The Eighties, a decade of inspiration and a rant about today

[Demonaut]

seriously, we had an amazing amount of creative music and awesome films, some of the best comedy's on TV.
In the movie catagory we had Aliens,Predator,Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High,Lost Boys,CaddyShack,National Lampoon "Vacation" movies,Indiana Jones series,Princess Bride, Breakfast Club, Blues Brothers. The crap coming out of Hollywood has become worse every year, what happened to the writers and directors who cared about a story line and characters? Input would be welcome.

[Dookus]

1. lol

I never thought I'd see the day when the '80s were held up as a paragon of creative excellence.

I liked a lot of those movies you listed, but most weren't "instant classics". There are plenty of great movies being made today, too. What IS missing are the huge, over-the-top comedies like Blues Brothers, which I miss.

But this decade is giving us Lord of the Rings, the Kill Bills, Moulin Rouge, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and tons of other movies that are among my all-time favorites.

[Demonaut]

4. maybe it's an age thing, but many of these movies are considered

classics, I agree that the movies you've posted are great but I miss the "type" of movie the eighties generated.

[Cybergata]

33. I'm so amazed that someone misses the 80s

This was the time of Reagan & "Greed is Good." Yuck. As for movies, there were a few good ones, but nothing like the 60s and 70s.

:hippie:

[m-jean03]

5. Give me Raiders of the Lost Arc and Adventures in Baby-Sitting,

The Goonies, and a hundred others of that first decade of my life

over that Kill Bill crap anyday. I can't HANDLE those movies. Yuck, why is ultraviolence considered so cool these days? :puke:

[Dookus]

6. I don't think it's anything new

Seen any Peckinpah films from the '70s?

I think of Kill Bill as comedy, and a damned good one at that.

[tigereye]

16. you know it's funny

because generally I abhor most violent films and don't really like Tarantino that much. But I did like Kill Bill for it's stylized and at times, strangely beautiful, take on martial arts and because there are strong (albeit extremely violent) women in the film. My tai chi teacher said he saw it as a women's story, which I found very interesting. And the odd thing is that the cartoon section in the first one is much more violent, in some way, than the live action parts.

Plus it has Shonen Knife in the restaurant scene, how cool is that.
However, you could say that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon gets the point across with less gore.

[DrWeird]

17. Raiders of the Lost Ark?

You mean the movie where Harrison Ford throws the guy into the spinning propellor of an airplane and blood splatters over everything?

Where people get run over by large trucks?

Where people get impaled multiple times in a booby trap?

Where people's flesh melts off their faces?

I thought you cringed at that "penguin baseball" video game.

Hmm.

[Demonaut]

28. not as bloody or as graphic

[mrboba1]

2. They sold out to...

Creating marketing hype for the first weekend of theatre release.

Movies used to have to be good to make money - they had to stay in theatres. Now, there are so many screens, they can hype it up for 1 shot - that first weekend and it doesn't matter what happens after that.

Sure there are still some good folks, but its easier to make(take?) a piece of shit then it is to work on something really good, so that's where many reside.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. You want to see a real golden age of movies?

How about the 1960s and early 1970s?

Klute, Carnal Knowledge, They Shoot Horses Don't They, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Graduate, Easy Rider, Network, Apocalypse Now, Bananas, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Far From the Madding Crowd, Fahrenheit 451, Little Big Man, A Hard Day's Night, O Lucky Man, The Knack, The Manchurian Candidate, The (original) Haunting, The World of Henry Orient, The Wrong Box, The Ruling Class, Z, The Battle of Algiers, Harold and Maude, The French Connection, The Godfather, A Clockwork Orange, Georgy Girl, Bullitt...

You have intelligent dramas, escapist fare, hilarious comedies, bold experiments in terms of both content and style, political allegories, and cult favorites. If you haven't seen these, you owe it to yourself.

Not all of these were made in Hollywood, but by comparison with them, your list from the 1980s represents the leading edge of "the crap coming out of Hollywood," although I will grant your point that the stuff coming out today is even worse.

[Demonaut]

7. nice selection, and with netflix I will.

[rlev1223]

22. plus..a random selection

The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, Straw Dogs, Alice's Restaurant, Easy Rider, Joe, The Magic Christian, Lenny, the Producers, Blow-Up, The Party, The Sting, The Boys From Brazil, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and of course Jaws, The Exorcist, The Stepford Wives (orig.) and everything by Russ Myers.......

[Burma Jones]

25. I would even take that to 1976 with Network and Raging Bull

I'd also add MASH and Catch 22 to this great list.

Lydia, are you a tattooed Lady?

I've read opinions that state Jaws was the blockbuster that ended the 60s-70s golden age. Well, Jaws, Star Wars , ET and Close Encounters.

[rlev1223]

32. How did i forget.....

How did I forget MASH and Catch-22. I wasn't thinking fast enough .

Also add:

Chinatown, Nashville, Ordinary People, Romeo and Juliet and the Monty Python Holy Grail...plus Animal House qualifies---1978. (A very political movie that was hijacked by the campus Nazis everywhere and claimed as their own. Maybe it should mark the end of the era.)

[WilliamPitt]

8. The 80s sucked

[Demonaut]

9. succinct, lol

[WilliamPitt]

10. Refined statement

90% of pop culture in the 80s sucked. You want dreck? Madonna, hair bands, synthesized pop songs. I like John Hughes films, but if you check the non-new-release aisles at the video stores, you'll see eight million shit movies. A lot of them are 80s movies.

I'll take the 90s. The rise of indie filmmakers, Tarantino, music that at least tried to have some emotional substance.

The best thing about the 80s was Bob Mould, but no one knew his name.

[Demonaut]

12. matter of taste, Tarantino has some good movies and Indie

films are a necessity born of the lack talent in mainstream and commercialization ie : name drops, product marketing placement, corporate sponsorship.....I can't stand a commercial disguised as a movie, and few movies made today lack that

[RFKHumphreyObama]

11. Couldn't agree more

I miss the decade in which I was growing up. I do agree that the 1960s and 1970s were high points in entertainment and culture -and movies from the 1940s and 1950s should also be included in this category-but I still get a lot of enjoyment out of 1980s movies and music. Plus in the 1980s we had a Labor government here and we could sure do with one now


Good movies these days are few and far between IMO. Same goes for TV shows and music

[JVS]

13. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is really an awful film

My brother liked it until I got him the tape for Xmas. After watching it a couple of times he said that his memories of that film were much better than the film really was.

[Demonaut]

14. guilty as charged too

not seen it since then

[Maestro]

15. Don't forget the hair bands

[Deja Q]

18. ?!

Early 80s music was cool, but by 1984 it was all fizzle. It was so washed up that alternative rock made its debut and lasted until 1994, when it became mainstream...

80s movies generally SUCKED. I recall mostly pointless sex-themed movies. "Hardbodies" and so on. The college frat movies "Porkys", "Revenge of the Nerds", et al, were just plain stupid. Indiana Jones was cool though 'temple of doom' didn't need the screaming chick and 'last crusade' had too much cornball humor in it to be taken seriously... "Aliens" is a CLASSIC though, a pity the 3rd movie didn't work out as originally planned... If it weren't for the Star Trek and James Bond movies, there's nothing about the 80s here that's worth mentioning.

Late 60s/early 70s was a better period IMHO.

But the 80s seemed to be the final era of originality... maybe the early 90s.

[Demonaut]

23. got to agree on the movies you listed but I'm referring to the ones

I listed, lets not forget "Plan 9 from Outer Space" that Ed Wood classic was only popular because it sucked, really sucked. 1960's had bad ones too but these very rarely made it onto rental formats... on edit missed the release date, Plan 9 came out in 1959

[Nikia]

19. Today, most movies don't seem to last long

With a few execeptions, most movies don't play very long in theaters. There seems to be another must see movie coming out every week. In the video store, the pattern seems to be repeated. Wasn't it different in the 80s? Were the fewer movies with longer runs? That's what it seemed like anyway.

[coloradodem2005]

20. Back to the Future.

That has to be one of the best things that came out in the 80's.

[sundog]

21. Talking Heads were great...

[Burma Jones]

26. THEY didn't jump the shark.....

[sundog]

27. Yeah, I watched the Stop Making Sense

remastered DVD a few weeks ago with some friends. It was so good... just as fresh as ever. Gotta be among the top concert films ever made - Demme before anyone had a clue who he was...

[Warren DeMontague]

29. Stop Making Sense

is the best concert movie of all time, IMHO. Even beats The Last Waltz.

[sundog]

34. Woodstock

was also pretty damn good :hi:

[Warren DeMontague]

35. Yes, Indeedy

From a cultural perspective, it's earth shattering.. But the performances are a little more spotty and hit-or-miss. On the stellar side, the folks who spring to mind are Ritchie Havens, CSN, Joe Cocker, and Hendrix of course. But, and I'm being perfectly honest, here, I could probably do without Sha Na Na, or Joan Baez mutilating the crap out of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot".

[sundog]

36. I know what you mean performance-wise

it's a hit or miss - my fave perf is John Sebastian's "Younger Generation"

"Monterey Pop" is also a great movie... in a way it paved the road for a lot of what would follow -- it has its own special raw quality -- much more performance oriented... very few words...

[truthbetold]

24. For my mom...

The 80s never ended. She's STILL rocking the big hair.

[NightTrain]

30. You're kidding, right?

You think those films were the best the '80s had to offer?! Christ almighty....

[Warren DeMontague]

31. For the record:

Not all of us were wearing acid washed jeans and listening to Poison or RATT during the 80s. Neither were we watching Miami Vice and riding friggin' vespa scooters. I was energized and politically active and pretty damn well pissed off all through college, which was the second half of the 80s for me. I was one of those kids, like Amy Carter, who was active in trying to end CIA recruitment and harrasment of groups like CISPES on college campuses.

And music? I felt about as much affinity to the "popular music" of the 80s as I do with whatever crap people are listening to today. I started listening to R.E.M. in 1983, when very few people had heard of 'em-- and anyone who refers to them as an "80s band" is clueless to the fact that they had nothing to do with most of what was going down (to their credit) in that decade. The Grateful Dead, for sure, who (although not an 80s band) put on some legendary shows between 1987 and 1991 IMHO... Talking Heads, yes, although they lost it rapidly.. Fear Of Music is still one of the all time greats.

80s Movies? Some of those movies are classics- Fast times, for sure, and even a couple of the John Hughes films, even though many are overrated. Classic 80s teen comedies? I just have three words for ya: "Savage Steve Holland".