Best Movie Year Ever?

                                                                           1983

Another year with more than its share of winners is the fairly recent (to me) 1983. Let’s take a look.

  Tender Mercies features Robert Duvall at his absolute best (and that's saying a lot) as a broken down country singer trying to rebuild a life on the wreckage of too much liquor and too many honky tonks.  Duvall wrote the songs in this movie.  Betty Buckley, seen briefly as another singer, is now the star of Sunset Boulevard on Broadway.

The Year of Living Dangerously is one of the best political thrillers ever made.  Sigourney Weaver is just fine as the attache who knows more than she wants to.   Helen Hunt won an Oscar for her role as a local who knows too much, but why they picked her to play a man baffles me. Since she won an Oscar, what do I know?  Mel Gibson proves here he really can act. 

Terms of Endearment features Jack Nicholson as an aging ex-astronaut with problems connecting emotionally and Shirley MacLaine as the unsainted mother of the fetchingly terminally ill Debra Winger.  An excellent screenplay by first-time director James L. Brooks from a Larry McMurtry novel keeps you interested and off balance.

The Right Stuff was the best movie about the space program until Apollo 13 came along.  Dennis Quaid, Scott Glenn, Sam Sheppard and Ed Harris play the early astronauts broadly as true American heroes.  Never boring, even though it's over three hours long, and technically stunning, it does not hook you emotionally.

Educating Rita is an absolute little gem of a film. Michael Caine is a world-weary college professor and Julie Walters (in her film debut) is the hairdresser who wants to better herself.  This is the best feminist movie ever made, but don't let that stop you from watching it.  

El Norte, about illegal immigrants, is alternately harrowing and humorous.  Featuring all unknowns, it is riveting from beginning to end.  You'll never think the same way about Latinos again.

Testament is a good end-of-the-world movie, far superior to the much-ballyhooed The Day After (made this same year).  Jane Alexander leads a stellar cast. It isn't the desperation that gets you, its the low key matter-of-factness.

Return of the Jedi was the second of the Star Wars trilogy, and, while not as dazzling as the first and third, the story is first-rate and the lovable Yoda is one of the best characters in the set.

Fanny and Alexander is one of the great Ingmar Bergman's most accessible films, and easily the most charming. One of his few color ventures, it is the story of a brother and sister whose dream lives intertwine with reality.

Ed Harris, Gene Hackman and Nick Nolte are certainly a dream team in Under Fire, a political thriller set in Latin America in which the journalists telling the story somehow become the story. The most violent scene is so offhand you're not sure you saw it at first.

Zelig is considered one of Woody Allen's lesser films, but those tend to be the ones I like the best.  This one foreshadows the neat special effects in Forest Gump  by showing Zelig on screen with long-dead celebrities. Mia Farrow is in this one, too; this was before you-know-what.