In other words, which one movie most embodies everything that, say, the 1970s was about? It doesn’t necessarily have to be the best movie of any given decade, just the one that best sums up that decade. Myself, I have a rather pathetic, incomplete list, but I’m anxious to see what everyone else considers to be the movie most representative of the '60s, '70s, '80s, etc.
In the meantime, here are the movies I came up with fairly easily:
1960s - The Graduate; also very tempted to go with Easy Rider or The Sound of Music.
1970s - Dog Day Afternoon; other real possibilities are The Godfather, The Conversation, and Taxi Driver.
1980s - No question, Top Gun. Or Do the Right Thing.
1990s - I’d unhesitatingly go with sex, lies, and videotape, except it was released in 1989. So I’ll put down Reservoir Dogs instead.
2000s - No real clue, actually. Maybe Iron Man? The LOTR movies? I dunno.
As for the earlier decades, I’ll have to give this more thought.
I’m wracking my brain, but I don’t understand how either Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs sum up the 90’s. Not trying to be snarky, but could you explain the logic behind this, cause maybe I’m misunderstanding the point of the thread. Either of them seem like they could have been set in any time period and both often feel like they were.
When I think of the 90’s, I think of angst: Gen-X angst in Reality Bites, AIDS angst in Philadelphia, or suburban wasteland angst in American Beauty.
I think Syriana best encapsulates the '00s: from the sharp rise in international terrorism, urgency over oil, to attempts to modernize the Middle East which is struggling against fundamentalism. Even the method of story telling, [URL=“Hyperlink cinema - Wikipedia”] was very of the time.
I’d go with Reality Bites and Singles - and possibly Clerks. **Philadelphia **is a good choice, but I’d take American Beauty out of it. Its “suburban wasteland” aspect better reflects the 2000s (and since it came out in late 1999, it was a bit prescient). (And if American Beauty is “suburban wasteland” is **Crash **“suburban guilty”?)
There’s just one movie that completely captures the zeitgeist of the 1990’s - the internet boom, the rise of geek culture, Gen-X alienation, pervading narcissism and bogus spirituality - and that film is the Matrix.
Heh, I was going to say. A movie about a singing Nun in Austria being pursued by Nazi’s is only emblematic of the 60’s in that people did a lot of LSD in the 60’s
I like the suggestion of Back to the Future for the 80’s movie though. Even though it takes place in the 50’s, the whole movie is a running joke contrasting McFly’s “80’sness” with the time of his parents teenage years.
Well, just that the '60s was the last decade where big Hollywood musicals were being made and making a profit; and The Godfather similarly represents the auteur aesthetic that was prevalent in the '70s.
I guess, though at best that still seems like they’re just emblematic of the movies of the decade, not really the decade itself (though I guess if you spend a lot of time in the 60’s and 70’s, maybe the two are equivalent).
Yeah, I threw in American Beauty just to balance out the list to 3. To be honest, I had to double check that it wasn’t released in 2000.
I thought about The Matrix, but to be honest the movie bores me to sleep (on 3 attempts, I’ve never make it past the scene in the room that’s all white) and it’s set in the future.
I should clarify: I’m not just asking which movies best represented life in their given decade, but more along the lines of which movies captured the zeitgeist of that particular decade, in terms of not only what day to day life was like in, say, the '90s, but what sort of entertainment we were consuming, and what our attitudes were toward both what had come before (e.g., The Godfather, The Sound of Music), and what may lie in store for us in the near, or even not-so-near, future (e.g., The Matrix, Starship Troopers, Total Recall, RoboCop).
30s: Gone With The Wind, Wizard of Oz
40s: Casablanca and John Ford westerns (Fort Apache, Yellow Ribbon, Rio Bravo)
50s: Howard Hawkes westerns and sci-fi thrillers; Rebel Without a Cause
60s: 2001: A Space Odyssey; The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
70s: Coffy, starring Pam Grier: classic blaxploitation with bell bottoms, afros, wocka-wow guitar, and large boobs. Also, Saturday Night Fever. Also Close Encounters.
80s: Footloose, The Breakfast Club
For my 2000s pick - I’m going to go with an HBO film, Recount, unless I can think of another film that demonstrates how our society evolved during that decade from racially based intolerance to politically based intolerance.