MOSTLYFILM: We Love 1986

It's been a busy week at Europe's Best Website, thanks to one of the team noticing just how many 30th anniversary re-releases of films we're seeing at the moment. Was 1986 really such a good year for cinema? We did some research, and it turns out that the answer was yes, surprisingly.

Inevitably, not everybody agrees: so one of the pieces published in MostlyFilm's 1986 Week has been Paul Duane's I Hate 1986, in which he grumpily suggests that this entire week's worth of content is based on a lie. At the very least, it provides some balance for the generally positive mood running through all the other articles. Early in the week, Indy Datta focussed on the 30th anniversary re-release of Cocoon: but the meat of the coverage comes in two group pieces, We Love 1986 Part 1 and We Love 1986 Part 2, in which no fewer than ten contributors each pick a favourite film from that year and explain what it means to them.

For those of you who just want to know where I'm involved in all this, I'm in Part 1. But both of the We Love 1986 pieces are enjoyable reads overall, and remind you just how much fun there was to be had in cinemas that year. Look at those films! Imagine what it would have been like to watch all their trailers back to back before the main feature started! And now stop imagining, because the Red Button Bonus Content for these pieces will allow you to do precisely that.

Here are the trailers, presented in the order in which they're discussed:

Reviewed in Part One:

2. Big Trouble In Little China (Spank The Monkey). "Problemacious"
3. When The Wind Blows (Emma Street). "Why are you drinking the rainwater? Really, really, don’t drink the rainwater."
4. Highlander (Mr Moth). "Is it possible they got the wrong scripts, and everyone was just too embarrassed to switch them?"
5. Heartburn (Helen Archer). "A very 1980s film, a film of unthinking privilege"
6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Ricky Young). "A teetering plate of For Some Reason spinning on top of a pole made of purest Will This Do?"

Reviewed in Part Two:

7. Little Shop Of Horrors (Kate Le Vann). "You can see it the way it was supposed to be if you buy the DVD/Blu-Ray. BUT NOT IN MY HOUSE YOU CAN’T."
8. Pretty In Pink (The Tramp). "He is the most believable high school sociopath the genre has ever spawned"
9. Crocodile Dundee (Laura Morgan). "New York City! Where men wore makeup and women wore suits"
10. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Matthew Turner). "Ferris is, to all intents and purposes, a smart-arse and by rights, the character should be insufferable"
11. Clockwise (Blake Backlash). "Michael Frayn’s screenplay is as finely-wrought as a clock that has kept time for the last thirty years"

Items 1 and 12 on the video playlist are there for nostalgia purposes only. (By total coincidence, I'm going to see the Pet Shop Boys playing live tomorrow night, and I hope West End Girls is on the set list.)