Eighties edumacation

[stellavision]

Okay, so when I was growing up my family didn't have much money, plus my parents are pretty conservative. This meant I didn't see very many movies as a kid -- really not until I was a teenager.

Thus, I have missed out on a bunch of classic '80s flicks. In the past several months, testitest has been educating me on what I've been missing. We've watched Wall

Comments

[crossword_fiend]

I saw Goonies for the first time last year.

I loved Sixteen Candles, but that was before I was sensitized to the badness of "drunk girl being given away by her boyfriend to another boy, while she was passed out" and "ha ha, Asians talk funny."

Scanning the top-grossing movies from the '80s at boxofficemojo.com, these were some favorites (in addition to those mentioned above):

Blues Brothers, E.T., World According to Garp, War Games, Risky Business (suburban boys pimping disadvantaged women is good hijinks!), The Big Chill, Silkwood, Never Cry Wolf, Gremlins, Purple Rain, Romancing the Stone (though how Kathleen Turner's writer character didn't know that leche = milk in Spanish, I'll never know), The Terminator, Breakin' and its sequel Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Cocoon, Witness, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, St. Elmo's Fire for horrendous '80s fashion, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Stand By Me, About Last Night... (based on a Mamet play, but with Demi Moore and Rob Lowe and Jim Belushi!), the Lethal Weapon movies (before we knew just how

[louaudioguy]

I was gonna post something here...but everyone's got it covered.

Hmmm....how about:

Bad Boys
Red Dawn
BMX Bandits
Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind

[anonymous]

Seconding Bourbon Cowboy, Some Kind of Wonderful is the mandatory companion to Pretty in Pink. It's basically the story of PiP redone to Hughes's original conception before the test audiences intervened. The Sure Thing is also great. Don't remember if it was mentioned but Real Genius is great screwball.

In a more serious vein, there's Brazil, which is brilliant, and still timely. In the very serious vein, I'd throw in Sophie's Choice. I know people generally say that Streep was over the top, but her performance still haunts and moves me.

Byron

Byron

Related Trivia

[testitest]

Without looking it up, does anyone know the answer to this "Sophie's Choice" trivia question:

What was Sophie's last name in both the novel and movie?

[elainetyger]

I already see Caddyshack -- one of the top ten best movies ever made imho -- and a few others I liked lots. I'll add Hannah and Her Sisters and ET.

[mlstrm]

Midnight Madness--really a crappy movie, but goofy enough to be funny if you're watching with the right people. That and it's the one all-night puzzle-solving movie from the 1980s that was played endlessly on HBO, and I'm surprised how many puzzle fans remember it.