The Year in Movies

It May not have been the number-one box-office draw of 1987 (Eddie Murphy's Beverly Hills Cop II topped the charts), but it was the film most likely to be discussed over lunelt, dinner or bedtime snack. Fatal Attraction coupled hot sex and sudden death and earned $129,400,000 by the end of the year. It was known as the AIDS movie, because it put in human form the consequences of casual sex, it embodied the message that has been screamed in headlines for the past few years. Have sex and die. Hollywood had been criticized for showing carefree lust. Now it would still show sex, but there would be responsible, cautionary, fear-mongering counselors around the canipfire. In short, the industry would take the sure-fire success formula of the teen slasher movies and repackage it for adults. The moral logic of those movies is familiar: You always know who Freddy (left) or Jason (below middle) will go after--the first girl to show a nipple dies. The first couple to make out ends up as chowder. Only the virgin survives. In 1987, the message was, if you have sex, maybe even your whole family dies. We're talking boiled buny. Hollywood hadn't made movies like that for adults in years, not since Jessica Walter threatened Clint Eastwood's love life (Donna Mills) in Play Misty for me (below). Ah, remember the good old days, when all of us were single and the only thing we had to worry about were psychopaths with butcher knives?

Magic Moments

People spent more money to see movies last year than ever before. For a while, it looked as if the Hollywood box-office draw would equal the entire budget for the Vietnam war. In fact, for a while, it looked as if Hollywood were refighting the Vietnam war, with Platoon clones ranging from Full Metal Jacket to Hamburger Hill. The best vet? Robin Williams found the role of his life in Good Morning, Vietnam. Our favorite line: his farewell to an uptight sergeant major: "That man is in more dire need of a blow job than any white man I know." It was the year that Hollywood discovered the right man for the right role. Steve Martin, delivering a 20joke soliloquy on the subject of his oversize nose, in Roxanne: "Laugh and the world laughs with you; sneeze and it's goodbye, Seattle.... Commercial: Hi, I'm Earl Scheib and I can paint that nose for $39.95.... Sympathetic: Did your parents lose a bet with God?...Hey, does that thing influence the tides?...Prurient: Now here's a man who can satisfy two women at once.... Paranoid: Keep that man away from my cocaine! Inquiring: When you smell the roses, are they afraid?" Jack Nicholson, a prefect match-up as the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick: "Do you think God knew what He was doing when He created women?...Do you think it was another of His little mistakes? Like earthquakes and floods. Volcanoes. Tidal waves. Just another little fuck-up in the divine plan. We make mistakes and they call it evil. God makes mistakes and they call it nature. So what do you think? Women. A mistake? Or did He do it to us on purpose?" The movies were filled with magic moments, from Ed-209 shooting the junior executive in RoboCop ("It's just a little glitch") to the moment the boss fired the bad guy. As he went through the window, did you think, What color is your parachute? We'll confess to liking all of The Princess Bride but especially the final duel. And we'll admit to liking Three Men and a Baby, particularly the way Steve Guttenberg uses a turkey baster. The sex scenes in No Way Out and Wall Street revitalized the limo business. No one will win an Oscar for those performances, but they may enliven the trip to the presentations. We even liked the nod to safe sex--the rubber scenes in Dragnet, Cross My Heart, Working Girls, Wish You Were Here! and Amazon Women on the Moon. And there were musical magic moments, from all of La Bamba to Chuck Berry: Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll to Mery! Streep's singing in Ironweed. In the year after the Meese commission tried to ban nudity, we appreciated the almost nonstop nakedness of Betty Blue, L'Année des Méduses and Castaway. Our favorite scene of the year was the sexual encounter between Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid in The Big Easy: You saw only her face as he performed exotic Cajun sex tricks off camera. In 25 words or less, what was he doing? See, they finally leave something to your imagination and you've forgotten how to use it. That's OK. Rent the video of Angel Heart and see all of Lisa Bonet. Say amen.

Class & Trash

Paramount was the number-one studio, pocketing one out of every five movie dollars with a few blockbuster films such as The Untouchables, Beverly Hills Cop II and Fatal Attraction. Touchstone Pictures continued to be the class act in town, showing that consistency--a string of 13 critically Successful money-makers (we'll try to forget Hello Again)--was enough to move it into second place. Some theater owners complained that there were too many movies last year. They didn't have time to book the likes of Surf Nazis Must Die, I Was a Teenage Sex Mutant, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Bitchin' Sorority Babes, Space Sluts in the Slammer, Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid, Nice Girls Don't Explode, Hack 'Em High, Amazon Women on the Moon, Street Trash, The Dirty Filthy Slime, Ishtar, Leonard, Part 6, Less than Zero and Over the Top. Look for them on video. We'll rent anything to keep from seeing Shelley Long twice.

Playboy Popcorn Awards

Hollywood gives Oscars for individual performances. If there were a category for season-long stats, Cher would get an M.V.P. award for her triple play in Moonstruck, Suspect and The Witches of Eastwick. Dennis Quaid would earn a similar honor for Innerspace, The Big Easy and Suspect. Richard Dreyfuss gets an ironman award for Tin Men, Stakeout and Nuts. Nice going, guy.

Batteries not Included

Nineteen eighty-seven was the year of the adult movie. Relationships took prime place--as opposed to Brat Pack puberty rites, one-man-army turkey shoots, terminally cute extraterrestrials or things that could be merchandised as toys at Christmas (though if the sexual chemistry in movies such as No Way Out, Dirty Dancing and The Big Easy could be bottled, or powered by batteries, we'd like to see it under our tree). Some of the best chemistry happened between adversaries--Debra Winger's investigator and Theresa Russell's murderer in Black Widow; Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito in Tin Men; Danny DeVito and Momma in Throw Momma from the Train; Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Male bonding put in a good show--in the Vietnam movies but also in Cry Freedom--as did offbeat living arrangements, from The Witches of Eastwick to the re-release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Three Men and a Baby. It was a year for special effects from the heart.

Bruce's Picks

Bruce Williamson's Ten Worst

(in alphabetical order)

1. Duet For One As a dying violinist, Julie Andrews scrapes up something roughly equivalent to the sound of Muzak.

2. Over The Top Looks more like Stallone has bottomed out when he's reduced to arm wrestling.

3. A Prayer For The Dying Slow death for audiences, with Mickey Rourke and Bob Hoskins in an Irish stew.

4. The Sicilian Another Michael Cimino disaster that makes Heaven's Gate look like a smash hit and Christopher Lambert look idiotic.

5. Siesta Snooze right through it, blinking when Ellen Barkin and Jodie Foster take their clothes off.

6. Straight To Hell Or more likely to video. Alex Cox directs Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper in a witless Western spoof.

7. Superman IV Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, just a loud, hollow thud as a durable series crash-lands.

8. Tough Guys Don't Dance Norman Mailer still trying to pummel that rugged prose into a movie career. Read his books.

9. Walker Strained spoof about U.S. meddling in Nicaragua and another strike-out by director Alex Cox.

10. Who's That Girl We can depend on Madonna for a contribution to our annual turkey shoot. Save her wishbone.

Bruce Williamson's Ten Best

(in alphabetical order)

1. Broadcast News Wit, women and TV workaholics put it all together in the year's top romantic comedy.

2. Cry Freedom Richard Attenborough's flawed drama about the fight against apartheid is poignant and powerful.

3. The Dead By the late John Huston out of James Joyce, a screen classic with Anjelica acting her heart out for Dad.

4. Empire Of The Sun When it's good, it's very, very good, and when not so good, it's still stunning Spielberg cinema.

5. Hope And Glory Director John Boorman's memoirs of his boyhood in Britain during the blitz make World War Two almost heart-warming.

6. Jean De Florette and Manon Of The Spring Claude Berri's two films are really one old-fashioned masterpiece, starring Yves Montand.

7. The Last Emperor Bertolucci combines Chinese history with breath-taking screen spectacle.

8. Radio Days A really winning nostalgia trip back to the good old pre-TV days with Woody Allen.

9. Raising Arizona This breezy, amoral comedy is the one 1987 movie that doesn't break into a rash of cuteness just because there's a baby (or babies) in it.

10. The Untouchables Slouching toward stardom with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness.

Police Line-Up

Usually, we reserve this space for our favorite heroes, side-kicks, bad guys and bimbos, but this year, the boys in blue racked up all the awards. Five of the top ten money-makers were cop movies. Eddie finally followed his dick to a stint in Holmby Hills, giving us the scene most likely to be featured in The Year in Movies (left). The rest of the roll call was pretty impressive. Mel Gibson, besides having the best buns in the business (ask your date why she sat through the beginning of Lethal Weapon twice), turned in the best action-cop performance of the decade. Now we just have to check out the rumor that the Republicans are going to run RoboCop for President, if they haven't already. He's a heavy-metal hero.

Hollywood Business School

"Whadda you wanna be...one of those guys who makes $400,000 a year and flies first class?" Michael Douglas earns an M.V.P. (Most Valuable Popcorn award) for his lust-and-greed double play. The guy has a gift. He starred in The China Syndrome and we had Three Mile Island for publicity. He made Fatal Attraction and we had the age of AIDS. He filmed Wall Street and we had the crash of 1987. Just don't let him film World War Three, or we're all crispy critters. Our award for Best Employee-Motivation Technique goes to Robert De Niro, for his novel use of a baseball bat in The Untouchables. Beats an M.B.A. any time.

Best Lines

¦ From Planes. Trains and Automobiles. John Candy's remark to "Steve Martin about the odds against finding transportation: "We'd have more luck playing pick-up sticks with our butt cheeks."

¦ From Broadcast News, William Hurt's reply to Holly Hunter's suggestion that he seems to like her: "I like you as much as I can like anybody who thinks I'm an asshole."

¦ From Stakeout, Emilio Estevez to Richard Dreyfuss, who has just spent the night with a woman: "Did you practice safe sex?"

¦ From Ishtar, the world's worst song lyric: "There's a wardrobe of love in my eyes.... See if there's something in your size."

¦ From Running Man, heroine to Arnold Schwarzenegger (in bright Hawaii togs): "I'm going to throw up all over you." Schwarzenegger: "Go ahead, it won't show on this shirt."

¦ From Throw Momma from the Train, a nerd describing a book project: "One Thousand Girls I'd Like to Fuck. It's a coffee-table book. Chapter one: 'Kathleen Turner.'"

¦ From Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a comment on Sammy's politician father: "We can't let a little torture get in the way of a party."

¦ From Moonstruck, Cher's confession to her priest: "I slept with the brother of my fiancé and bounced a check at the liquor store."

¦ From Raising Arizona, husband commenting on wife's infertility: "Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."

¦ From The Lost Boys, kid to teenage vampire brother, whose reflection does not appear in a mirror: "You're a creature of the night. Michael. Wait' II Mom hears about this."

¦ From In the Mood, Sonny Wisecarver, World War Two lover boy on one of his honeymoons: "This is so much better than ninth grade."

¦ From Patti Rocks, Billy to woman propositioning him on the road: "You're so ugly I wouldn't fuck you with his dick" (gesturing to buddy Eddie).

¦ From Dancers, two ballerinas discussing character played by Mikhail Baryshnikov: "You know how he is when he has a headache...he takes two girls and feels fine in the morning."

¦ From RoboCop: "Nukem and other quality home games from Butler Brothers."

¦ From Broadcast News, man to employee he has just fired: "If there's anything I can do for you...." Employee: "Well, I certainly hope you die soon."

Hear you at the movies.