Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (35 page)

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See? Random French words. They always work.

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More high-flying, incidentally, than the characters in the French version. Typical Americans! So career-obsessed! So competitive!
Bof
.

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In the best moment in the otherwise deservedly forgotten 1990s film
Sleep With Me
, Quentin Tarantino expounds on this theory, first mooted by film critic Pauline Kael, at pleasing length: ‘
Top Gun
is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what
Top Gun
is about, man. You’ve got Maverick, all right? He’s on the edge, man. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman, and all his crew. They’re gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways. Kelly McGillis, she’s heterosexuality. She’s saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They’re saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the gay way, all right? That is what’s going on throughout that whole movie … He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they’re going to have sex, you know, they’re just kind of sitting back, he’s takin’ a shower and everything. They don’t have sex. He gets on the motorcycle, drives away. She’s like, “What the fuck, what the fuck is going on here?” Next scene, next scene you see her, she’s in the elevator, she is dressed like a guy. She’s got the cap on, she’s got the aviator glasses, she’s wearing the same jacket that the Iceman wears. She is, okay, this is how I gotta get this guy, this guy’s going towards the gay way, I gotta bring him back, I gotta bring him back from the gay way, so I’ll do that through subterfuge, I’m gonna dress like a man. All right? That is how she approaches it. But the REAL ending of the movie is when they fight the MIGs at the end, all right? Because he has passed over into the gay way. They are this gay fighting fucking force, all right? And they’re beating the Russians, the gays are beating the Russians. And it’s over, and they fucking land, and Iceman’s been trying to get Maverick the entire time, and finally, he’s got him, all right? And what is the last fucking line that they have together? They’re all hugging and kissing and happy with each other, and Ice comes up to Maverick, and he says, “Man, you can ride my tail, any time!” And what does Maverick say? “You can ride mine!” Swordfight! Swordfight! Fuckin’ A, man!’

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Crazy people.

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The scene in which Ray (Aykroyd) dreams a ghost is going on him in the film is, by some measure, the weirdest and worst moment in the film. It makes absolutely no sense, mainly because it was part of another scene that was cut. That it was written at all, and stayed in the film, serves as a handy little reminder that Aykroyd is, as we shall discuss, kind of an odd fellow.

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When actress Katherine Heigl later – and rightly (if somewhat belatedly) – complained about the female characters in
Knocked Up
, her male co-star Seth Rogen sneered on Howard Stern’s radio show in July 2009, ‘It’s not like we’re the only people she said some batshit crazy things about. That’s kind of her bag now.’ The depiction of female characters in Apatow and Rogen’s films have remained unchanged ever since.

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In fact, Sandler and Apatow shared an apartment when they were both starting out. Ladies, we can only look back and regret that we never got to hang out in Sandler and Apatow’s woman-repelling bachelor pad.

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Bridesmaids
and the HBO show
Girls
, both produced by Apatow, depict young women struggling to grow up. But these remain anomalies and the amount of attention both these projects received, when they were merely showing women do what men had been doing onscreen for decades, underlined the different expectations placed on male and female fictional characters.

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Yes.

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I’m sensing that I’m not really convincing you of my whole ‘Aykroyd = total hottie’ argument.

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Yes, I am still going on about how cute young Aykroyd was.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: The Impact of Social Class

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Wall Street
is pretty much the film equivalent of ‘Born in the USA’ in the way it was misunderstood and reappropriated by precisely the people it was satirising: just as Gordon Gekko’s mantra ‘Greed is good’ was adopted by Wall Street bankers, so Springsteen’s protest against the Vietnam War was clunkily adopted by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign for the presidency.

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Although to be fair to Hughes, the implausibility may be more of a reflection on Judd Nelson’s acting than Hughes’s writing.

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There is a popular internet conspiracy theory that says Ferris is actually a figment of Cameron’s imagination, and there is merit in that. But personally, I don’t want to live in a world where Ferris doesn’t exist, albeit only onscreen.

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The economics teacher, who roll-calls ‘Bueller … Bueller …’ was played by Hughes’s friend and noted economist Ben Stein who has said that acting in
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
was the happiest day of his life: ‘[My obituary will] have a picture of me and above it will say “Bueller … Bueller.” The fact that I went to Yale Law School, was a columnist for the
Wall Street Journal
and the
New York Times
, wrote thirty books, that will all be washed away and it’ll just be, “Bueller … Bueller.” And that will be just fine’ (from
You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried
, Susannah Gora). Stein omits from his list of achievements that he was also a speechwriter for Nixon, a game show host, an advertising spokesperson (which led to him being sacked by the
New York Times
) and wrote a famously laughable defence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the IMF who in 2011 was accused of raping a hotel maid. Stein pooh-poohed the allegation with the ironclad argument that ‘people who commit crimes are criminals’, and not rich, important men like Strauss-Kahn. Maybe those achievements didn’t feel as noteworthy to Stein as his attendance at Yale Law School? But no matter. In this book at least, a good
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
appearance can wash away all sins.

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Ferris and Duckie’s dance styles are pretty similar, too, which is not that surprising as the man who choreographed Ferris’s parade dance, the great Kenny Ortega, also choreographed Duckie’s dance to ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ in
Pretty in Pink
. He later went on to choreograph
Dirty Dancing
and, somewhat less excitingly in this book’s opinion,
High School Musical
.

Steel Magnolias: Women are Interesting

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Faludi doesn’t mention
Kramer vs. Kramer
in her discussion of 1970s films as a feminist utopia, but I of all people can hardly criticise her for providing a selective view of a decade’s movies.

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For a start, there were other movies around that were far smarter about male infidelity than
Fatal Attraction
such as, for example,
Moonstruck
. In this movie, Olympia Dukakis has to contend with her aged husband’s compulsive womanising. But because this movie was sensible and not stupid like
Fatal Attraction
– or, more recently, the appalling
The Other Woman
(2014) –
Moonstruck
shows that marriage is about more than just point-scoring, infidelity is about more than just sex, and the betrayed wife is a smart woman in her own right. So don’t watch
Fatal Attraction
– watch
Moonstruck
.

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One day I shall write a book about the mighty titles of feminist texts and studies. They are all reliably awesome.

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See: the oeuvre of The Cure and New Order – in the eighties, obviously.

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Says Hadley, madly.

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Also,
Baby Boom
co-stars James Spader, which pretty much makes it an automatic winner in my book.

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One of my favourite newspaper columns in the world is the
New York Times
’s By the Book series in which famous people discuss their favourite writers. Almost invariably, readers cleave to their own gender: Bruce Springsteen, for example, mentioned thirty-seven authors, only two of whom were women, which, to be fair, may well be an accurate reflection of Springsteen’s own fanbase.

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New York Times
’s Manohla Dargis pointed out that when Michael Mann’s 2001 film
Ali
failed to make back its costs, his career was barely affected and he directed big-budget films for Paramount and Universal soon after. When Kathryn Bigelow’s 2002 adventure film
K-19: The Widowmaker
didn’t recoup its costs, she didn’t make another film until 2007 and it was funded by a French company. ‘Ms Bigelow is one of the greatest action directors working today, and it’s hard not to wonder why failure at the box office doesn’t translate the same for the two sexes,’ Dargis writes (‘Women in the Seats But Not Behind the Camera’, Manohla Dargis,
New York Times
, 10 December 2009).

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An interview with Kathleen Turner is pretty much all that you want it to be. Sadly I can’t print everything she told me as I’d be sued for libel by half of Hollywood. But if you ever have the opportunity to spend an afternoon with her, I highly recommend you take it.

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Told you.

Back to the Future: Parents are Important

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Weirdly, Bebe Neuwirth is also in
Say Anything
, playing the school’s careers counsellor, meaning that both Frasier’s dad and Frasier’s wife were in the same film together, yet without Frasier. Kelsey Grammer should call his agent.

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Cameron Crowe’s fratty follow-up to
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, featuring Christopher Penn, Eric Stoltz and – pleasingly – Rick Moranis.

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TEENS FIGHT EVIL COMMIES! America’s fate lies in the hands of Charlie Sheen and Patrick Swayze, God help us all.

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Tom Cruise fights to get a football scholarship to college instead of having to work in a mine with his father. If you like the mining scenes from
Zoolander
, you’ll probably enjoy seeing the inspiration.

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When looking at other eras, teen movies in the 1980s invariably celebrate the innocence of the 1950s, such as
BTTF
and
Peggy Sue Got Married
, and invariably mock the hippy revolution of the 1960s. The optimism and consumerism of the 1950s would have been easier for eighties Reaganite and Thatcherite teen audiences to grasp than the hippy rebellion of the 1960s, which would just have looked hilariously out of step with their own time, such as in 1982’s
Valley Girl
, where the female lead sneers at her hippy parents’ restaurant where ‘everything tastes of nothing’.

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The reason Marty is given two older siblings is because Zemeckis and Gale had to keep throwing in more kids to make it seem credible that George and Lorraine got together in 1955 but didn’t have Marty until – given he’s a senior in high school in 1985 – 1967.

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According to Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson was, hilariously, ‘doing this method thing’ when they made
The Breakfast Club
. This both explains a lot and excuses nothing.

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And in the case of at least one parent, it worked. On the day
Back to the Future
came out in the US, I, age seven, decided to paint my nails in the living room. My mother told me three times to do it in the bathroom but I ignored her and duly spilt nail polish all over the rug, and I got a good spanking for it. That evening, to calm my mother down, my father took her out to see this new film, and when Marty uttered that line to his parents about setting the living room rug on fire, my mother promptly burst into tears.