I have to wonder if Captain Oveur asking Joey if he’s ever seen a grown man naked would be funny to me if I hadn’t grown up watching Airplane!
Landau’s character also has the line “call it my …woman’s intuition” when asked by James Mason’s character why he distrusts Eva Mariie Saint’s actions. That’s a very odd line, unless it is seen as insinuating the character’s orientation.
Just watched Top Gun with the kids Saturday night.
Christ, so many things about this movie are just cringe-worthy now. I mean, it will always be an iconic entertaining movie, the cocky pilots in their zoom-zoom jets are always fun. But the acting, the dialog, the humor, the cool-guy lines, the romantic banter, the film score, almost universally terrible. The mid-late 80’s time period were just an absolute creative desert AFAICR.
I think Top Gun will have a lot more staying power if they bleep out every single bit of the musical score and dialog lines. Just make it a silent film except for the dogfight chatter, “I feel the need for speed”, and “Dangerzone”
One of my favorite ghost stories is a movie called The Changeling starring George C. Scott released in 1980. The cast is top notch, the story is pretty good, and it’s well directed in that pretty much every scene advances the plot or sets things up for later in the movie. But I suspect most under forty, and a lot who are in their 40s, will find themselves bored by how slowly paced it is compared to modern movies and even the style of acting.
When I was a kid watching The Wizard of Oz, my father told me that when he was my age the flying monkeys scared the hell out of him. I found that incredulous as I couldn’t imagine those monkeys scaring anybody. But I kind of get it now. A few years back I watched some scenes from various Friday the 13th movies and didn’t find any of them scary or gross. I don’t know what it looks like when you chop someone’s hand off with a machete but it probably doesn’t look like that. But when I was a kid that stuff looked pretty real to me.
I haven’t seen Top Gun since shortly after it came out on video in 1987. I’m sure I’d find much of it cringe worthy as I have with other movies I’ve watched after so many decades passed like I did with Monster Squad. I think we experience that with most movies and television shows. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy them of course. Even as a kid, The Andy Griffith Show was clearly the byproduct of an era before my time but I still watched it.
So you’re a fan of playing beach volleyball in jeans, then? 
The first time it was televised it was at 9:00 pm and too late for me, but in 1959 when the started showing it at 6:00 pm I was old enough that the flying monkeys weren’t distressing.
I watched it just recently with my 4 year old grandson, and was careful to stay close during those scenes I assumed he would find frightening. He did fine through those, and I kind of drifted away to start preparing dinner during the denouement, when all of a sudden he burst into tears. I had forgotten the scene where the Wizard can’t bring the balloon back and Dorothy thinks she’s been abandoned. That really upset him. When people talk about the frightening parts of that movie they don’t usually mention that part but it bothered him a lot. He said he wanted to see the movie again, “but not right away”.
I’m straying from humor into drama here, but a saw a few episodes of Murder, She Wrote recently, a show I haven’t seen since I was a kid. My god, the acting was so melodramatic. But I guess that’s just what dramas were like in the 1980s.
Looking over a list of eighties movies, there are some from '85-'89 that I have pretty good memories of: Batman and Lost Boys, for example. And there are some I’ve seen fairly recently that hold up well (at least if you ignore the soundtrack): Ladyhawke, Princess Bride, Die Hard. Plenty of lazy clunkers, but even the studio hits are not all garbage
I’m male, and I’ve used lines like that. It’s just playing on the “woman’s intuition” thing, and saying “Hey, men can have the same intuitions.”
Yes, but he didn’t try to excuse it that way, and the line is suggestive.`
Especially when James Mason’s character followed it up by suggesting that Landau’s character was jealous of Eva Marie Saint’s. That’s a weird thing to say to another guy, implying that they are vying for Mason’s attentions.
The score of 80s movies are hard to ignore. An orchestral score is timeless and blends in to the movie. 80s synthesizers are the exact opposite. The ones that stuck with an orchestra hold up fine. The ones that went the way of Vangelis are cringey. The acting in Absence of Malice holds up. The score is completely distracting. I remembered the movie *Gallipoli * fondly. I rewatched it and the synthesizer score ruined it for me.
I didn’t see Ladyhawke until sometime after 2000 and the soundtrack really stuck out like a sore thumb. And I couldn’t help but notice the soundtracks to other Escape from New York and The Terminator.
So true. That was the otherwise wonderful composer Maurice Jarre composing for the otherwise marvelous director Peter Weir. They reunited a couple years later for the otherwise terrific film “Witness,” where the synthesized (yet well written) music clashes with the bucolic Amish setting — though you could argue that it’s an interesting reminder that it WAS the 1980s, not the bygone era evoked by the Amish ways of life and landscapes.
I gotta disagree. I was watching a lot of movies during that time period (I had access to a lot of movie theaters and lots of ways to get in cheap or even free at that time, plus I was on my own with a lot of time to kill) Besides the ones already mentioned, we had a plethora of Stephen King movies, most of which were pretty good and a few (The Dead Zone and Stand by Me, to name two) that were astoundingly good.
Ignoring the Early and late 1980s, we also had
Return of the Jedi
The Last Starfighter
Amadeus
Koyaanisqatsi
Back to the Future
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
The Fly
Predator
Crocodile Dundee
Labyrinth
Octopussy
Never Say Never Again
The Living Daylights
Gremlins
Splash
Romancing the Stone
Star Trek III and IV
The Color Purple
Aliens
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
… and a lot of films other people loved, but I didn’t (Goonies, The Breakfast Club, etc.)
And Terminator, released in 1984. Also that’s one where the synth track is absolutely perfect.
100%. I’d love to read a knowledgeable history of who the hell thought this was a good idea–I mean, I generally get that folks were all OOH LOOK AT THIS SHINY NEW TECHNOLOGY, but I want names, people!
I don’t think it was primarily meant as a showcase for new tech, but just a matter of cost reduction. It’s much cheaper to record alone in a studio with synthesizers than to hire a symphony orchestra and record in a big recording hall. There was a real scare in the eighties that real life musicians would become obsolete. Fortunately, that didn’t turn out, and the industry began to understand that musicians are not totally replaceable by machines.
I blame Chariots of Fire and Vangelis.
Yeah, and since it became an Oscar winner, that became a standard in orchestra classes for a few years. So, the budding musicians got to copy a synth. 