Top 5 Films of 1987 | Archive

0:00Adam Kempenaar:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. The power's out. Tensions rise. What happens next depends on you. I'm former Navy SEAL Cade Courtley, and when disaster strikes, staying invisible might just be what keeps you alive. In a blackout, desperation spreads fast. People will do just about anything to get their hands on power, and it's exactly why I trust the Alpha Case Elite from Four Patriots. It looks like an ordinary briefcase, but inside, you've got a solar generator that's silent, fume-free, and powerful enough to run your fridge, lights, medical devices, even power tools. No gas, no noise, no attention, just clean, tactical power when you need it most.

0:44And right now, during this limited launch, you'll also get a free solar panel and free flashlight all packed inside your Alpha Case generator. But heads up, there are only 2 ,200 units available, and once they're gone, they're gone. Go to 4Patriots.com. That's the number 4, Patriots.com, and get your Alpha Case Elite while you still can. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold-out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope. It's podcast time.

1:12Adam Kempenaar:We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at The Office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Film Spotting is presented by Regal Unlimited, the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits.

1:43See any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. Sign up now on the Regal app or at the link in our description and use code FILMSPOT26 to receive 15 % off.

2:00What kind of a show are you guys putting on here today? You're not interested in art? No. Now look, we're going to do this thing. We're going to have a conversation.

2:09Adam Kempenaar:Hey, Filmspotters, Adam going solo here, waiting for Josh to return from Scotland. and it's our archive drop and Masters of the Universe is opening this weekend directed by Travis Knight who made 2016's Kubo and the Two Strings good movie I would ask Josh how many Masters of the Universe action figures he owned and which ones but he's not here I actually didn't own any Masters of the Universe action figures but I did have friends in my neighborhood who had them and I played with them I don't know that that's going to be enough to get me to go see Masters of the Universe, nor did I see the film version that came out in 1987 starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor, but I've certainly seen many scenes from that film.

2:56Adam Kempenaar:What does this have to do with this week's drop? Well, in honor of 1987's Masters of the Universe, we're going to get in the Wayback Machine, and we're going to share our top five films of 1987, which is a film we did 10 years ago, back in 2016. I'm sure that made sense back in 2016. Did Masters of the Universe make the cut? I'd say you'll have to listen to find out, but of course it didn't make the cut. I already told you that I haven't seen the film, and there's no way Josh put it on his list. The big question is, where's Raising Arizona going to be? Where's The Princess Bride going to be? That's what you'll have to listen to find out.

3:42I really must say goodnight, sweetheart, goodnight. Well, it's three o 'clock in the morning.

3:54Adam Kempenaar:Three men and a baby. Steve Guttenberg, Ted Danson, Tom Selleck singing goodnight, sweetheart there. That was the biggest surprise for me as we're sharing our top five films of 1987. The impetus for that really is just that Shane Black, who, of course, wrote and directed the movie we reviewed earlier and recommended earlier The Nice Guys. He had his breakout debut as a screenwriter in 1987's Lethal Weapon. So we thought, why not go back to that year? We still have a few years from the 80s to get into as we've been doing our annual top five films. And you can find the full list of what we've done so far over at filmspotting.net under top fives.

4:32Adam Kempenaar:But this was the number one grossing movie at the box office of 87. That's not possible. It was. It's crazy. beat out Fatal Attraction, Beverly Hills Cop 2, Good Morning Vietnam, and Moonstruck. Those were your top five. How was Moonstruck even in the top five? Well, that's a good point. It doesn't really seem like a movie that would be that popular. It wouldn't today. I would highly doubt something like that would today. Probably not. But, you know, I was in cahoots with Sam there a little bit playing that clip and playing that music because I thought as we get into our lists, it might be fun to reflect a little bit.

5:06Adam Kempenaar:And I don't know if you went through and thought about some of the movies if you remember what you were watching in 1987 but that 80s cheese really does make up a lot of the movies I saw back in 1987 and I was looking back at our list from 1986 and I'm going to steal from that I did before I even did the top five my actual top five I did my pure nostalgia top five so just based on what I liked then right looking back on it don't know whether it holds up I'm sure some of these titles don't your list that pretty much that My top five would be La Bamba, number five, Summer School, Mark Harmon, directed by Carl Reiner, number three, The Lost Boys, number two, Dirty Dancing, and number one, Arnold in Predator.

5:50Oh, no.

5:51Adam Kempenaar:I knew Predator was going to come up. He had a great 87 because not only did he have Predator, but I loved The Running Man, too. So now I have to point out that Predator just did not have enough muscle flexing for me. Apparently not. I know. You don't appreciate that film. But there's that. And then before we get to yours, the pure nostalgia movies I'm embarrassed to admit I liked in 1987. Number five, Hiding Out. Hiding Out. Nobody's seen this. John Cryer, he like gets into some trouble and he's going to testify against the mob or something. So he hides out. The FBI like has him go back to high school.

6:23Adam Kempenaar:That was a real movie. And he has to pretend to blend in. A real movie. I loved it in 87. Not a TV movie. Not a direct to VHS. No. Okay. No, it's good. Or it was when I was 12. Mannequin, number four. And I'm going in the order here of how embarrassed I am that I like these movies. I didn't listen to that song in 87. Why are you making me listen to it now? Hey, mission accomplished if it got you irritated. Number three, Can't Buy Me Love, Patrick Dempsey in that high school movie. Number two, Overboard, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. And number one, I remember going to the movie theater in my small little Iowa town and seeing and quite approving of Three Men and a Baby.

7:00Adam Kempenaar:Really? I mean, come on. Those cads, they're so funny. The roguish charm of Selleck and Danzen and Gutenberg. I still think it could have been improved with a robot. I'm sorry. I don't deny that. I don't know when I saw, I don't know if I've ever seen all of Three Men and a Baby. I'm sure it was playing in the background on VHS at some point in my life. So what did you love in 87? I'm not too embarrassed by my list in 87. You were a snob even then, I know. The one I have in common with you is The Lost Boys. But I'm thinking about it. I didn't see that in the theater. There's no way I could have seen that.

7:33That was the hard part for me.

7:34Adam Kempenaar:I did see a lot of movies at that time in the theater. But I also remember at age 12 having a TV in my room with a remote control that had HBO. HBO, yeah. And I watched HBO a ton. Yeah. And I saw these movies like six months to a year later, too. That's probably when I saw The Lost Boys. But that was a big one for me. I remember seeing Empire of the Sun, the Spielberg film, and having some sense of who Spielberg was at that point and wanting to see it and really liking it. See, I didn't even see that until I was out of college. Really? No, I had to go back and watch Empire. Yeah, I was aware of Spielberg at that point.

8:10The Untouchables was a big one, as it was for a lot of people, I think. I think I saw that much later. Actually, we were just talking before going to the screening tonight about how we feel about De Palma. And that is one, though, I will give De Palma credit for this, is where I started to realize what a director was doing, even at that age, because some of those sequences there are so crafted and stylized in a clear way. So The Untouchables would have been on there. The Last Emperor, my parents, this is where they would—we were big into seeing whatever the much-talked-about Oscar— Yeah. So I remember that being like a huge event.

8:45I think we went to the Water Tower Theaters at a time at Water Tower Place here in Chicago. They had, you know, the red carpet. You had to go through the fancy high rise to see it. So I think I saw that in the theater. And then, Adam, Adventures in Babysitting. Yeah. Come on. You know what? I didn't really like it. Elizabeth Shue?

9:06Adam Kempenaar:I didn't really like it. Even when I was in junior high, I didn't really like it. I just don't know what to say about that. See, me and my boyfriend, Mike, tonight's our anniversary. But then he went and canceled, and now I'm stuck watching these three. And it's so hard. And it's so hard. I'm glad that we have a major point of contention there, in addition to Predator. So some good stuff and some not so good stuff there as we get to our actual top five. And we don't try to coordinate these too much ahead of time, but we had a feeling there would be some titles that we would overlap on. This happens with some of these annual top films lists.

9:49Adam Kempenaar:It happened with the one we recently did, the top five films of 1972. And so we do have three in common, and we're going to save those and get to those in a second. We're going to start with our first two picks, the two slots we don't have in common, basically. Josh, why don't you start it with your number five? So my number five could almost fit into our contemporary Nordic cinema marathon, except that 87 is probably a little too far back for us to go. It comes from Denmark, written and directed by Gabriel Axel, and it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It's Babette's Feast. This is set in a 19th century Danish village where a pair of older sisters are still living under the stern shadow of their pastor father.

10:30And the whole village is you get a sense that this church is almost the government of the village, essentially. The sisters take in a housekeeper and a cook who comes from Paris, and she has a secretive past that I'm not going to give away. This is really an early foodie movie, I think. the central event is this sumptuous meal that the chef prepares for the villagers, and most of them are reluctant to appreciate it because they fear it'll be sinful or sensual or something like that. The movie, though, it just lavishes in the cuisine and really, at the same time, the awakening that takes place between these sisters where they start to understand and appreciate the good things in life that they previously kept at bay because of this fearfulness.

11:19So like any good foodie movie, it does get your mouth watering, but, and, you know, they often do this too. It works as this celebration of cooking as its own sort of art form. So this is a small film. It's very humble, but it's garnered a really devoted following over the years. And I'd count myself as one of those.

11:38Adam Kempenaar:Babette's Feast is one of my real regrets. It's come up a few times over the years. listeners have written in. Certainly anytime we've talked about food movies, I was hoping to see it for this list, but it's one of four big regrets. And two of the other titles, Josh, you've already mentioned The Last Emperor. I've never seen that Bertolucci film. Moonstruck, I haven't seen. And this one, I can't believe that I've never seen it in its entirety. I've certainly seen a lot of it, but if I've only seen a lot of parts, I don't really consider it that I've seen it. And RoboCop Oh, okay. It's good. Yeah.

12:10Adam Kempenaar:I've always enjoyed what I've seen, but I need to watch the entire thing. So tear me apart, everyone, for my top five films of 1987. It's incomplete without RoboCop. My number five is a David Mamet film, House of Games. This was the first film. You mentioned The Untouchables. He wrote the screenplay for that. De Palma film had written many films before. This was the first film he directed. And I certainly did not see this movie in 1987. I didn't see it until much later, probably more like 1998 or 1999. It was definitely after Glengarry Glen Ross, and that was partly what pushed me to want to see more from Mamet.

12:48Adam Kempenaar:He didn't direct that film, but he did write it, of course, based on his original play. I'm going to quote from the Gospel of Roger here, Ebert, because he was also, besides the fact that I was curious about Mamet, he was the one who really pushed me reading his stuff to want to see this movie and to help me appreciate it as well he was a very big proponent of mammoth's work overall and of this film in particular i believe he had it as his number one film of 1987 and this is a film that stars lindsey krauss who i don't know if she was mammoth's wife at the time but she did become his wife at some point and she plays a therapist who gets a little bit too involved with one of her patients he owes money and she goes to try to help him out and she gets caught up into a larger scheme joe mantania mammoth's favorite actor is the lead member of this crew and this is what ebert said about the film and about mammoth i am particularly fond of mammoth's films they strike some kind of responsive chord in me i like the dry way his actors are instructed to behave the way they don't go for effects, but let the effects come to them.

13:55Adam Kempenaar:I like the slightly mannered style of movement by both actors and camera. There is a teasing quality to Mamet's presentations that reminds me of a skilled magician, meticulously laying out his cards while telling us a story. We know the story has nothing to do with the cards. The story is a diversion. The real story is what's happening to the cards. What is he really doing while he's telling us he's doing something else? Mamet's dialogue starts with the plain red bricks of reality and mortars them into walls that are slightly askew. Nobody uses a word you don't know. They like vulgarities and obscenities and cliches, but the dialogue is rotated into a slightly new dimension.

14:28Adam Kempenaar:It is mannered a little and somewhat self-consciously assembled as if the speaker is dealing with a second language or an unrehearsed role. That makes us listen more carefully. My marker's good for a moment. What is this marker? Where are you from? Where am I from? I'm from the United States of Kiss My Ass. My The marker's good. F*** you! And get the goddamn money up or fold the goddamn hand. Listen, mister, this man is a man of his word. He's a regular player. Where I come from, the rule is you can't call the bet. You're out of the hand. Call the bet. If you've seen it, you know, Ricky Jay's in the movie, and Ricky Jay, the great illusionist and magician, is a friend of Mamet, so it makes sense that Mamet gets into the way the story doesn't really have anything to do with the cards going off of his analogy there, how it's all a diversion.

15:16Adam Kempenaar:And it does make us listen more carefully. We are caught up in that diversion. We know we're being tricked, but we're not entirely sure how, and we want to try to figure out how the trick works. And I think the stilted way the actors speak draws us in even more. I do think that Ebert's right that his films, Mamet's films, this one in particular, will strike a chord in some people, and in others it simply won't. It will seem a little too stiff and too mannered, but it really did work for me. I have yet to find out. House of Games is one I still need to see. I knew you would have that one covered, though.

15:48I did catch up with something else, which is at my number four, and I watched it for the first time for this list. It's Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle. And man, was this the year to catch up with the film, especially after the Oscars So White debate that was going on just a few months ago. I mean, this is almost 30 years ago, and Townsend was raising the exact same questions about Hollywood casting. He's the co-writer and the director here, and he also stars as Bobby Taylor, who's an aspiring actor who's close to winning the lead in Jive Time Jimmy's Revenge. Now, in order to get the part, he knows he's going to have to act blacker than he actually is, whatever that means.

16:29So the structure of this film is interesting. This reality induces a crisis of conscience for Bobby that plays out in a variety of daydream sequences and nightmare scenes so that the movie has this sketch comedy format to it. Just one example. At one point, Bobby imagines an advertisement for Black Actor School. I was hoping you'd go there. Yeah, these classically trained African-American thespians. Yeah, it's the best bit. They're instructed how to play butler, slaves, or drug dealers so they can get work in Hollywood. Black acting star. Let's talk to a graduate.

17:02Adam Kempenaar:This is Ricky Taylor. Ricky graduated from my class three years ago. Ricky, can you tell us what you've been doing since you've graduated? Well, Robert, I've played nine crooks, four gang leaders, two dope dealers. I played a rapist twice. Whoa. That was fun. Currently, I'm filming a prison movie. I play this tough con that tries to f*** this new inmate. That sounds wonderful. I'm so happy for you. So, of course, the sketch format and the code switching identity politics made me think of Key and Peele and Keanu, which we recently talked about. And I liked this for some of the same reasons I like that film, just the political bent to the laughs here.

17:41I have to say, though, it was also depressing to watch this and realize that Keanu and I think more directly something like Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which was in the 2000s, early 2000s, I think. that they even still have this topic as fodder for satirical comedy. I mean, you know, what that ultimately suggests is that Hollywood shuffle, as smart, as funny as it was, as good of a reputation as it has, it's one that I've been meaning to catch up with for a long time, had little to no effect. I mean, it's sadly, it's probably the 1987 movie on my list that's the most relevant today still.

18:17Adam Kempenaar:It probably is. And I know that it's not in the top 100 highest grossing movies of that year. So very few people, relatively speaking, saw that film. And you're right. Nothing has really changed. And that's one of the things that as you go back and see it, I'm sure you do appreciate and recognize as you did. I'm curious, though, because this is a movie I like. I didn't see it in 1987. I saw it a few years after that. I'm not remembering the exact context. But as much as I enjoy it, I'm curious of all the movies from 1987 to visit for this list. What was it about Hollywood Shuffle that its reputation?

18:50Adam Kempenaar:Made you see it. Really? Yeah, it really has been one. And I didn't research. I didn't have time to look up a lot of the specific reviews who have since hailed it. But it's been one in my mind that I know people have cited as this underseen, as you're pointing out, in that year and since movie that's really important and also really well done. And I have to say it is. I mean, it's sketch comedy. So some of the bits are better than others. But at the same time, Townsend shows a lot of flair absolutely as a performer. I mean, he could keep up, if not instruct Key and Peele, on how to slip in and out of identities and caricatures.

19:24But also as a director, there's some interesting stuff here. He gets a chance with this format to do some black and white cinematography in sort of a film noir takeoff sequence. that also interestingly combines sort of the graininess of some of the blaxploitation films we watched when we did our marathon on those movies. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff there. I can see now why people have continued to talk about it if maybe they still haven't talked about it enough.

19:51Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I just don't hear anybody talk about it that much. I'm trying to think of the last time I heard that title invoked, but one people should definitely see. The power's out. Tensions rise. What happens next depends on you. I'm former Navy SEAL Cade Courtley, and when disaster strikes, staying invisible might just be what keeps you alive. In a blackout, desperation spreads fast. People will do just about anything to get their hands on power. And it's exactly why I trust the Alpha Case Elite from Four Patriots. It looks like an ordinary briefcase, but inside, you've got a solar generator that's silent, fume-free and powerful enough to run your fridge, lights, medical devices, even power tools.

20:34No gas, no noise, no attention. Just clean, tactical power when you need it most. And right now, during this limited launch, you'll also get a free solar panel and free flashlight, all packed inside your AlphaCase generator. But heads up, there are only 2 ,200 units available, and once they're gone, they're gone. Go to 4Patriots.com. That's the number 4Patriots.com. and get your Alpha Case Elite while you still can. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time.

21:07Adam Kempenaar:We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey Jonas is available now and their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at The Office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman. Clearly I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Pride from the Outspoken Podcast Network. All month long and all year round, we're celebrating being loud, proud, and always original.

21:39Adam Kempenaar:It's me, Brandon Kyle Goodman, host of the podcast Tell Me Something Messy. Check out my show for unfiltered takes on dating, relationships, and adulting. The more you get comfortable with someone, the more their real self comes out, they're going to be gross. What's the grossest thing about a man? Burping. Shut it down. Listen to High Key for the best pop culture takes, and there are no girls on the internet for all your tech news. For your favorite celebrity kikis, check out Outlaws with T.S. Madison. Wait, so Luke was the son of Vader, and Vader was turned by RuPaul? Yeah, well, somebody's heard of some old, old, old witch.