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
Mystic Pizza
; the ultimate in action from
Top Gun
Die Hard
Beverly Hills Cop
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
; love and sex in
9 1/2 Weeks
Splash
About Last Night
The Big Chill
Bull Durham
; and family fun in
The Little Mermaid
ET
Big
Parenthood
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
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
).