The Awesome ’80s are back, and better than ever! Looking through last year’s posts I see that I did really well with this theme, I watched a lot of movies, and I wrote a lot of reviews. Let’s hope I do the same this year.
As I noted in last year’s keynote I grew up in the 1980s. It’s when I really started watching movies. According to Letterboxd I’ve watched more films from the 1980s than any other decade. And yet, it is not at all my favorite decade for movies. When I think about my favorite eras for cinema, I start talking about the 1940s or the 1970s, or maybe even 1999. But the 1980s won’t get much of a mention.
There were some great movies made in the 1980s. I think, for me, in some ways the decade comes up short because I grew up in it, but I was too young to watch a lot of the best films from that period. I love 1980s Spielberg films, John Hughes’s teen flicks, and Robert Zemeckis and all that classic ’80s stuff. A lot of it holds up, and some of it is really good. But a lot of it was crap, kid stuff. I think my memory blends all of that together and the decade comes out as a mishmash of nostalgic gold and syrupy slop.
So, once again, this year I’m going to try to find and watch films that I would have missed as a kid. Movies that were maybe inappropriate for pre-teen me, or that I would have found hopelessly boring. I don’t want to say I’m gonna watch movies for adults, or mature films as that bring up images of me sitting in a dark room sweating, but movies for grown-ups lets say. And then maybe some silly, goofy totally 1980s movies.
I already watched the original Rambo trilogy if that tells you anything about where this is going :). Look forward to that review soon.
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