Music: Flashback! The Best Music of 1978

Continuing with our best of 1978, here's the best music of the year all in a convenient playlist for your pleasure. It's on random so just press play to enjoy the punk, pop, disco and funk that made the Carter years so damn special.

Movies: Flashback! The Best Movies of 1978 - Part Three

Our final installment of the Best Movies of 1978 finds us grappling with the supernatural and downright horrific. 


11) Invasion of the Body Snatchers
One of the very few remakes that may be even better than the original, Philip Kaufman's remake of the Don Siegel 50s frightfest takes place in 1970s San Francisco. Where Siegel's film was a veiled take on McCarthyism and anti-Comunist paranoia Kaufman is interested in the 70s self-help EST driven search for self that ultimately found a bunch of numb alienated people (or just plain alien pod plant people) going through the motions. Donald Sutherland plays the hero, Leonard Nimoy is terrific as the turtleneck wearing "I'm OK You're Ok" shrink and Jeff Goldblum does his neurotic schtick while it was still fresh. Don't miss original Body Snatchers star Kevin McCarthy and director Siegel in cameos.


12) Dawn of the Dead
Ten years after Night of The Living Dead George Romero was ready for the sun to rise. Where his original zombie fest was an attack on racism during the peak of race riots and American civil unrest, Dawn of The Dead took us to the heart of zombieland - the capitalist utopia of the mall. The enuui of the Carter years transmuted into pure terror.


13) Halloween
Producer/Director/Screenwriter/Composer John Carpenter kicked off an entire genre of slasher picks with this low-budget b-movie left field hit. Jamie Lee Curtis, a stalker in a mask, Donald Pleasance and that famous piano score and yet the movie's depiction of teenage life in the late 70s rings oddly true and nostalgic from here. Other than the crazed slasher who won't die. Spawned 328 sequels.


14) Heaven Can Wait
Ernst Lubitsch's 1943 film Heaven Can Wait starred Don Ameche as a rake who dies and goes to Hell where Satan demands some proof of his Hellworthiness before entry. Ameche obliges with a recounting of his lusty adventures. Perfect for a remake starring famous cocksman Warren Beatty right? Well same title, but this Heaven Can Wait is actually a remake of a different 1940s film, the much sweeter Here Comes Mr. Jordan. No matter as Beatty is great as deceased football star Joe Pendleton who dies thanks to a mixup from inept angel Buck Henry. Pendleton is inserted into the freshly murdered body of a jerky millionaire to the surprise of homicidal wife Dyan Cannon and her lover Charles Grodin. Even more surprised is real-life Beatty paramour Julie Christie as the environmentalist protesting the rich guy who turns out to have a heart after all.


15) Superman: The Movie
This is where the superhero blockbuster started. Hokey, tongue in cheek and with effects that have aged this is still a hoot. A lot of the pleasure comes from a crackerjack cast - Christopher Reeve as the man of steel/Clark Kent, Margot Kidder as hardboiled Lois Lane, a magnetic Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, and spitcurled tubster Marlon Brando as Jor-El. Don't discount the big setpieces though - the helicopter crash, the earthquake, Luthor's lair below Park Avenue. Sheer escapist fun.

Part 1 of the Best Movies of 1978

Part 2 of the Best Movies of 1978

Movies: Flashback - The Best Movies of 1978 Part 2

In the first part of our series the Best Movies of 1978, we got real heavy man with a bunch of 'Nam and Women's Lib flicks. There's some strong stuff here too but there's also fun to be had-- it was the 70s after all.


6) National Lampoon's Animal House
Just as there was a desire to look back at the recently concluded war in Vietnam in 1978 there was a desire to go back even further - in the case the early 1960s and the wildest frat on campus. The campus comedy is so debased these days that it's hard to believe the story of the outcast frat house versus the preps and the school administration could be fresh and new. Setting a new standard for "vulgarity," this was the Something About Mary of the late 70s but don't discount the winning performances by John Belushi,Tim Matheson and Peter Riegert and all-too-briefly, Karen Allen. Toga! Toga!


7) Grease
Grease was another 70s nostalgia trip, this time to high school in the late 50s. By 1978 musicals were staggering around looking for oxygen but this adaptation of a successful stage play was a big hit. Vinnie Vega...er..John Travolta that is, shows us where he got those sweet Batusi moves from and Olivia Newton-John is winning goody-two shoes. The supporting cast is where a great deal of the action is with Stockard Channing terrific as bad girl Rizzo and future Celebrity Rehab star Jeff Conaway as Kenickie. There's also the score which marries 50s style songs (inclluding the surprisingly bawdy "Greased Lighting") to 70s disco moves and production. You're the one that I want indeed.


8) The Buddy Holly Story
Like Grease, this one is set in the late 50s and features a future screwed up celebriality TV mainstay - in this case Gary Busey. Unlike Grease it's a true story and isn't a musical though it features copious thrilling performances of Holly's hits. It's hard to know these days just what Busey is famous for other than being a nutjob but this film got him a well-deserved Academy Award nom for his incredible acting as Holly - a man who he normally resembles not at all. Busey even went one step further and does all the singing as well. This is one of the great rock bio pics of all time, telling the story of one of the greatest pioneers of the music.

9) Straight Time
Busey also showed up in Ulu Grosbard's underatted gem Straight Time, playing simpleminded best bud to paroled con Dustin Hoffman in this quirky study of how darn hard it is to go straight. Hoffman gives one of his best performances as theif Max Dembo, who wants badly to assimilate into the ideal American dream only the penal system doesn't seem to want him to. M. Emmet Walsh does his creepy bit as an overbearing parole officer, Harry Dean Stanton is at his iconic, laconic best as one of Hoffman's old buddies and young Teresa Russell is breathtaking as a woman who loves Hoffman but begins to discover what price she might pay for that.



10) Days of Heaven
This film, following his 1973 debut Badlands, established Terence Malick as one of the foremost portrayers of land and sky in cinema. His lush long shots almost threaten to swamp his actors and his storytelling but that is part of what makes them watchable. Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and playwright Sam Shephard register mostly as visual elements in the glowing cinematography of Nester Almendros and Haskell Wexler and yet it's impossible to look away. This would be Malick's last film until 1998's The Thin Red Line. I can only imagine how long it must have taken to shoot a film that looks as if it took place in the "golden hour" between day and dusk.

See the Best Movies of 1978 Part One here.

Flashback: The Best Movies of 1978 Part One

Our flashback series takes us to 30 years ago, 1978, and the best movies of the year part one.


1) The Deer Hunter
Three years after the fall of Saigon, Americans seemed finally ready to grapple with Vietnam head-on in several films. The Deer Hunter was the longest and arguably weightiest of these - an epic visual poem. Director Michael Cimino had three rising stars at his disposal - Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and Meryl Streep - all of whom would get Oscar noms. There have been nitpicks over the years over the accuracy of what's onscreen - particularly the Russian roulette sequences - but this isn't meant to be a documentary. It's a tortured exploration of war, community, and friendship, and manhood.


2) Coming Home

The second big 'Nam film of the year starred Hanoi Jane herself as the wife of a Captain, played by Bruce Dern, who is on his way over to serve in 1968. She's unquestioning in her support of the war and her husband. His absence leads her to start to think for herself and take a job helping at the local VA hospital where she encounters hunky paraplegic Jon Voight. Fonda's dawning consciousness about the the war parallels her discovery of herself as a separate person from her husband and the stifling military society they live in. Fonda and Voight are terrific, with Voight giving one of his best performances as an angry, sensitive man trying to channel his rage into something constructive. The ending is truly haunting and director Hal Ashby, an oft-overlooked genius of 70s filmmaking, knows just when to cut and when to linger. The soundtrack is full of great 60s chestnuts including lots of hard-to-clear Beatles and Stones songs.


3) An Unmarried Woman
A more contemporary exploration of a woman finding herself came in this Jill Clayburgh film directed by Paul Mazursky. Clayburgh plays a woman who thought she had a perfect marriage until sucky yuppie hubby played by Michael Murphy ditches her for a younger lass. With the help of her therapist she discovers the joys of singledom and casual sex before meeting up with lusty but sensitive he-man artist Alan Bates. In the end she has to decide whether her burgeoning career and independence are more important to her than her love of Bates. While the "choice" may be a false one it certainly mirrored what many women were feeling as they moved through the professional ranks while often being expected to put their lives on hold for the men they loved.


4) Blue Collar
Paul Schrader, the man who wrote Taxi Driver, made his directorial debut with this, one of the best American films to directly address race and class. It's not polemical so much as it's deeply felt and imbued with the grit of the assembly lines in which it takes place. Richard Pryor was never better than he is here as Zeke, along with Yaphet Kotto and Harvey Keitel. As Union members who scheme to rob the fatcats of their own union the trio form a tight onscreen bond that unravels against greed, violence, and the American way of doing business.

5) Fingers
Another talented writer taking a turn behind the camera for the first time was James Toback, here directing Harvey Keitel as a man torn between the family business of organized crime and his innate talent for classical piano playing. It's a more abstract character portrait than you might think judging from the plat and even some of the Scorsese mannerisms of the camerawork but it's an engrossing piece of work. Remade as The Beat My Heart Skipped.