Movies Of The Year: 1977

I'm missing more from 1977 than 76, but I really doubt any of them would break into my top 5.

Here's the list:

11. Saturday Night Fever - Yeah the dancing is kinda cool, but this is a truly terrible movie. Painfully bad.

10. Pete's Dragon - The first of several kid's movies this year. Mediocre live action, partly animated Disney movie. Mickey Rooney's in it.

9. Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo - I loved the Herbie movies when I was a kid. This is a Herbie movie. Ignore the Lindsey Lohan version.

8. Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown - Never one of my favorite Peanuts films, but it's alright.

7. The Rescuers - A lesser Disney cartoon, but it does star Bob Newhart. So that's cool.

6. The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh - A much better Disney cartoon. One of the best, in fact. There's a big gap between 6 and 7 here.

5. New York, New York - A great, underrated Scorsese movie, it's a very dark musical with the unlikely cast of Robert DeNiro and Liza Minelli. Basically the same story as A Star Is Born, but elevated by some of Scorsese's best looking scenes. The opening set-piece on VE day is amazing.




4. A Bridge Too Far - More than the epitome of the Caine-Hackman Theory, it's a great war movie in it's own right. Really the last great classical war movie. All-star cast (Caine, Hackman, Connery, Caan, Redford, Ryan O'Neal, Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Liv Ullman, maximillian Schell, Denholm Elliott, Elliott Gould, etc) epic scope, complex action sequences, interesting story, it's got it all.


3. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind - Possibly Spielberg's best movie. Great performance from Richard Dreyfuss. Chock full of visually stunning sequences. Francois Truffaut co-stars as a scientist. Classic That Guy Bob Balaban plays Truffaut's assistant. This means something.

2. Star Wars - Very tough call between 1 and 2. Ask me ten minutes from now and I might reverse them. It's fashionable to prefer Empire, but it's Star Wars that is the truly revolutionary film. I refuse to blame it for the crap that came after it, or the effect it had on industry strategy (the creation of the blockbuster-event film).

1. Annie Hall - The best romantic comedy of all-time. Iconic performances by Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. One of my 5 favorite movies ever. Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum have cameos. We need the eggs.


The Unseen:

That Obscure Object Of Desire
Eraserhead
Slap Shot
Smokey And TheBandit
The Kentucky Fried Movie
The Goodbye Girl
Oh, God!
Looking For Mr. Goodbar
Pumping Iron
Black Sunday
3 Women
Stroszek