Yeah, I feel like that’s the thing that all 80s movies get wrong. The way that all the cliques are so homogenous and sharply defined. The Breakfast Club made it like those kids were total strangers to each other.
Yes and yes. John Hughes was so wrong in just about everything he did that his whole career is basically just one long, tedious insult.
Something like Heaven Help Us (1985) but set in Australia.
I graduated in 1979 in Minnesota.
Dazed & Confused
Freaks & Geeks
The Road. Things were a little tough.
^ Ha, we had to sleep in a shoe box in the middle of The Road.
I should contribute something “useful”: I think “That '70s Show” was only slightly exaggerated.
Remember the Titans
Eerily similar to my experience.
Dazed and Confused.
I grew up in Austin where the movie was filmed during the time the move was set. I recognized everyone and everything in that movie. I played baseball on the same field where Mitch’s game was in the movie. I attended games at the same stadium where the part of the movie was set. I had friends at the same school. The cars were the same as those in the parking lot at my high school. The tower that the characters climb? Those are called “Moonlight” towers and still exist all over Austin. The “Club” where the characters hang out was never really a club but it is right across the street from a skating rink where we did hang out (The skating rink is now closed but the building where the “club” was is still there and has a plaque about the movie).
It would have to be some combination of “Hjartasteinur”, “Fucking Åmål” and the first episode of “Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet?”.
I know they’re all set in different decades. That makes absolutely no difference.
Sorry its a TV show instead of a movie, but I have to vote Roseanne.
In my mind that’s the only show ever made about real families (meaning my family). Lots of little things about that show rang true for me.
Same here; I was in junior high at that time, and those scenes felt like being back there.
Exactly. I was some kind of nerd-jock hybrid, without being some kind of super Type A resume-padder type, which made me a little bit on the odd side. I always found it odd that the movies always made it out like if you were on the football team, there was no chance that you knew the nerds or theater people.
I can’t think of any movies that portrayed high school very accurately; there aren’t any movies about a late 80s/early 90s all-boys private school that I can think of.
But… that crop of late 80s/early 90s teen movies (Heathers, Pump up the Volume, Encino Man, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) gets a lot right in terms of the rather oppressive nature of a lot of schools’ administrations, and the way that people just sort of hung out at malls and other places.
Not Dead Poets Society, nor much of Scent of a Woman? These were boarding schools, but if you went to a day school, many similarities, I think.
I was going to also suggest “My So-Called Life”. The show came out when I was in college, but damn, the themes are so similar to my high school experience.
And “Heathers” and, sorry…“The Breakfast Club”. It still has the 80s vibe for me. Also, I want Molly Ringwald’s boots from the movie. And tiny bit of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”.
A combination of Fast Times and Sixteen Candles. I graduated in 84.
Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan
Gregory’s Girl
Being a teen in 1981 in a large Scottish High School. Teenage angst. All the boys lusting after one or two incredibly popular girls, who of course had boyfriends who’d left school and had cars. The boys didn’t stand a chance with them; the rest of us girls didn’t have a chance with the boys. Social awkwardness. Wandering the streets of a housing estate because there’s nothing else to do.
Teen Wolf Too was uncanny at how close it mirrored my experience.
TBC gets my vote because that is the way it was at my school. There were the rich kids and they never spoke to my group of friends, and other similar cliquey dynamics.