Remember These Guys?

What do Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson, John Landis, Ivan Reitman, and Brian De Palma all have in common? These men directed some truly memorable films of the 1980s and in some cases the 1970s and early 1990s, and who appear to have either completely dropped off the radar since the turn of the millennium, or to have been reduced to shadows of their former selves in terms of churning out Hollywood blockbusters.

Coppola, in particular, is, for his work on the first two Godfather films alone, one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of all time, but apart from those cultural touchstones he has a whole host of very well-regarded films on his resume including Apocalypse Now, Peggy Sue Got Married, and a highly-stylized retelling of Dracula. For all of that, however, the only films to his credit these days are independent films that apparently nobody sees, and which don't even garner particularly good reviews.

Levinson rose to prominence in the 1980s with films like Diner, The Natural, and the certified blockbusters Good Morning Vietnam and Rain Man, with his work on the last film grabbing him an Academy Award for Best Director in 1989. He had one more hit, the sexual-harassment-themed Disclosure in 1994, and a few more films that received so-so reception in the late 1990s and the first couple of years of this millennium, then proceeded quietly into obscurity.

Landis, on the other hand, was a regular fixture of the 1980s, with his first big hit National Lampoon's Animal House being regarded as one of the pioneering films in the "screwball comedy" genre, and which is also regarded as one of the highlights of the late John Belushi's career. His hits and career highlights included the Eddie Murphy films Trading Places and Coming to America, collaborations with Dan Aykroyd like The Blues Brothers, and Spies Like Us, the cult-classic horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London, and his rather celebrated work on the late Michael Jackson's music videos for the songs Thriller and Black or White. Unlike Belushi and Jackson, Landis is very much alive, but for some reason he seems to have pretty much dropped out of circulation.

Earlier this year, Ivan Reitman managed to nab, for the first time in well over a decade, the number one spot at the U.S. box-office with the Ashton Kutcher/Natalie Portman romantic comedy No Strings Attached, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with his box-office track record would almost certainly wonder what on earth happened to this guy. This is the man behind the massively successful first Ghostbusters film, who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his biggest box-office hits that weren't directed by James Cameron, and who is probably principally responsible for Bill Murray's ego being as big as it supposedly is, for the simple reason that thanks to films like the two Ghostbusters films (the box-office disappointment of the second one notwithstanding), Stripes and Meatballs, Murray became a household name. His career may have stumbled a bit when he took on the Herculean task of creating chemistry between Harrison Ford and Anne Heche in Six Days and Seven Nights and unsuccessfully tried to do with aliens what he did with ghosts in Evolution, but I'm fairly certain that Reitman deserves better projects than an anemic attempt at a romantic comedy. Though My Super Ex-Girlfriend was pretty awful, I like to think this guy still has a couple of pretty good comedies left in him.

De Palma is responsible for one of my hands-down, all-time favorite movies: the crime drama The Untouchables, which conquered at the box-office and won both critical acclaim and an Academy Award for Sean Connery. Not only that, but he was responsible for Scarface, which remains, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most oft-quoted movies today, with the line "say hello to my little friend!" showing up just about everywhere on the pop-culture landscape. Despite the cultural impact of these films, De Palma's presence barely registered in Mission Impossible, which he directed but which will forever be remembered as Tom Cruise's movie, and just about every film he has made since then has gotten a lukewarm reception at best.

I'm not necessarily championing these directors; many of them had their shot and arguably just lost their touch as time went on, particularly de Palma, but I guess what dismays and to an extent depresses me is how they, and other fairly popular 80s directors like Walter Hill, Joe Dante, Larry Kasdan, and Richard Donner seem to have lost their ability to captivate audiences with a compelling story. Sure, a lot of their contemporaries like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Peter Weir, to name a few, endure, and continue to pack in theaters, but I guess I'm disappointed that the current generation of film goers has to put up with hacks like Michael Bay, Zack Snyder, McG, Shawn Levy, Roland Emmerich, Stephen Sommers and most of the idiots who rotate on the Adam Sandler movies. Sure, today's generation has Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams, and Peter Jackson but I honestly can't help but feel like they're missing out on some directors who really knew how to tell fun, engaging stories back in their day, which was not too long ago. Heck, though he may be a mega-bazillionaire, the James Cameron who directed Avatar and even Titanic is to my mind the merest shadow of the James Cameron who directed Aliens, and the same can be said of the Spielberg who directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when comparing that schlock to just about anything he did in the 1980s and even most of the 1990s.

With movie prices continuing to skyrocket, especially thanks to gimmicks like IMAX and 3-D, moviegoers deserve more than mindless drivel like the Transformers movies, 300 and the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. They deserve better than the contrived spectacle of having movie characters look like they're reaching out of the screen to grab them; they deserve adventures and stories that really DO grab them, the way the movies of by likes of Reitman, De Palma and Landis used to grab me and lots of other moviegoers when I was younger, especially considering that unlike many notable directors of years past like David Lean, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and the like, most of those guys from the 80s are still around.