I would have to nominate Reality Bites and Singles. Hip and relevant when they were released, embarrassingly dated now. I remember getting mad at the latter film when Bridget Fonda, who spent most of the film angsting over her boyfriend Matt Dillon’s comments about her boobs being too small, ended up taking him back anyway.
I think it will be rather interesting watching these two films with my daughter a few years from now. “Hey Mom, doesn’t the guy in the tie sound just like the lion from Madagascar?” Maybe by then the expected 90s revival will have taken place and I will have dragged my old babydoll dresses and flannel for her to wear.
Stupid edit window. I meant “dragged my old babydoll dresses and flannel out of storage for her to wear.” If I just dragged them she would refuse to wear them 'cause they’d be too dirty.
How about those early-90s Kevin Costner prestige films – Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and The Bodyguard (with Whitney Houston).
These were HUGE blockbusters with nonstop media coverage that lasted for months. I think they were a hit with every demographic group out there. I even knew some bad-ass teenagers who bragged about how many times they snuck into Robin Hood without paying.
Cut to today- these “masterpieces” seem to be totally forgotten. I doubt they’d show up on anyone’s top 100 list.
That made me think of a scene from the Brady Bunch movie (which has held up well, in my opinion.) Jan is in the counselor’s office, listening quietly. “So, what seems to be the problem, Jan? Unwanted pregnancy? HIV infection? Teen suicide?” Jan deadpans, “No. It’s my stupid glasses. They make me look positively horrible.”
Nothing, except for some pretty damned cool musical numbers.
Animal House, on the other hand…for several years there, I couldn’t watch this movie without cracking up pretty much for the duration, now it’s just a lot of noisy 70s tedium except for the prime Bluto moments. And it’s not like I just outgrew it, either – I still find mindless meathead comedies hilarious, and the high school-to-college-age kids who used to dote on AH have pretty much gone on to other sources of yuks. If it didn’t have John Belushi in it, I think it’d be a mostly forgotten fossil flick.
Rising Sun. Remember when Japan was going to conquer the United States via LA? I actually feel a little stupid for worrying about that back in the day.
I saw Empire Records in 1996 and loved it. Bought the DVD about a year back, and had to fast forward through most of it. I don’t hate the characters the way I hated everyone in Billy Jack, which is the movie I usually post about in these threads, but I couldn’t identify with them, anymore. Come to think of it, I really couldn’t identify with them back in '96, but at least back then I thought they were interesting.
Gotta agree that The Blues Brothers aged badly. Yes, there were a few laughs, and I enjoyed seeing the blues legends play, but that’s part of the problem. Belushi and Ackroyd were comedians. They were not blues musicians, and it showed when they were performing with people who actually knew the blues. And to me they looked so goddamned smug about it. Like they could just put on cheap suits and play a harmonica, and suddenly, they were qualified to play next to Ray Charles. I was actually a little embarrassed about watching them smirk onstage while trying to sing.
The original" War of the Worlds" holds well. The original the “Thing” is better than the new one too. Better effects do not necessarily make a better movie. I watched “Predator” last night. How often do you see a movie with two future governors in it?
At its core, Juno was about a too cool for the real world outsider having sex with her dorky best friend just to see what its like. An excellent movie, but not because of the plot.
Little Miss Sunshine had one teenage character, a too cool for the real world outsider who’s major rebellion was not talking.
American Beauty’s kids didn’t seem to have any real problems. Yes, Wes Bentley’s father beat him, but Bentley also had a giant wad of cash that he planned to use to skip town with anyway.
The Cold War was a relic by the 80s. I remember growing up and never hearing a single word about it until the Berlin Wall fell.
Although it’s been pointed out already how tech stuff doesn’t stand the test of time, I’ll mention Videodrome. It’s a twisted mindfuck of a psychological thriller where you can’t tell reality from psychosis, but there are too many elements that don’t work past their era. Most obvious and least important, VHS cassettes are now quaint antiques now that you can purchase from the Salvation army store for a dollar or less.
A young James Wood stars as the president and part owner of a Toronto independent television station (Civic-TV, Channel 83) specializing in sensational programming. I think all of those were bought by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp just a few years after this movie was released. He finds a pirate TV station broadcasting 24-hour, all-snuff flicks, (like the early MTV featuring 24-hour, all music videos) beamed via sattelite from… South East Asia?, a relatively unknown part of the world 25 years ago, now a major player in the global economy, not only in industrial production but also an emerging power in finance.
The Videodrome signal induces powerful and complex hallucinations which are often impossible to distinguish from non-hallucinatory reality. Subliminal suggestion has been pretty much debunked by now.
Debbie Harry stars as a talk radio pop-psychologist. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think all of them have been tools of the right wing since the late 80’s.
Most of what was cutting edge and underground, and identified with the ‘forbidden’ in this film has been absorbed by the establishment, and more specifically by the conservative wing of the establishment.
I’m also gonna say that social commentary stuff often doesn’t age too well either.
Two I just thought of are George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.
One of Night’s main themes is that watching TV turns people into zombies who don’t understand what’s going on right outside their door. This is very clearly a product of its times as I can’t imagine knowing that a huge crisis was happening and not checking the TV or computer for updates. How much CNN did we all watch on 9/11?
Dawn’s “consumerism makes us zombies” theme is another one that seems horribly outdated now. Do some people take consumerism too far? Of course. But the heavy handed moralising makes the movie needlessly long and takes away from the real message, which is “Holy shit! Zombies! Kill 'em!”
I would point out that you are mixing genres now. It would be better to compare a movie like** Superbad **to 80s movies like Ferris Bueller. In fact they both have the same theme, seperation and moving into the unknown. The take is completely diferent, but if anything Cameron’s problems with his parents are more serious and long term than anything the guys in Superbad had to deal with. Both movies are about the fear of leaving the known environment of high school and all the people you are comfortable with. That may not be an earth shattering social issue, but I would bet it rings true to a large number of people between 16 and 20, just as it did in the 80s.
The problem with that is that Ferris constantly tells the camera he’s doing what he’s doing because he’s afraid Cameron will grow up to be lame. Cameron’s real problems with his father are mostly glossed over.
True, but that is just Ferris’s perspective. And Ferris, being a teenager, kind of simplified things. I think he was worried that Cameron would be deeply unhappy for life if he did not find a way to break the pattern his parents had given him.
