8. The Right Stuff (Kaufman, 1983) [LE]

Long before Homer Simpson rescued a space mission by munching on a bag of free-floating potato chips, long before the New Kids on the Block sang an irrepressible ditty, there was The Right Stuff.

Could you imagine the temptation Hollywood must have felt to dumb down the story of the space race? To smooth out all the uncouth edges of history and make a much more conventionally appealing picture? Fortunately (and apparently, not without some screenwriting conflict) they resisted that temptation, and as a result, The Right Stuff has ended up a refreshingly candid blast of high atmospheric oxygen.

This isn't a cold, distant history lesson. This is a "take off your gloves and reach into the muck of history and scrunch it around in between your fingers" lesson. No patriotic, apple pie cows are left sacred here. The unflappably pure and heroic notion of the Mercury 7 is revealed to have been essentially a masterpiece of public relations - aside from John Glenn, that is, portrayed by Ed Harris as an Eagle Scout from a Norman Rockwell painting.

Just check out this cast: Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, etc., etc. The most surprising revelation at the time, so I hear, was playwright Sam Shepard, appearing as fearless test pilot Chuck Yeager. The revelation: He was a studly lookin' dude. "So not only is he a brilliant playwright," people apparently said to themselves, "he's also ridiculously handsome? Why don't we just kill ourselves now and get it over with?"

Finally, The Right Stuff is one of the only '80s movies where the top-notch special effects are in the service of a completely realistic story. We could have used a few more instances of that kind of story/technology interplay in that decade.