Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (34 page)

Best film ever about dead people playing baseball in a cornfield, and the filmmakers are welcome to put that quote on the DVD.

1
Lucas

One of my favourite films of all time, albeit starring one of the most cursed casts ever. Go watch it now, it’s wonderful.

Footnotes

Introduction

^fn1
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, of course.

^fn2
Mine is better.

^fn3
Well, maybe seven.

^fn4
The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood
, Edward Jay Epstein. A very good primer if you’re interested in this wonky sort of stuff.

^fn5
In 1993, twenty-two blockbusters opened on US screens in the summer. In 2013, it was thirty-one, all costing over $100 million to make and most of them flopped (‘Hollywood’s Tanking Business Model’, Catherine Rampell,
New York Times
, 3 September 2013).

^fn6
I also made the decision in the chapter about
Batman
to use an interview I did with Tim Burton for the
Guardian
a few years ago along with my favourite book about the director instead of bother the poor man again. When I met up with him before, I was so excited I burbled to him for about ten minutes about how much I loved his artwork. ‘Wow, you really … like my drawings,’ he eventually replied. When Tim Burton pretty much tells you that you’re an obsessive nerd, you know you’ve crossed a line.

^fn7
The mighty, mighty
Spaceballs
.

Dirty Dancing: Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine

^fn1
Winona Ryder was originally considered for the role, and she would have been good at conveying Baby’s nerviness – and Jewishness – but it would have been much harder to accept her as a wide-eyed sixties teenager. Ryder, even back in the eighties, has always been just that bit too ironic and cool. Grey, on the other hand, was all wide-eyed sweetness.

^fn2
Rather thrillingly, in real life Rhodes was married to eighties pop star Richard Marx. Hard to get more eighties than that.

^fn3
Max Cantor had probably the creepiest post-eighties teen movie career of anyone. After a privileged New York upbringing and a very brief acting career he became an investigative journalist. He came across a story about a cannibalistic cult in downtown New York and, in order to gain their trust and get the story, he started taking drugs. He soon became addicted and was eventually found dead. Some alleged he was killed by the cannibal, Daniel Rakowitz, but others said he simply overdosed. Whatever the truth, it’s hard not to think poor old Robbie should have stuck with Ayn Rand and stayed away from the cannibals.

^fn4
Sex and the City
, starring Jennifer Grey lookalike Sarah Jessica Parker, would suffer a similar fate two decades later, even though, in its heyday, it was at least as smart and sharp as any critically lauded male TV drama.

^fn5
Boys, too, enjoy their sexual maturity in eighties teen films. In
Risky Business
, Joel (Tom Cruise) enjoys aerobic if somewhat improbable sex with Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) when he loses his virginity. In
Teen Wolf
, as the film’s title emphasises, the old trope about werewolfishness as a symbol for male puberty is employed to its most delightfully ridiculous extent, and in a far sillier way than it was in 1957’s
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
. It is almost certainly the best movie ever made about male puberty; what Judy Blume’s
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
is to girls,
Teen Wolf
should be to boys. When Scott (Michael J. Fox) changes into a wolf, he becomes irresistible to girls in high school, and he enjoys sex with them with a howl. Similarly, the teen vampires in the presciently emo
The Lost Boys
take enormous pleasure in their vampirism. Compared to both these films, the vampire and the werewolf in
Twilight
make sexuality and maturation look a lot less fun.

^fn6
John Hughes’s teen films were clearly and heavily influenced by
Risky Business
, minus the plot about prostitutes (thank God).

The Princess Bride: True Love Isn’t Just About the Kissing Parts

^fn1
I’m using Vizzini’s definition of the word here, of course.

^fn2
‘17 Important Life Lessons from
The Princess Bride
’, Erin La Rosa, BuzzFeed, 15 May 2013. Seventeen! Pah! There are at least 1,374,978 lessons in that movie. Step it up with your listicles, BuzzFeed!

^fn3
I only managed to last a week on a dating website so I’m afraid my research isn’t as thorough as it could be. You see, because of
The Princess Bride
, I have high standards when it comes to love and I just didn’t believe that any beautiful farm boys would be on
match.com
. How would he have wifi up in his mountainous hovel?

^fn4
The US version of the TV show
The Office
, when it was still amazing, played on this idea in the second series when Pam (UK translation: Dawn) chose ‘The Princess Bride’ as one of her Desert Island movies
choices, proving she is the right woman for Jim (UK translation: Tim). Jim’s current girlfriend Katy (played by Amy Adams), on the other hand, chooses ‘Legally Blonde’, which definitively establishes her inferiority to Pam.

^fn5
If you love
The Princess Bride
, which I’m assuming you do if you’re reading this chapter, and because you’re presumably a sentient human being, you really should read
As You Wish
. Any book with an index that includes the entry ‘André the Giant: breaking wind, and, 123–126’ should be on everyone’s bookshelves by law.

^fn6
So called (by me) for the obvious reason that the grandson was played by Fred Savage, who went on to play Kevin Arnold in
The Wonder Years
. But you already got that, and I apologise for condescending to you by spelling it out.

^fn7
Because Peter Falk plays the grandfather and – What? You got it? OK, cool. Just looking out for you, bro.

^fn8
Which is not to say I don’t love the movie. I do, completely, love the movie. But I ADORE the book. Other reasons why I prefer the book are that Buttercup is allowed to be much funnier than she is in the film, and William Goldman’s authorial interjections in the text are worth the price of the book alone.

^fn9
This computer game is the one thing that dates the film. Other than those creaky graphics, the movie looks remarkably timeless – more so, really, than any other film from the eighties. This is partly because there aren’t any eighties clothes in the film (other than the grandson’s mother’s weird mullet hairdo), and partly because instead of having a pop-and-synth soundtrack, Mark Knopfler wrote a simple instrumental piece.

Pretty in Pink: Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers

^fn1
This is not intended as an all-encompassing diss of Hughes’s comedies. Personally, I would fight to the death for
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
and fight at least until grievous injury for
Uncle Buck
.

^fn2
The Chinese exchange student character, Long Duk Dong, is a caricature so crude he makes the scenes feauturing the Chinese villain in
The Hangover
look like an educational video from the UN.

^fn3
The awful Caroline and Geek ending, as ranted about in the Introduction.

^fn4
The criminally underrated 1986 teen film
Lucas
later cast Sheen as the unexpectedly sensitive popular boy and, despite Sheen’s under-appreciated acting skills, and despite my deep love for this film, the truth is, he’s not exactly plausible in the role. Every time he stands up for a nerd in the movie, I half expect him to turn around and give him a wedgie.

^fn5
1987’s
Broadcast News
is also very smart about this, with Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, falling for the shallow handsome newsreader (William Hurt) instead of the schlubby and nice producer (Albert Brooks), and that’s just the way it is.

^fn6
‘How could that have been allowed to happen?’ wailed the badass actress Ellen Page in an interview with
New York
magazine
when discussing
The Breakfast Club
. Films like that, Page tells the magazine, make tomboys like her ‘start judging ourselves, just because, you know, we’d rather climb trees than give blow jobs’.

When Harry Met Sally: Romcoms Don’t Have to Make You Feel Like You’re Having a Lobotomy

^fn1
Possibly because everyone was too distracted by Cher and Cage’s awesomely hammy acting and even more awesomely hammy lines, e.g.: ‘I ain’t no monument to justice!’ ‘A WOLF WITHOUT A FOOT!’ Seriously, go watch this movie, it’s just the business.

^fn2
Can we please have a moment of respectful silence for the hot tamale of awesomeness that is Kathleen Turner?

^fn3
Other screenplays that lost that year to
Dead
freaking
Poets Society
:
Do the Right Thing
,
Crimes and Misdemeanours
and
Sex, Lies and Videotape
. The Oscars were completely hilarious that year.

^fn4
In fact, to compare how much attitudes have changed to women working from the eighties to now, you just need to look at the era-defining family sitcoms from these two eras. In
The Cosby Show
, Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad) is a lawyer, on a professional par with her doctor husband, Cliff (the fallen idol, Bill Cosby), and she is the calm, wise centre of the family. In
Modern Family
, the two women in the show, played by Sofia Vergara and Julie Bowen, are both housewives and clearly professionally inferior to their husbands, and both slotted into the usual clichés for women: the over-emotional sexy minx (Vergara) and the nagging shrew who gives her adorable husband a hard time (Bowen).

^fn5
Moranis’s wife, Ann, died from cancer in 1991.

^fn6
Moranis’s later films included
The Flintstones
and, er,
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves
. So, you know, fair enough.

Ghostbusters (With a Segue into Top Gun): How to be a Man

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The true maverick’s choice.

^fn2
Failure to recognise quotes from
When Harry Met Sally
and
Indiana Jones
were also date dealbreakers. It really is astounding I was single until the age of thirty-five.

^fn3
The very English comic horror film
Shaun of the Dead
(2004), which depicts a north London overtaken by zombies, owes a pretty hefty debt to
Ghostbusters
.

^fn4
Copyright: the great Clive James.

^fn5
Technically, if not obviously, a native English speaker.

^fn6
During the 2012 US election, Chuck Norris and his wife Tina made a video in which they issued a ‘dire warning’ to America, suggesting that were Barack Obama to win the presidency, we would be sentencing ‘our children’ to ‘a thousand years of darkness’. Eighties stars never fade away – they just become more themselves.