Hadley Freeman is a writer who has a love for 80s movies that is unparalleled by anyone I have known in real life. She feels about the genre like I feel about a select few (specifically, Dirty Dancing and Steel Magnolias, so I was over the moon they each had their own chapters) and does an excellent job giving insight both into individual films, as well as the landscape of cinema in the 1980s. And she does so with great humor, in depth personal self-reflection, […]
The Good the Bad and the Eighties
So I had to return my copy to the library weeks ago and wasn’t able to get it back in time, so I might be a little fuzzy on details. Overall, I found that there were a lot of good moments in the collection, and a few that bugged me. Three things really stood out for me. First, I loved the interpretation of Ghostbusters, and the how she drew attention to the gender relationships. What was particularly noticeable to me was how she focused on […]
You can never go home again
A spring evening in 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackie is waiting impatiently outside for his girlfriend Rosie Daly, as they plan to elope and move to London, making a new life for themselves away from the hard life of the Dublin working poor. When she doesn’t show, Frank goes looking for her in the abandoned house a few door down, and finds a note that suggests she’s gone off without him. As Frank’s father is a violent drunk, his mother is neurotic and shrewish and his […]
The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.
4.5 stars Aristotle “Ari” is a conflicted teenager growing up in El Paso in the late 1980s. He’s sixteen and a loner, but doesn’t really mind his lack of friends. He’s very close to his mother, whose a high school teacher (not at Ari’s school), but wishes he could talk to his dad, a Vietnam vet about, well, anything really. The youngest of his family, Ari’s twin sisters are much older than him and his brother is in prison, never spoken about by anyone in […]
An absolutely perfect little book.
I’ve made no secret of my dismissal of the romance genre. It’s not that I don’t enjoy romance, or am indifferent to love, it’s that I’ve found the heaving bosoms and overflowing adoration to be blindly fantastical and willfully dismissive of actual romance. I’ve generally avoided the genre because I’ve never thought of it as even adequately representing real world love. I know that bodice rippers aren’t all the genre has to offer, but I have never encounter romance that spoke to me. Until Rainbow […]
The Happiest Dystopia
I was born and grew up in the 1980s. I was not a gamer, and was not much into pop culture. Even so, I had a lot of fun with Ready Player One. Set 18 years from now, the world is basically lived in a virtual setting known as OASIS. When the company founder, James Halliday, dies, he leaves a challenge, basically a treasure hunt through OASIS based on 80s trivia (the era of his youth). Naturally a culture of studying everything 80s from the […]
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