:dubious: Testament, The Day After, Red Dawn…
Not to mention Wargames, virtually every Bond movie, Firefox…
Speaking again of Wargames, that’s one of several movies mentioned here that I think actually serves very well as a time capsule. Because it’s set so specifically in 1983 on the nose, not just general early '80s, it captured the feel of the cold war and the state of technology at that time prit-near perfectly. A year or two ago, Mr. Rilch and a friend and I were watching it, and we could hardly go five minutes without one of us yelling, “I had that! I did that! I wore that!” Is a movie to be valued only for continued relevance? Can’t it be valued just as much for archival purposes?
Um, no it wasn’t. What do you think Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ was about? How old are you? Are you really saying that you never once heard anyone worrying about nuclear war throughout the 1980s?
I’m 27, born in 1981. Maybe it was a big deal in the early 80s when I was too young to remember, but it was never mentioned in school until the Berlin Wall fell in 89 and I never heard my parents worry about nuclear war.
You must have been very fortunate. Even now there is a lot of concern (in my sphere) about nuclear war with Iran , North Korea and other “rogue” states having the capability.
So, with all due respect, you’re too young to understand what the teenagers in the Breakfast Club would have had to deal with whenever they watched the news. Your parents probably (rightly) sheltered you from discussions of nuclear war. By the late 80s there was less worry with Gorbachev in power, but you could never be sure he wouldn’t suddenly be deposed (this did happen in 1991 but things were very different by then). Sorry for the history lesson, but in the 1980s there was almost no cultural contact between east and west Europe - we thought we would never see the likes of Prague and Budapest and as for the idea of people from those places visiting the west, forget it. The cold war had very real practical effects right up until the day the wall came down, and the effects continued to be felt some time afterwards.
You’re right, I probably was too young (but kids born in 81 were still considered the last “Cold War Generation” because we were around before the Berlin Wall fell). But I guess what I’m getting at is that the idea of the Cold War by the 80s had become something of a joke. Absurd situations where Russians invade Bumfuck, Colorado only to be beaten back by a bunch of teenagers or Rocky crushing communism (and Ivan Drago) in Rocky IV.
Basically, there was no Fail-Safe being made in the 80s.
I can’t speak to Solaris, but 2001 has held on not so much on it’s own merit as much for it’s fanbase keeping it alive.
Sorry, but your thesis still doesn’t hold up. Satirical movies such as “Dr. Strangelove” (1964) (which holds up very well) and “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” (1966) (which doesn’t) were being made at the height of the cold war as well as at the tail end. And some of the bleakest were made in the mid-'80s such as “The Day After” (1983) and “Threads” (1984).
I have to disagree here. IMHO, the newer one has both held up better and is more faithful to the original story Who Goes There. John Carpenter’s version of The Thing is both a good movie and features a monster that doesn’t require an idiot plot to be extremely dangerous. The older one is about a vegetable guy. “A walking carrot” is a phrase one character uses IIRC.
I was in elementary school in the early 1980’s and my teachers have some explaining to do if the Cold War wasn’t real at that time. We were constantly told that we were going to probably die because of it. All of popular media constantly emphasized that fact as well and there were some deadly serious close calls with global-thermonuclear war especially in 1983 (See Russian Colonel Petrov in Wikpedia for more details). The Cold War was still at its peak in the early 1980’s and no joke whatsoever. Believe it and be glad that you were fortunate enough to have been oblivious at the time.
Well, except for the whole AI issue. Speaking of AI, another movie that does not hold up well at all (it seemed ridiculous when I saw it in the 90s) is Electric Dreams. Basic plot, guy buys a top of the line computer with a blazing fast 300bps modem to help him get ahead at work. He connects and does all sorts of fancy work stuff before spilling champagne in the keyboard, causing the computer to merge with all the computers in the world and become sentient. It proceeds to romance his upstairs neighbor through music and a love triangle develops. The only way anyone could buy the details in this movie was if computers were a some strange wizardry they didn’t understand (understandable since it was made in the early 80s). I don’t know how it did at the box office, but it won some awards, so it was not a total failure.
Jonathan
The Cold War indeed lasted through the 80s. But I believe that what many people might be thinking of was the period of strong public anti-communism that started at the end of the 40s and lasted until Vietnam. Until then few outside the left doubted that communism was a global threat. But after the US public good will was squandered in Vietnam, it became fashionable to denigrate warnings about the Soviet Union as the ranting of nuke-happy hawks in the Defense Department. Much of the public angst about the Cold War in the 80s was against the Reagan administration’s arms build up and Reagan’s confrontational policies, which weren’t really any more radical than what the Eisenhower or Kennedy administrations had done, but which had much less public support.
So it appears I was a little too young to be remembering the end of the Cold War accurately. But I do want to throw in that several of my high school teachers thought the idea of the Cold War turning hot in the 80s was pure fantasy.
Doesn’t mean much (or anything at all really), but it is the impression of the Cold War I continued to receive during my education well into the 90s.
It was great enough for Joan Fontaine to win an Oscar for it. I’ve made it a goal to see every single one of Cary Grant’s movies. I recently saw this one, and I wanted to like it, since I adore Mr. Grant so very, very much. But quite frankly, I don’t think any of Hitchcock’s movies stand the test of time. Well, I might be willing to make an exception for Rear Window (I don’t remember rolling my eyes or yelling at the screen at any point), but I just find the vast majority to be over the top ridiculous. And boring. I don’t know how movies can be ridiculous and boring at the same time, but Hitchcock found a way. I know that’s basically heresy, but I’ve stopped recording/renting Hitchcock films, because I just know that I’m not going to like them at all.
Of course, I still have to watch North by Northwest because of the aforementioned goal.
My music complaint is Ladyhawke. IMO it’s one of the great fantasy movies (especially in the traditional European Sword&Sorcery model), except for an absolutely atrocious '80s soundtrack that firmly grounds the movie in the decade it was made in, instead of in the medieval setting it should be grounded in.
I have no problem with movies that are set in contemporary times and are well grounded in them. Wargames is not a problem, because it’s set in the '80s; I expect the tech to be eighties tech.
Last time I watched it, the movie was absolutely terrible, because the sound quality was so bad on the videotape we watched (this was in 99). Is the DVD release pretty clear?
Edit: as for the Graduate, I first saw it about two years ago, and went into seeing it with a sense of foreboding, expecting it to be one of those dry, dreary movies that are always said to be so good (Chinatown, anyone?). Instead, I thought it was brilliant and hilarious. Nostalgia didn’t enter into it for me at all.
And I watch teen movies as though I’m watching a different culture. Sure, teen priorities are different from mine, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valid. I loathe John Hughes, but that’s not because he’s writing about self-absorbed teenagers.
Daniel
Just out of curiosity, why do you?
And re: Dark Crystal. The last time I brought up that aspect, I was scoffed at. But it’s true and I can’t help it: if your only source for an older movie is a deteriorated video copy that was not the best transfer to begin with, then how can you appreciate the film the way it was meant to be appreciated?
Keep in mind that when you hit high school, it was probably 1995 or thereabouts, and the Soviet Union was gone, and your teachers had the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.
Speaking from my experience, the late 1970s through about 1988 or so were VERY tense as far as I could tell. Do you think that movies like Threads, The Day After, Testament or Red Dawn would have been made in a period where the Cold War was a joke or a foregone conclusion?
I remember being terrified of nuclear war when I was about 10 years old (1982), and growing up thinking that the Soviets were the “Bad Guys”, much like kids grow up these days thinking that Islamist terrorists & Osama Bin Laden are the “Bad Guys”.
So you’re remembering it through young kid glasses- the Cold War was very much alive and scary through most of the 80’s. I can remember wondering if the shit was going to hit the fan and I’d be drafted for World War III when I was a teenager in about 1988 or so.
His movies seem to have the moral that high school’s vicious cliques of popularity and others is a good thing, and that the ultimate good is finding a way of fitting in. When freaky-girl got all cheerleaderified at the end of The Breakfast Club, I coulda cried. And I still think that there was essentially a rape played for laughs in Sixteen Candles.
Is the DVD version any better, do you know? Or did I just have an extra-crappy copy of the tape?
Daniel