It is weird to get to 1983 because it is at once a lighter and less iconic year than some of those surrounding it, particularly when you get to 1985, but at the same time it is still full of influential movies, first entries for franchises, noteworthy sequels, and originals that continue to resonate over 40 years later. I said all that to say that for me personally, this year offers fewer foundational films and more idiosyncratic favorites that I love deeply but may cause a raised eyebrow or two all the while omitting things like Scarface that are legendary but that I don’t really connect with much.

All that being said above, there is one movie on the list below that was one of the most foundational in terms of my sense of humor, how I write, how I encounter nostalgia, and how I feel about childhood. It is one of the heaviest hitters in this entire exercise so 1983 can’t really take much of a backseat to other years even if 1984 and 1985 contain the most foundational and life changing films I have ever seen. This is quite a run and really speaks to who I am and what I like more than just about any three year period available.

I chose fewer runners up than last year and there are a few that I really dig that I left off just because it starts to feel ridiculous listing movies after awhile but, in no particular order, the runners up for 1983 are: Blue Thunder, the Meaning of Life, War Games, Trading Places, Krull, Mr Mom, Strange Brew, and Christine.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1983 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 43-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.A Christmas Story-Bob Clark

There is a lot of debate about what the best Christmas movie is and it often centers around Christmas Vacation and something else. For me, and as much as I love Christmas Vacation, the winner is and always will be a Christmas Story.

A Christmas Story, based on the writing of Jean Shepard and directed by Black Christmas director Bob Clark, is the story of Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) and his campaign to get a Red Ryder Range Model Air Rifle in Indiana in the 1940s. The story is told via narration by Jean Shepard himself and utilizes several fantasy sequences in which Ralphie imagines scenarios both good and bad that play out during the film. Along the way Ralphie has to contend with local bully Scut Farkas (Zack Ward), tries to get his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring, attempts to do his best to navigate friendship with Flick (Scott Schwartz) and Schwartz (RD Robb), and keep from going blind from having his mouth washed out by Life Boy soap. The constant refrain of ‘You’ll shoot your eye out’ from everyone including Santa Claus only fuels his madness further and further until he inevitably gets it from his Old Man (Darren McGavin) who is gruff and often unyielding but is, at his core, kind of a softy. That he suffers an immediate eye injury upon shooting a bb at a metal target is icing on the cake topped only with the disastrous turkey theft by the Bumpus Hounds from next door.

Jean Shepard’s book, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, is a collection of short stories and essays that he originally published in Playboy and were originally read on the radio. As such, the movie is an amalgamation of several of those stories, some of which actually appear in other books, but the arrangement here by Shepard really unlocks a special kind of magic that others have attempted to replicate in the years since. The Wonder Years literally would not exist if not for a Christmas Story as that is where the idea came from. Many movies and shows have followed in trying to produce something with the magic this movie has and while some are good in their own right, like the aforementioned Wonder Years, none have ever really recaptured the magic.

There have been several attempts to sequelize a Christmas Story but most of those are hot garbage. There are only two that come close. The first is My Summer Story (1994) which is also directed by Bob Clark, written and narrated by Jean Shepard, and stars Keiran Culkin as Ralphie, Charles Grodin as the Old Man, and Mary Steenbergen replaces Melinda Dillon as Ralphie’s mom. In fact the only returning actor from the original is Tedde Moore as Ms. Shields. I dig this movie and it takes most of its substance from Wanda Hickey’s Night of Gold Memories and Other Disasters as well as some from In God We Trust. It did not catch on, partially because of the original title being It Runs in the Family, but also because there is just such magic from the first cast in the original movie that it is hard for even a stacked cast like this to re-capture.

The other one is a Christmas Story Christmas (2022) which features Peter Billingsley (who has a writing credit on the movie) returning as an adult Ralphie trying to write an obituary for the Old Man while spending Christmas with his family at his childhood home. I will not talk about it much here because it will appear much later on this list but its proximity to my own father’s death has made it much more personal to me. I also thought it did a pretty good job of balancing nostalgia with genuinely funny material.

I don’t really remember when I saw this movie for the first time. It was probably on TV or we rented it but I loved it from the jump. I remember vividly quoting lines from it at church with a kid I didn’t know, our only credential being that we both loved this movie. I thought it was hilarious and rarely a day goes by now that I don’t quote it in some way. The way that Shepard narrates, the way he tells the story with the vocabulary and references, the similes and metaphors, all of it became deeply engrained in me and it informed how I talk as a person more than just how I write. It took a lot of restraint not to use similes and metaphors right now in describing this and I think I should get some kind of special consideration for it.

I deeply identified with Ralphie when I was a kid. My schemes to get the Castle Grayskull mirrored Ralphie’s plight fairly closely, although I was not so much in danger of shooting my eye out (but small accessories are a choking hazard, I was often reminded). I was bullied like Ralphie, I had a dad who could be very gruff at times and who indeed wove a tapestry of obscenity that as far as we know is still hanging over Southern Arizona today. Unlike Ralphie, I was an only child but that led to another similarity which was that I spent an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about thins. Running silly scenarios that were the only company I had on long days by myself. It was my solace and it felt really good as a kid to see someone else cope with their reality that way.

I don’t know that any other character has ever reminded me more of my mom than Melinda Dillon’s mom character in a Christmas Story and it isn’t just because my mom’s name was Belinda. I am not even really sure how to articulate the ways but the energy and the vibe is very similar. I always felt safe with my mom when I was a kid, she had my back, even running interference with my dad. Things were different when I was in high school, but when I was a kid, we were very close and even when she had to punish me, she did it with the same regret that Ralphie’s mom felt when she put soap in her own mouth after washing his out. She was kind and calm and even when I was prattling on about whatever bullshit cartoon I talked about incessantly, she listened and I never felt dismissed. When I opened Castle Grayskull on Christmas morning, along with a He-Man comforter that I passed out wrapped up in at the base of the Christmas tree, it was even more clear that she had been listening and actually cared. I have felt dismissed a lot by people in my but not by her, not then. I suppose it is fitting that this entry came up the weekend of Mother’s Day because I get to write about her and the feeling she gave me when I was a kid. I miss her desperately and a Christmas Story, which she also loved, always makes me feel closer to her. I don’t know if there is a better way to say why this movie means so much to me.

I have read Jean Shepard’s books and I love them. I recommend anyone who hasn’t sought them out to do so. But as good as they are, I think a Christmas Story, this movie, is his masterwork and if you have to have one thing left behind as a legacy, we should all be so lucky as to have it be as amazing as a Christmas Story.

2.Return of the Jed-Richard Marquand

The epic conclusion to the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi sees  Han Revived, Luke learning that Leia is his sister, Luke confronting Vader, Han and Leia getting together, and the single worst acted scene of Carrie Fisher’s career. This movie has it all and Ewoks to boot.

When I was a kid this one was my favorite mostly on the strength of Luke having a green lightsaber as green is my favorite color. Like I have said before, the depth of my film criticism was fairly shallow in those days.

Green lightsabers aside, rescuing Han from Jabba is fucking amazing. The speeder bike chase on Endor is fucking amazing. Luke and Vader’s lightsaber battle is fucking amazing. It is all so cool that Luke coming off like a wet blanket during the whole thing stopped bothering me after the fourth or so time I saw it in the theater.

My dad and I went to this on opening weekend. We went to the theater at El Con mall. There is still a theater there now, although the theater that was demolished long before the rest of the mall was. When we showed up that Saturday morning, the line was stretched around pretty much the entire mall. The wait was insane and for some of the people in that line, there was zero chance they were making it in. In our case, we ran into friends about ¼ of the way through and they let us in line with them. They were people I knew from little league and while most of my memories from little league are bad and punctuated with bullying, I suppose it paid dividends occasionally.

I saw it four times in the theater, the final time being with my mom who had not yet seen it. This is likely the origin of my love of watching movies I have seen before with someone who hasn’t seen it before and experiencing vicarious joy through their experiences. It was a great day. We had to go to the Foothills Mall to see it because by that time it wasn’t playing very many places and since we lived on the east side, it was sort of like taking a day trip over there. It felt like a pilgrimage. We ate at the food court and then we saw the movie. It was awesome. We walked in all holding hands, me in the middle still trying to swing like a monkey. Pure unadulterated joy.

3.National Lampoon’s Vacation-Harold Ramis

I have talked before about my parents’ (Read: mom’s) loose ruleset for what I can see. This is another example of that, although it less so than Aliens. This fell into the ‘well there are kids in it’ loophole but it was only because saying no was sort of like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out.

My cousin Dee was visiting from Oregon and staying over at my house and I woke up after having gone to bed and I couldn’t sleep. So, I went into the living room to see what was up and Dee was watching Vacation on cable. She was older than me and as such was not subject to the same rules I was in terms of content. I laid down on the carpet next to her to watch and my mom came in all smiles to explain some adult joke to her and saw, aghast, that I was there watching. I told her I couldn’t sleep and asked if I could stay and she said ‘well, there are kids in it, it can’t be too bad.’ Yes it can. But I loved it even though the vast majority of it went over my head at the time.

This movie is John Hughes by way of Harold Ramis and it is a perfect blend of sensibilities. Chevy Chase may be notorious as a dick in real life but his run in the 80s solidifies his god tier status as a hilarious actor. He can do a lot of different flavors of comedy but I think Clark Griswold is his comedy sweet spot. I think Christmas Vacation is the best of the series but this one is a close second for me.

4.Curse of the Pink Panther-Blake Edwards

Okay so, look, not all of these are going to be great films. Not all of these are even going to be good films. They are all ones that I loved as a kid and it is under this category that we find Blake Edward’s Curse of the Pink Panther. It was meant to be the start of a new franchise after Peter Sellers’s death by introducing Ted Wass as Detective Clifton Sleigh, contracted by the Surete to find the missing Inspector Clouseau who has made off with the Pink Panther diamond. This movie plays all the hits with a Kato scene, a disguise shop scene, Chief Inspector Dreyfuss descending into murderous madness as he is injured more and more by Sleigh’s clumsiness, and even some poorly aged gay panic for good measure. Does it work? Not really, but kind of.

I watched this repeatedly on cable when I was a kid. I loved the Pink Panther movies when I was a kid. Revisiting them now has been kind of horrifying in terms of homophobia, trans jokes, and blatant racism. I don’t believe they are all like that but at this point, I am a little nervous to find out. This installment is much more toned down on those things. Sure, Sleigh makes his first appearance in drag posing as a sex worker to catch a killer but as far as gay panic goes, it was fairly tame compared to something similar in, say, Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978).

Watching this again now, I still find most of it funny. Granted it is in a way that is predicated more on familiarity than my current sense of humor but I still have a lot of affection for it. I think Ted Wass was really good as Sleigh and it is too bad that his five movie contract ended with this one. I think that by this time, the series had really run out of steam creatively and the loss of Sellers was a fatal blow. The attempts to make Pink Panther movies since bears this out, although I do dig the Steve Martin ones. I don’t know that I would recommend this movie now but I still like it. For my money, though, the scene in which someone asks if his name is Sleigh as in kill and he says ‘No as in one horse open’ remains hilarious to me and probably always will.

5.Jaws 3D- Joe Alves

Speaking of bad movies that we love because reasons, we have Jaws 3. I saw Jaws 3 in the theater with my friend Adam because Adam was the same level of shark fanatic (fanatic?) as I was. I was sleeping over at his house and his dad took us. The 3D gimmick really didn’t work well but I was stoked anyway. This was the first Jaws I ever saw in the theater and the experience was magical.

I look back on it now with fondness while also recognizing the stage of diminishing returns that we were in with it. Sure, it had Dennis Quaid as Mike Brody and a Sea World tie in but cracks were really starting to show in the franchise. It is important to specify that it is not even in the same conversation as Jaws 4: the Revenge in terms of how bad it is. Jaws 3D is watchable and the shark never fucking roars but this still can’t compare to the first and second installments.

I think it is kind of funny that Back to the Future 2 pokes fun of long running movie franchises and includes a jab at Jaws given that we only have four Jaws movies next to other franchises that stretch past 13. I feel like of shortchanged by that. We are owed at least four more shitty Jaws sequels by my math. And that gets to the point of this for me a bit. Jaws 3D might not be the best but it is a movie about a shark eating people and I will take it over a lot of movies that don’t have any sharks eating people. I don’t want a Jaws reboot or remake but man, in a world of legasequels, where the fuck is my Jaws movie? Sure, pretty much everyone who stared in the original aside from Richard Dreyfuss are dead but I don’t care. Have Sean and Mike Brody show back up to Amity to fight a shark. Maybe it could be a bull shark this time like in the actual historical incident that inspired Jaws probably was? We could have a shitty mayor fucking things up again and that would definitely play relevant in such times as these. Fuck, they could even do it in 3D if they used James Cameron’s tech. I know it isn’t going to happen, but a guy can dream.