More 60’s
Fail Safe
Doctor Strangelove
The Green Berets
*Swingers *always felt like the ultimate 90s movie to me. Maybe just because it captured my 90s experience so well (not that I was an aspiring actor living in Los Angeles).
Excellent!
Good picks. I’ll do Real Genius for the 1980s because it hits a few points:
[ul]
[li]Military usage of and sponsorship of research.[/li][li]The Strategic Defense Initiative (aka Star Wars) in all but name, and lightly fictionalized.[/li][li]Party atmosphere. This would have been a conspiracy thriller had it been made a decade earlier or later, especially earlier.[/li][/ul]
Clerks, with its focus on losers and lack of a true narrative core, is like a more accessible version of Slacker as a portrait of one specific subculture in the 1990s.
1910s: Shoulder Arms
1920s: Safety Last!
1930s: Our Daily Bread
1940s: Act of Violence
1950s: All That Heaven Allows or Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1960s: (first half) A Hard Day’s Night (second half) Night of the Living Dead
1970s: Nashville
1980s: Top Gun
1990s: Showgirls
2000s: Bad Boys II or Transformers
2010s: Get Out
I have another suggestion for the 1910s. It’s a little overly-dramatic, but as far as capturing the zeitgeist, I think The Mother and the Law by DW Griffith captures the era extremely well. It was conceived as “The Modern Story” segment of Intolerance, but was eventually released as a feature by itself. The basic story is the trials and disappointments of people who move from a rural area to the city, looking for a better life, and get caught up in the squalor of the city. The fledgling profession of social work, and its ability to remove children from “unsuitable homes” plays a key role, something that was a huge topic of debate at the time, and there’s an 11th hour race between an automobile and a train, which [SARCASTIC SPOILER ALERT FOR A MOVIE MADE IN 1916] the automobile wins. It wins because it can take shortcuts, as opposed to staying on the tracks, and can go very fast-- not faster than the train, technically (it’s on a sort of Kessel run), but much faster than a horse. It’s an extremely suspenseful sequence, even now (I first saw it in the 1980s), and must have even been more so to people in 1916, who had never conceived of something able to outpace a train. The film has all sorts of little details-- it pokes fun at the fashion of the time, it has an opinion on the Temperance movement, it contrasts life on a subsistence farm with a city tenement, it shows unionization, and organized crime. Even the struggles of a single mother. Seriously, if you took a sampling of headlines from the early teen centuries of the 20th century, there would be something on each one in this movie.
Starring Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron, people almost no one has heard of in 2019, but they were extremely famous in 1916. Mae Marsh was nearly as popular as Lilian Gish and Mary Pickford. I don’t watch enough movies now to compare her to someone contemporary, but the fact that she’s in the same class with Lillian Gish ought to say volumes. If you haven’t heard of Lillian Gish, she was called the “First Lady of cinema”-- more popular in her own time than Meryl Streep. Mary Pickford was called “America’s Sweetheart,” and was the first superstar (yes, even before Chaplin). These were A-listers of the silent era.
That works for the jaded, cynical end-of-decade feel that only began to set in during 1969. For the Sixties as a whole, *Barbarella * or The President’s Analyst + Alice’s Restaurant.
When I think of the 60s I think of The Graduate.
Hmmm… for early 90s, I thought of Singles. For 80s, I think more of the high school movies, I guess because I was a kid at the time? Like Heathers or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Breakfast Club. Those all seemed like defining Gen X movies to me.
I thought of that one and “Sweet Smell of Success”
More 60’s
Stretching the boundries of the OP, but I always thought that Woodstock and Gimme Shelter are a perfect analogy for the peak of the era of The Summer of Love (Peace, Love, Music) and the end, literally as the decade ended.
It’s hard to pick one for the 80s. For me personally, it’d be Pump up the Volume, but for the Boomers, it’d probably be Return of the Secaucus Seven. Although, if you think of Fatal Attraction as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic, that’s another good one, in spite of how derivative it is.
Part of the problem is that once you’ve left the 60s, you no longer have a single zeitgeist. The generations are so self-focused.
Not too self-focused, too recent. We can still remember the 1990s around here, so we can remember all the complexity of those times, all the dots in the pointillist painting which makes up a life. As we look back at decades in the distant past, the dots merge into each other, or disappear entirely, and we have swathes of flat color. This is how humans are: In the moment, we’re a mass of random thoughts and impulses, only some of which make it to the surface, but if you remember your day yesterday, you see a directed action propelling you through, and forget everything which didn’t amount to anything.
Anyway, I’m going to describe a film and you tell me what it is: A White male office worker in an unfulfilling existence becomes an alter-ego and, through a measure of sheer insanity, brings down a pillar of the business world.
Hint: This is from the 1990s.
Office Space and Fight Club, two films which will be studied for insight into a specific mindset decades from now.
Yes, yes, yes. That was another one I was thinking of in terms of “essential 80s/Gen X movies.” (OK, it was technically 1990, but presumably written and filmed before that. And, besides, the 80s ended somewhere around 1991.)
Thank you. I remember how Singles and Reality Bites were released close to each other and seemed to be competing for the definitive young adult Gen X hit. (I was too old by then, in my 30s, but whatever). I remember how *Reality Bites *had the big star power and all the heavy-duty promotion and media buzz behind it. But Singles, practically ignored, was by far the superior cinematic oeuvre.
1970s: Nashville (agreeing with irritant above)
1980s: Do the Right Thing
I think the Bad News Bears captured the shambolic nature of the 1970s better than any other film. Clueless did a good job with the superficiality of the 90s.
Dale Sams suggested Soylent Green for the 1970s, which I think does fit the pessimistic view of the future, particularly from the first half of that decade (and a prescient view of the negative effects of unregulated big business).
Three other films from that period which come to mind, all with similar dystopian views of the future (but all rooted in what was going on in the culture of that era):
Silent Running
Logan’s Run
Rollerball
What WAS the spirit of the 1980s? Greed? “Wall Street” would be the obvious choice, or maybe “Trading Places”.
For Gen X movies, I’d say “Heathers” and “The Breakfast Club” have to be on there somewhere as well.