Why are even dumb 80s movies still better than modern capeshit?
Owl
Because they were still attempting to be archetypal and thus serve as good memes.
I’d rather watch cape shit personally though. 80s movies are unforgivably boring to actually watch.
There’s usually about two scenes per movie that are worth seeing, and about 90 minutes of slow-paced filler.
Escape from New York was an absolute slog.
They Live was worse.
If you’ve seen a single sunglasses on, sunglasses off meme you’ve seen literally everything that movie has to offer.
Xer irony-posting is cringe. Like in They Live when they’re punching each other and he’s yelling “put on the glasses” I knew I was supposed to be laughing, but I just felt bad for the intended audience.
Can you imagine having such a self-protective wall up that everything- cosmic horror, action scenes, the truth itself- has to be this production where you’re assuring everyone watching it that you aren’t serious?
You get this shitscape where everything is shit on purpose to be funny, but then everything is still just shit. At least Zoomer irony-posting is directed at other people, Xer posting is just a giant self-deprecating hedge against cringe so everybody thinks any cringe was intentional. Haha look at how bad my clown costume is! I wasn’t even trying!
Gen X is a hundred million people competing desperately to be seen as trying the least hard.
I like punch fights dammit. Make a good one and don’t apologize for trying and failing to make it perfect!
80s movies are trash and not even all that archetypal. When I want archetypes I go further back in time to when Hollywood had ambitions.
Did you know Lawrence of Arabia was made in 1962?
It’s almost 4 hours long and every scene is better than any 80s movie.
Patton: 1970.
“Cleopatra” and “The Great Escape” were around the same timeframe, if I recall correctly
Even Star Wars suffered from this change. Everybody says Empire Strikes Back was the best because it was quotable, but try to read the plot summary without your eyes glazing over: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empire_Strikes_Back#Plot
It wasn’t *about* anything.
It’s hard to even think about the movie as a whole because there’s no “there” there, it’s just a vague notion of “winter fight, swamp training, cloud city political stuff”.
Even the prequels had better plots than that.
Imagine if the flowchart of your space western has a big bubble saying “spy shit” at the climax part.
Even as a kid I didn’t like Empire.
It was boring.
We only rented it once and even though we watched the other two a few times each, I never felt the desire to watch Empire again.
In conclusion, fuck the 80s.
Unironically the least ambitious and most try-hard decade of all.
Van Halen’s guitar style was terrible and I’m glad he’s dead.
lol tell me how you really feel
just let it rip
I don’t have anything left.
Temple of Doom could have been a great movie if it had been made in a different year. Great premise, great setting…wisecracking monkey sidekick.
Because 80s.
That’s probably the best description of the 80s.
Aeoli Pera 
Accurate.
All the passion in the 80s went into the music, which still has a layer of ’emotionally-implicit cheese’ on it which turns a lot of deepsock types off.
Don’t forget the general smarminess of most of the popular music.
It’s like the Jocks and preps got a full handle on the culture industry? When in the 90s more alternative subcultures rose to prominence with some actual substance.
Also while I agree that though there are a lot of *overrated* 80s flicks (Escape from NY being a good example) it’s wrong to just dismiss the decade entirely because there were a lot of bright spots there: Conan the Barbarian, first Terminator film, Ghostbusters, Aliens, the Thing, Temple of Doom (def my favorite Jones movie), Full Metal Jacket, Die Hard, stuff like Blue Velvet, etc etc.
I think it’s probably the overall ‘spirit’ of the decade which you dislike.
The whole Genx irony thing is why Red Letter Media are great critics/internet entertainers, but can’t actually make a film to save their hackfraud souls
Van Halen’s geetar seemed to be best when subordinated to more disciplined/structured songwriting. I don’t have much use for ‘Eruption’ (even the name suggests guitar-neck masturbation) but then you have their more well-structured songwriting resulting in stuff like the mighty ‘Panama’ which is A+ shlock.
This ‘need to be perfect’ is probably why Cain freaked out and killed his brother.
Also, Empire is about the characters/people rather than decisive story-action. The movie’s climax is a heavy ‘character-moment’ (luke i am your father) rather than the Death Star blowing up. Empire is about the good guys getting btfo by the bad guys while struggling and evolving as characters, setting up for the third/climactic story act. I could see why some would find it boring, and I don’t think I’d call it the ‘best’ SW–but I definitely don’t think it’s bad or a shit film or anything.
Jung: “Women are more ‘psychological’ than men… who are usually satisfied with logic alone.”
Empire is a more ‘psychological’ film than the others. It ends with the beginning of Luke’s Night Sea Journey/anti-Behelit, which starts with him falling down into the big shaft/abyss after learning a very challenging truth from his Shadow Darth Vader. Luke’s Night Sea Journey/anti-Behelit mostly takes place offscreen between Empire and Jedi which is why he’s a self-assured ubermensch Jedi at the beginning of movie 3.
I don’t have a reason for posting this scene here, other than it’s a great scene.
Man this is such a great movie.
what was the first video? not showing up for me. ‘an error occurred, pls try again’
Scene of Feisal, Brighton, Ali, and Lawrence in the tent.
Palpy: arch-melon (dark triad)
Luke skywalker: arch-melon (goodboi)
Obi-Wan: TT
Han Solo: MT
Darth Vader: MT
Leia: TT or TM
Boba Fett: Owl Melon
Yoda: Starchild
Lando: TM(?)
Tarkin: Nobilid
Jabba: Bigeye melon
Chewbacca: Shaq-id Brotha
Greedo: Sape
3PO: Amud parody
R2: Parody of Mousterian
Palpy: Alchemist
Vader: Upper-Level “game theorist policy” technocrat
Tarkin: Lower-level “functionary” technocrat
Jabba: Tinpot third-world silverback dictator
Bib fortuna: neurotic
Pig guard guys: fucked-up looking goons in blocking positions around jabba
The Force: Zodiacism?
who is our politician?
Arguably it’s Vader.
I don’t think we ever get a really good look at a politician during the OT. I think Vader would be a ‘higher level technocrat’ (which you have alluded to as the ‘game theorist’ class). Patrick said ‘these are the people manufacturing the doublethink for the O’briens to think in’, and I think that works for vader who is very esoterically-initiated. Patrick talked about how the lower-level technocrats are ‘just kind of smart people who can exercise discretion and self control’ and I think that fits Tarkin. Vader is too religious/principled to be a politician.
I’d blame that on it being a shallow leftist’s caricature of a right-wing warrior priest.
Basically Vader = Dick Cheney.
>basically Vader = Dick Cheney
I can see that. Not quite full politician, not quite full alchemist. Somewhere between.
Agree except…
Han Solo: Owl.
Chewbacca: MC.
Eh, close enough.
https://jungny.com/night-sea-journey/
The night sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos–a descent into Hades
Luke falls down the shaft
It is also represented by imprisonment or crucifixion, dismemberment or abduction
Luke gets hand cut off
In the language of the mystics it is the dark night of the soul.
“The empire strikes back”
You’re right. 90% of 80’s movies were absolute garbage.
Yet they were still vastly superior to the gay porn called superhero flicks that the Fedora wearing drips are masturbating to right now. In the 80’s we had no idea a movie could be that vapid and utterly soulless until millennials showed everybody just how low cinema could decline. By contrast, every single movie made in the 1980’s begins to look quite good in comparison. Watch GALAXY OF TERROR and compare with the globohomo space flicks streaming right now on Pedobear Clownworld Netflix junk. The Corman space operas begin to look like Leonardo Da Vinci alongside modern tripe.
When you take an awful movie despite all the expensive CGI and front load it with woke messages, you encounter cringe levels that will make your spine try to escape your body before it will sit still. The first ten minutes of any globohomo production will give you explosive diarrhoea and make you want to shoot up a school, that’s how rotten that trash is.
Preach it
The 80s may have faults, but I’ll still take that decade’s filmography over the 2010s any day. Nowadays it’s either remakes, capeshit, re-remakes, remakes of capeshit, adaptations of remakes of capeshit, or pseudo-artsy, pseudo-avante garde, toothless pseudo-indie bullshit made by the children of billionaires and funded by human trafficking dollars