Well it's Tuesday so you know what that means - there's about a 20-25% chance that I won't be lazy and I will actually do
one of our "Siri Says" series posts, wherein I ask the robot lady inside my telephone to give me a random number between one and one hundred and then, once she has, I take that number and I turn it into a year and then I pick my five (well usually five) favorite movies from that year. For example today my phone gave me the number 89, and so we're going to list out favorite movies from
The Movies of 1989.
On first glance through 1989's movies I thought this was going to be a small sad strange bunch, since the year was mostly populated with junk like
Weekend at Bernie's or
Born on the Fourth of July or (horror of horrors)
Driving Miss Daisy. Blecch no thank you - I am with Spike Lee; Morgan Freeman should have driven Miss Daisy right off the cliff. But then I started digging deeper and there are a bunch of buried gems that came out this year, and what follows is probably one of the strangest most erratic batch of movies I've ever listed for one of these.
There are movies in here that I loved as a 11-year-old kid and there are movies that I have come to appreciate with a more adult sensibility, but side by side these all seem a little bit bonkers. Anyway once I did get to digging I found plenty to adore - indeed too many, and this week's list is twice the standard. And I could've made it even longer and brought several of those runners-up up too -
Indiana Jones and
Batman should've made my top list probably, but I decided to just stay weirder.
And before you write an angry defense of
Do the Right Thing (obviously the true masterpiece of the year) please remember these aren't the "best" movies of the year, they are the ones I personally get the most joy from. My "favorites." My "best" list would be pretty different. (There are also some real glaring oversights in the list of movies I haven't seen, for that matter.) I give you...
My 10 Favorite Movies of 1989
(dir. Ron Clements & John Musker)
-- released on November 17th 1989 --
(dir. Rowdy Herrington)
-- released on May 19th 1989 --
(dir. Michael Lehmann)
-- released on March 31st 1989 --
(dir. Phillip Noyce)
-- released on April 7th 1989 --
(dir. Herbert Ross)
-- released on November 22nd 1989 --
(dir. Peter Jackson)
-- released on December 8th 1989 --
(dir. Martin Donovan)
-- released on October 18th 1989 --
(dir. Michael Haneke)
-- released on May 19th 1989 --
(dir. Danny Devito)
-- released on 1989 --
(dir. Brian Yuzna)
-- released on May 13th 1989 --
------------------------------------------
Runners-up:
Batman (dir. Tim Burton),
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (dir. Spielberg),
Do the Right Thing (dir. Spike Lee),
Sante Sangre (dir. Jodorowsky),
Back to the Future: Part II (dir. Zemeckis),
Parenthood (dir. Ron Howard),
Drugstore Cowboy (dir. Gus Van Sant),
The Abyss (dir. James Cameron),
Troop Beverly Hills (dir. Jeff Kanew)....
....
Ghostbusters II (dir. Ivan Reitman),
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (dir. Gilliam),
The Fabulous Baker Boys (dir. Steve Kloves),
Akira (dir. Otomo),
Crimes + Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen),
Parents (dir. Bob Balaban),
Major League (dir. Irby Smith),
When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner),
Sex Lies and Videotape (dir. Steven Soderbergh),
The Burbs (dir. Joe Dante)
Never seen:
Casualties of War (dir. Brian De Palma),
My Left Foot (dir. Jim Sheridan),
Roger & Me (dir. Michael Moore),
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (dir. Peter Greenaway),
Dekalog (dir. Kieslowski)...
...
Kiki's Delivery Service (dir. Miyazaki),
The Killer (dir. John Woo),
Last Exit to Brooklyn (dir. Uli Edel),
New York Stories (dir. Various),
The Rainbow (dir. Ken Russell),
Sweetie (dir. Jane Campion),
Valmont (dir. Milos Forman)
What are your favorite movies of 1989?
