When Fandango Groovers Movie Blog calls for participants to a blogathlon about a special movie year, the roar reaches all the way to a suburb to Stockholm and to my (not so small) ears.
Though writing in English isn´t neither my cup of tea nor my big gulp of coffee I will do the one thing I can: my best. So, buckle up and I will try to take you back to the year when I was only sixteen and had my whole life ahead of me and a shitload of fantastic movies to see.
The year is 1988. I live in an extreeemly small Swedish town and my parents gets divorced that year. We move from a house to an appartment and my new neighbours don´t have much of a life. They notice everything I do and talk to my mother about my strangeness. My God, black curtains in her room and black Doc Martens on her feet, she must be a terrorist or something!
But no, I wasn´t a criminal of any kind, I was just an ordinary teenage nerd. I loved school, I loved reading books, I loved electronic music and of course, I loved movies just as much then as I do now. I had terrific friends, I had a great mom and I had a nice good looking boyfriend with a white driveable Volvo, but despite all that, movies was the one thing that made me understand life and the crazy rocking world around me.
1. Luc Besson´s The Big Blue made me realize that love isn´t easy, not for anyone. Love can be a lot of things and even if it´s anything but normal – for me – to love a fish more than a human Jacques Mayol proves me wrong. Who decides what´s normal? I decide for me but for others I sure don´t.
The Big Blue is a movie that manage to play on my feelings like I was a big cello. I cry like a starving baby with colic each time I watch it and as a movie it´s pure and simple perfection. But not all awakenings are easy. My new perspective about myself and love made me listen to my heart. I dumped my boyfriend and my neighbours got a new thing to talk about: my ex-boyfriends clogs clapping in the stairwell, angry and sad at the same time, day after day after day.
2. John McClane teached me a lot of things in John McTiernan´s Die Hard but not all of those things focused on how to handle an angry German guy. For example: I had a deodorant that worked! Transpiring like a guinea pig in a sauna and still being totally odorless was a feeling any teenager would die for and I sure was one of them.
I sat there in the little local cinema and couldn´t breathe. I couldn´t blink either. I just sat there and I was so exhausted and my sweater was so soggy and moist I could easily have used it as a wet towel. Die Hard is still one of the greatest actionmovies of all times even though I transpire a lot less nowadays (thank God for that!).
3. Racism was – and still is – a huge topic in many small Swedish cities. I the shitty village of mine there were a great deal of that back in 1988. I was so sad, so frustrated over the fact that people could be so cruel to each other because of something so silly as skin color.
Seeing Alan Parker´s Mississippi Burning didn´t make me glad but it sure gave me a giant bandaid around my heart. I was still angry but I felt a bit wiser, isn´t that the whole purpuse of being a teenager?
4. Perhaps it was then, perhaps it was when Glenn Close cleaned the pale make-up from her face in the movie Dangerous Liaisons that I grew up from being a schoolgirl to a real woman.
The movie is a smörgåsbord for every hormonal, thinking, feeling boy or girl, man or woman. Jealousy, passion and love, subjects that never goes out of style, subjects that fulfill our minds no matter of age. When it comes to love we all have a bit of our reptilebrain left. Intelligence doesn´t count, self confidence can be erased by a minute, all you can do is live your life and try to be kind. Carma, you know.
This movie was my teacher in life-kindness-knowledge. Be kind, be good, be nice. Try, always. Don´t let mean people piss on you but in every other case try to be nice and you´ll get it back – sometime, somewhere, somehow.
5. So many memories from my teenage years holds the strong hand of Sylvester Stallone. Therefore, I can´t do a list like this without a movie with my homie, without the man, the myth, the short Italian killingmachine Sylvester Stallone aka John Rambo.
He travels to Afghanistan this year in Rambo III, of course to be a hero and save Trautman (Richard Crenna) and I love it, I won´t and I can´t explait it, I just do. I cried like I always did (and always do) in the end when the credits roll, the lights turns on and I leave my stonehard Viol-candy on the armchair (the only candy for sale in my cinema back then and it was soft like leftovers from the stoneage).
The first thing I bought when I visited Stockholm just weeks after seeing this film was a movieposter and I hung it on my pink wall right between First Blood and Cobra. I wonder what the neighbours would have said about that. Three times Stallone on a girly wall! Oh my God, she must be craaaazy for real!
There were a lot of movies from 1988 that made me a wiser young girl and it´s difficult picking just five of them but I did, I made it – Jeeeeey! – but there are a few more movies from ”my” year that I would love to at least mention: Dead ringers, The Unbearable Lightness of being, Big, Betrayed, Working girl, Rain Man, A fish called Wanda and The Accused.
There are so many movies and so little time, but if you choose one year to dig yourself deeper into, choose 1988. At least that´s MY favourite movie year of all times.
