(no subject)

[deckardcanine]

Earlier this week, IMDb linked to, oh, some people's unranked list of the 100 best movies of the '90s. (Was it 100? It felt like less.) I don't bring this up to discuss their choices, but it did get me thinking. When I had trouble coming up with 100 '90s films that I thought were truly great, I started thinking back on previous decades. The '30s and '40s must have produced the best crop, but even I have seen only so many of those. So I thought of the next nearest decade, the '80s.

And I realized that easily most of the titles that came to mind were comedies, or at least semi-comedies (think Labyrinth). And most of those that weren't were still popcorny fun-timers like The Empire Strikes Back. The same could not be said of my reflection on any other decades.

Does it seem to you, too, that popular films from the '80s are disproportionately light-hearted? Was there not much in the way of memorable serious fare? If so, it would explain why AFI's "100 Years, 100 Films" had only three '80s movies.

Comments

[mwalimu.livejournal.com]

After giving this some thought, it seems to me that most decades have several best movies that could be described as epic dramas, but the ones I can think of from the 80s tend to be more boring and less memorable than comparable movies from other decades. One of them, "Out of Africa", once won an informal survey of the worst movie to win best picture ("The Greatest Show on Earth" from the 50s was also a leading contender for that dubious honor).