Just Finished Reading: Life Moves Pretty Fast – The Lessons we Learned from Eighties Movies (& Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Any More) by Hadley Freeman (FP: 2015)

I tend not to judge a book by its cover but a good one will certainly attract my attention. This one (shown in the cover art above) looked just like a VCR cassette – same shape, size and (probably) weight. It immediately made me do a double take and then smile at its cleverness. Half sold already. Of course the subject matter helped – 80’s movies. As someone who (well, almost) grew up with 80’s movies – I was in my 20’s, living away from home and, at least for the early part of the decade at university with a VCR machine and a nearby video store. Needless to say I developed a deep and abiding love for the teen movies of the time and much more besides.

The author of this interesting, funny but admittedly hit and miss homage to the time and genre had a bit of a different exposure. She saw her first 80’s movie aged 8 or 9 so had a much different route into the subject at hand which shows in her pick of movies reviewed and honestly gushed over. For example she starts off with Dirty Dancing. To be honest I don’t think I’ve seen the whole movie so I learnt a lot from her description and her analysis of its cultural and social place in the 80’s scheme of things. On to The Princess Bride (which I have seen at least once or twice) which I agreed was a good film although maybe not as good as many people think it is. Then Pretty in Pink. OK, I’m a HUGE John Hughes fan and I like Molly Ringwald as much as the next person but again PinP wouldn’t normally have made my Top 20. I did find the background of the film interesting – as well as the discussion of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (I’m looking at you Zoe Deschanel) – which made me laugh. I was more than a little creeped out by Hughes’s relationship with Ringwald though…. Then one of my all-time favourite films and one of the best comedies ever made – When Harry Met Sally. Quite brilliant. I realised that there were feminist themes in the movie (obviously) but enjoyed it myself because of the realism of the relationship between the two leads. Then onto another of my all-time favourite movies – Ghostbusters. Again both very funny and very clever. As with the other films – even the ones I wasn’t greatly interested in – the author provided some good insights and background information 90% of which I was completely unaware of. Naturally at some point we had to get to the movie where the title of the book came from: Ferris Bueller’s Day off. I watched it recently after finishing this book. In any list it’d probably be in my Top 20 favourite movies. I LOVE it to death – as does the author (naturally). I found myself agreeing with much of her analysis and hoovering up the movie trivia around it. Then she lost me completely with Steel Magnolias which I knew existed but have never seen. Then (as if in recompense) was another film that I love dearly – Back to the Future. I’ve seen that movie many times and the sequels almost as much. I still quote it from time to time. After that the book got a bit….. vague, looking first at Batman movies and then at Eddie Murphy who I always thought to be rather hit and miss. Some of the reason behind that was explain here. 

Although far from a perfect book about far from a perfect movie era (a significant number of 80’s movies were SO bad I believe they actually warped space-time and probably destroyed whole alternative universes – I’m looking at YOU Buckaroo Banzai). It was fun travelling down such a nostalgic path even with someone else leading the way. My version of the book would’ve been rather different (more Schwarzenegger for one thing!) and would’ve covered the 80’s films that ended up defining my life like:

The Breakfast Club
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Terminator
Die Hard
Gremlins (which me and the guys are seeing tomorrow on the BIG screen)
Bladerunner (which I’ve seen over 60 times)
Top Gun
Aliens
The Lost Boys
Weird Science
Heathers
Risky Business
Beetlejiuce
Escape from New York……..

Definitely a fun read for all 80’s movies fans but this is very much a personal journey looking back at a childhood spent watching iconic movies whilst growing up lonely in New York. Recommended with caveats. (R)