Like what film would you show an alien to really capture the essence of boomer? Grease was the movie that prompted this question, but I think we can find boomier
quick summary for OP: the movies thesis is just good things come to people who keep their head down and dont disrupt the status quo.
good things come to people who keep their head down and dont disrupt the status quo
With that in mind, the Xer equivalent of Forrest Gump is definitely PCU.
There's a more obscure one that speaks to the Vegas :grillman: Hate The Wife mindset called "Let It Ride." It's about gambling, glorifying gambling, and glorifying wife hating.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" is a bit like that too and is a solid contender for :grillman: association, even if that wasn't the writer or director's intent. I know a lot of boomers that love that movie's quaalude-blue curtains and wish they were the main character.
Come to think of it the old "Wall Street" movie with Martin Sheen is also a contender.
I think this is the one
On another note, did anyone else hate this movie without even seeing it just from asshole kids at school shouting "run Forest, run" if you happened to be running past them?
Seriously hated this shit since middle school, never gave it a chance until a year ago and it ended up being even worse than I ever imagined
That has to be one of the stupidest movie plots I've read in my life. Anti "PC" rhetoric has not moved an inch in 30 years.
They just make up a new term for the same ideas every few years to see who they can peel off.
PCU was on Comedy Central approximately forty times a week when I was a kid, but I think I escaped the treacherous aspects of its influence. It taught me to appreciate George Clinton, hate David Spade, and to not wear the shirt of a band I’m going to see. Plus it has the great Jessica Walter.
I did know one kid, also raised by Comedy Central, who let it influence his perception of feminism, though. It’s definitely a bad movie, with bad ideology, but don’t be deceived by how ugly the plot reads, because it’s not smart enough to give its critiques any teeth. A very minor rewrite with a Find-and-Replace function - instead of PC caricatures, make the antagonists the football team or a wealthy donor trying to tear down the house to build a statue with his name on it or some shit - yields pretty much the same stupid Animal House wannabe. The PCU people merely read a propaganda article about “political correctness run amok at Oberlin,” or wherever, they didn’t write it.
All of that is just to say that we need a different candidate for Most Gen-X movie. My first suggestion is Clerks, but Richard Linklater probably directed the other nominees.
(Next week’s essay in the series of Vaguely Remembered Films Wertheimer Saw Too Many Times on Comedy Central in the ‘90s: Johnny Dangerously.)
All of that is just to say that we need a different candidate for Most Gen-X movie. My first suggestion is Clerks, but Richard Linklater probably directed the other nominees.
The Most Gen X Movie title should go to Reality Bites. It's the Gen X equivalent of The Big Chill.
Forrest Gump. A blissful idiot wanders through life and, by simply being at the right place at the right time, becomes filthy rich in the process.
The Minions Movie
Not only does it have Minions in it, it's set in the 70s. That shit was tailor-made to appeal to boomers. It's a boomer movie masquerading as a kids movie
one day the photos of a minion concentration camp guard will come to light
Doesn't the movie make the joke that the Minions were all in Antarctica during the 30s and 40s?
Its a hasty workaround of the implications of the premise.
The minion species is drawn to the most evil villain of the moment and work for them. Obviously this implies they would have participated in the Holocaust. But since this is a movie for children they wrote in that after Napoleon's defeat they just got depressed and lived in an ice cave until, conveniently, the 1960s.
Napoleon as the most evil person
I mean, the guy wasn't exactly a working class hero, but he was surrounded by peers who were worse.
The Big Chill IIRC, Liberal Boomers went nuts for this movie in the 80s and it spawned a TV show called Thirtysomething which was basically "First World Problems: The Series".
When considering what it means to “sell out”, it’s useful to look to the classic 1983 film The Big Chill. Fifteen years after graduating from college, a group of friends and former radicals come together to mourn the suicide of one who used to be in their clique. To a t, each character has given up on progressive aspirations to focus on him or herself in various ways—drugs, money, babies, etc. In fact, the one person who was still trying to act for the higher good is Nick, the guy who killed himself. Nick’s descent from radicalism to academe to social work and then complete and total absence is powerfully symbolic of the erasure of progressive ideals, the transition into the eighties, and the coming of Yuppie. The film is like a home birth movie, in which a group of insufferable Baby Boomers midwife a neoliberal fever-dream about the moral sacrifices that adulthood should entail.
TBC is an excellent choice. Speaking as a boomer. I make a point of watching it every ten years or so, and like all of the best movies, it's different every time. Which is to say it's a good yardstick to measure how my response to its messages change over the years. Of course, younger people have lived in a world that was altered by this movie. At the time, using the Stones "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the soundtrack while showing close ups of the dressing of a corpse was edgy and cool in a way that big movies hadn't been for a while. Ditto the entrepreneur giving out free pairs of his brand of running shoes for everyone. Lots of eye rolling at the time, but, to be real, it was at his house and on his dime.
Selling out may be the overt theme of TBC, but self-regard is the powerful subtext. That makes it the best boomer movie, because the characters are tormented by their compulsion to constantly regard their self-regard. They mostly haven't found any way out of the trap, which, as the movie sells us, is love. And rock and roll, of course. The Baffler article concludes: "Along with the shrinking of the middle class came the neoliberal reforms that seamlessly blended every aspect of culture with an overly privatized civil society and an anemic economy. In an Orwellian turn, the word “reform” has come to mean privatization. We create content for Twitter for free. We’re saddled with almost incomprehensible levels of debt from school. Ideas are “branded” before their umbilical cords are even cut. To sell out or not sell out isn’t a choice that we get to make. We’re forced to sell out, without even really getting to cash in." Such innocent times.
Death Wish 3. A bunch of old people who live in the middle of town are terrified by teenagers.
They help the hero heroically gun down children by supplying him with machine guns and rocket launchers.
It includes amazing scenes such as shooting someone for the crime of stealing a walkman (and then everyone claps) and ambushing a dozen teenagers playing in an allyway by mowing them down with a Browning 30 cal from a third story window.
lmao his signature guns a fucking automag :che-laugh: and that browning? just goddamn carrying it on the hip like he thinks he's in Katanga
I think a movie like Porky's is the ultimate boomer movie.
I once looked up the ending to Grease on Youtube cause i wanted to see a car fly (never actually saw Grease) opened the clip it started normal then they flew into the WTC.
Nah unfortunately mine got deleted since, but it was a hard cut that was full on shocking.
Spielberg's E.T
The Graduate
Jobs, the movie about Steve Jobs as played by Ashton Kutcher.
Back to the Future - implied that the McFlys poverty was caused by a lack of willpower and confidence rather than other environmental factors.
Nobody, starring Bob Odenkirk. This is John Wick, but with immense divorced, disrepected dad energy. I couldn't last more than 30 minutes watching it. Those 30 minutes are filled with Bob being disrespected by his family and some teenagers on a bus or something.
- Bob Odenkirk plays Saul Goodman and Saul Goodman is cool
- The movie has a cat
