Life Moves Pretty Fast

The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them from Movies Anymore)

Hadley Freeman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501130663
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

From Vogue contributor and Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, a personalized guide to eighties movies that describes why they changed movie-making forever—featuring exclusive interviews with the producers, directors, writers and stars of the best cult classics. For Hadley Freeman, movies of the 1980s have simply got it all. Comedy in Three Men and a Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ghostbusters, and Back to the Future; all a teenager needs to know in Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Mystic Pizza; the ultimate in action from Top Gun, Die Hard, Beverly Hills Cop, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; love and sex in 9 1/2 Weeks, Splash, About Last Night, The Big Chill, and Bull Durham; and family fun in The Little Mermaid, ET, Big, Parenthood, and Lean On Me.In Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley puts her obsessive movie geekery to good use, detailing the decade's key players, genres, and tropes. She looks back on a cinematic world in which bankers are invariably evil, where children are always wiser than adults, where science is embraced with an intense enthusiasm, and the future viewed with giddy excitement. And, she considers how the changes between movies then and movies today say so much about society's changing expectations of women, young people, and art—and explains why Pretty in Pink should be put on school syllabuses immediately.From how John Hughes discovered Molly Ringwald, to how the friendship between Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi influenced the evolution of comedy, and how Eddie Murphy made America believe that race can be transcended, this is a "highly personal, witty love letter to eighties movies, but also an intellectually vigorous, well-researched take on the changing times of the film industry" ( The Guardian ).

Index

A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.

A-Team, The, 116, 260

Absence of Malice, 203

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 100

Accidental Tourist, The, 179, 183

Act of Valor, 115

Adams, Amy, 44n

Adam’s Rib, 192

Adventures in Babysitting, 7, 73, 79, 259

Adventures in the Screen Trade, 53

Adventures of Pluto Nash, The, 256–257

After Earth, 178

Afternoon Delight, 299

Age of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience (ed. Chambliss, Svitavsky, and Donaldson), 240n

Alfie, 39

Ali, 178n

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 164

Alice in Wonderland, 233

Alien, 127, 128

Aliens, 7, 167

All the President’s Men, 53

All the Right Moves, 5n, 215

Allen, Woody, 31, 87, 90–93, 95, 106

“Almost Paradise,” 161

Along Came Polly, 79, 97

Altman, Robert, 4

Amade...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Dirty Dancing: Abortions Happen and That’s Just Fine
• The Princess Bride: True Love Isn’t Just About the Kissing Parts
• Pretty in Pink: Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers
• When Harry Met Sally: Romcoms Don’t Have to Make You Feel Like You’re Having a Lobotomy
• Ghostbusters (with a Segue into Top Gun): How to Be a Man
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: The Impact of Social Class
• Steel Magnolias: Women Are Interesting
• Baby Boom: Successful Women Are Sexy as Hell
• Back to the Future: Parents Are Important
• Batman: Superheroes Don’t Have to Be Such a Drag
• Eddie Murphy’s Eighties Movies: Race Can Be Transcended
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About Hadley Freeman
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright