I was listening to Saturday Morning Flashback on WXRT, Chicago's Finest Rock, and so was thinking about 1982 when their short bit on the movies of the year came on. It made me try and remember that year in movies. Since I couldn't remember, I just went to IMDB for the top movies of the year.
- Blade Runner
- The Thing
- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
- Gandhi
- First Blood
- Poltergeist
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
- Pink Floyd: The Wall
- Tootsie
- The King of Comedy
- Conan the Barbarian
- Fanny and Alexander
- Fast Times at Ridgemont High
- Tron
- Kayaanisqatsi
- The Dark Crystal
- Sophie's Choice
Other notable entries from that year. An Officer and a Gentleman at 23, Victor/Victoria at 28, The World According to Garp, staring Robin Williams, at 29, The Year of Living Dangerously, staring a very young Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, at 32, and Diner at 34.
I have seen all most of those movies, even if only when they showed up on broadcast TV. I own a few of them on DVD. Most of them have some cultural impact even today. The first 15 are certainly all watchable, though I know people who didn't like Kayaanisqatsi, I think that is because they didn't know what they were getting into.
While some of them were based on existing properties, The World According to Garp was a book before it was a movie, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is obvious, but after the commercial failure of the first Star Trek movie, it was a real gamble. ("Even numbered Star Trek movies don't suck.") Tron and Blade Runner were early in the Sci-Fi wave that was going to overwhelm us. At the time, studios didn't really believe in Sci-Fi. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is something that is no longer produced, a comedy.
This selection of movies is why it wasn't uncommon to just go to the theater, and see something, or see the movie from the trailer you saw last week, and thought, "That looks good."
All of the creativity evident in 1982 has been driven out of Hollywood by corporations like Amazon, and the insanity of DEI at places like Disney.
I couldn't listen to all of Saturday Morning Flashback, because while some of the songs took me back to my youth, so much music from the 1980s was just crap.
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