to get my favourite lines, classics such as ‘They’re dead, they’re all messed up’ and ‘Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go up pretty easy’.

30. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (1984, Spielberg): Until Spielberg and Lucas decide to resurrect Dr Jones in the ill-fated ‘Indiana Jones and the Magical Fridge’ (alternative title – Indiana Jones and the load of shite), Temple Of Doom was the least liked in the series. Naturally, this means it has always been my favourite. Sure Raiders has melting Nazis and Crusade has….I can’t remember, but Doom has Short-Round, cliffhanging fights, rope-bridge stand-offs, booby traps, Donkey Kong inspiring races, lava pits, blood drinking, heart-ripping – everything that every kids movie should have. As someone who loved those type of Haggard/Doyle/Verne/Burroughs movies which always featured sinking sand, giant spiders, and always ended with a volcano erupting, this was the epitome. It was a fantasy, but set in a realistic world. It was just real enough to make me think that some wacky priest could crawl out of my toilet and whisk me away to some underground slave trade, but thanks to short-round made me think that I could probably beat my way through thousands of baddies and get home safe. My most quoted line – especially when I run out of ANYTHING? ‘No more parachutes!’

Gloops

Please share your pearls of wise-assdom in the comments!