Authors: Hadley Freeman
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (28 page)
Just listening to this makes me want to ride Val Kilmer’s tail.
1 ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’, by Simple Minds, from
The Breakfast Club
Come on, there is just no competition. Not just the best eighties movie rock song but the best musical moment in an eighties movie. Punch the air, Judd Nelson! Punch it hard!
TOP TEN WEIRDEST SONGS ON AN EIGHTIES MOVIE SOUNDTRACK
10 ‘The Goonies R Good Enough’, by Cyndi Lauper, from
The Goonies
‘Why ‘R’ and not ‘are’? And why are the Goonies only ‘good enough’ for Cyndi – is that not damningly faint praise? And was Cyndi good enough for them? So many questions.
9 ‘We Built This City’, by Starship, from
Mannequin
Why IS Marconi playing the mamba?
8 Queen’s songs for
Highlander
soundtrack
All credit to the group for getting references to the movie’s plot in each of their songs, even if they make no sense now. ‘A rage that lasts a thousand years’, indeed.
7 ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’, by the Dream Academy, from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
I feel rather guilty putting this in because it’s not weird. I love it. But there is still something very amusing about a self-pitying song by the Smiths getting turned into an instrumental piece by an Australian band and rendered into a love song.
6 ‘Daddy’s Girl’, by Peter Cetera, from
Three Men and a Baby
This song is about the love a daughter feels for her father. Sweet, right? Wrong! Here’s the chorus: ‘Little baby wanna hold you tight / She don’t ever wanna say good night / She’s a lover, she wanna be Daddy’s Girl.’ I love
Three Men and a Baby
but someone needs to call CPS, stat.
5 ‘Ghostbusters’, by Ray Parker Jr, from
Ghostbusters
A classic. Also: weird.
4 ‘Peace in Our Life’, by Frank Stallone, from
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Sylvester Stallone’s brother singing about peace in a movie in which his brother bombs the world. God bless you, Stallone family.
3 ‘Magic Dance’, by David Bowie, from
Labyrinth
David Bowie, in a mullet, singing about a magic dance to a bunch of muppets and a baby. I love the eighties.
2 ‘Oh Yeah’, by Yello, from
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
, etc.
I feel like this song was in every eighties movie, but it was actually only in two:
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
and
The Secret of My Success
. It just feels that way because it was so weird. And bonus: the band were Swiss.
1 ‘The Dragnet’ rap, by Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks, from
Dragnet
And people say white people can’t rap.
Eddie Murphy’s Eighties Movies:
Time has not been kind to 1980s comedy superstars. John Belushi is long dead, Harold Ramis is recently dead, Martin Short has largely faded from view, Dan Aykroyd is only spotted these days flogging vodka, the brilliantly gifted Steve Martin moved over to romantic leads with somewhat mixed results,
fn1
Chevy Chase appears to be engaged in a full-time job of generating negative publicity about himself,
fn2
and Steve Guttenberg was last spotted doing panto in Bromley.
fn3
Out of all the comedy legends who emerged in that decade, the only one still standing with any real current critical credibility is Bill Murray.
And that’s great – I love Murray. Murray is my favourite thing (Venkman) in my favourite movie (
Ghostbusters
, as I might have already mentioned) of all time. He’s also my very favourite thing (Jeff the flatmate) in one of my most watched films (
Tootsie
) of all time.
Caddyshack
,
Tootsie
,
Stripes
,
Ghostbusters
,
Scrooged
: there is no doubt, Murray had a very good eighties. But back in 1989, if you’d asked anyone on any street in any western country which American comedy star they reckoned would still be revered in twenty-five years’ time, you would have got one universal answer, and that answer would not have been Bill Murray. It would, instead, and quite rightly, have been the man who remains the biggest comedy star of all time, and the one to whom time has been comparatively the most cruel: Eddie Murphy.
fn4
Public attitudes towards Murray and Murphy exemplify how short people’s memories are. No matter how good Murray’s eighties were, the reason he is still adored today is because he has made some very smart career moves in the past fifteen years. With the noted exception of
Groundhog Day
(which is really just a mystical update of
Scrooged
, for the record), Murray, like most eighties comedians, had a pretty meh 1990s.
fn5
He made films like the laughably miscast
Mad Dog and Glory
fn6
and
The Man Who Knew Too Little
in which he starred alongside such unlikely co-stars as Richard Wilson and, er, Dexter Fletcher. Someone presumably thought this might be Murray’s
A Fish Called Wanda
. It was not.
Things would very likely have continued in this vein had he not been rescued by Wes Anderson who, with
Rushmore
(1998) and
The Royal Tenenbaums
(2001) reminded the world that Murray is, in fact, a wonderful dramatic actor.
fn7
Anderson’s friend Sofia Coppola took note and cast him in 2003’s
Lost in Translation
as the jaded celebrity bored by money and Japanese people, and lo, suddenly, it became a truth universally acknowledged that there is not a person on the planet who does not worship at Murray’s altar. Murphy, on the other hand, is a different story.
Most people born before 1980 think of Murphy with the kind of bemused, embarrassed disappointment one feels about a cousin who once seemed so cool only then to grow up and become a tedious old fart who works in PR and gets drunk every Christmas and makes homophobic jokes.
fn8
Murphy, it is widely agreed, hasn’t made a decent comedy in almost twenty years, having opted for the grim career of a sell-out consisting of fat suits, kiddie franchises and movies so bad you can only hope he was paid $30 million for his time.
And this is really not fair. Sure, Murphy’s wasted a lot of years in unwatchable dross like
Holy Man
and
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
, one of the biggest box office disasters of all time. But he has also made some excellent movies in (relatively) recent years: in the very funny Steve Martin 1999 comedy
Bowfinger
he is completely brilliant playing both a Hollywood superstar and the superstar’s dopey brother, and he absolutely should have been nominated for an Oscar for it. But the Oscars, of course, don’t do comedy so instead, in classic Oscars style, Murphy got nominated for a later and less deserving but still good performance in the otherwise pretty mediocre
Dreamgirls
(2006). As Jimmy Early, the heroin-addicted, washed-up soul singer, Murphy proved to audiences that he can do dramatic acting, but he also reminded them how spectacularly lazy he has otherwise been in his later career, which presumably wasn’t quite his intention.
Having said all that, don’t, for heaven’s sake, underestimate
Shrek
. Without Murphy’s charming voiceover work as Donkey, that film would have just consisted of Mike Myers grunting about in a Scottish accent, and no child (or parent) wants to sit through that.
Shrek
would have barely been a movie were it not for Murphy, let alone three movies. Moreover, for all the sneers (mine included) lobbed at Murphy for making franchise movies for kids, like
The Nutty Professor
,
Daddy Day Care
and
Doctor Doolittle
, no one has done it as successfully as him: altogether, those films, including their sequels, made $3.5 billion worldwide, which can’t be described as a career failure.
But not even I fancy expending too much time and energy defending Murphy’s post-1989 career, particularly compared to Murray’s. As I said, the man has been pig-ass lazy.
fn9
What I will do, though, is argue to the death that Murphy’s eighties career more than compensates for a million Pluto Nashes. Eddie Murphy deserves so much more respect than he is accorded, first, because he was once the most exciting person to watch onscreen in the world. Just thinking of his grinning face in his eighties movies makes me smile. And second, because he made America believe, for the first and maybe only time in history, that race can be transcended.
In order to understand just how incredible it is that a black man became the biggest movie star of the eighties, we need to look at just how much racism eighties mainstream movies felt was A-OK. As chance would have it, I have watched a lot of eighties mainstream movies and here, in a handy list form, are some examples of the typical kind of racism to be found in eighties movies:
1 Wacky Asians
Sixteen Candles
(1984): Despite
Sixteen Candles
being a John Hughes teen movie, he was more in his slapstick
National Lampoon
mode as opposed to his soulful
Breakfast Club
gear. An exchange student from an unidentified Asian country called Long Duk Dong (ha ha! Asian people have funny names!) comes to stay with Molly Ringwald’s family. He is obsessed with sex (‘No more yanky my wanky!’) and, of course, embarrassingly nerdy (Asians – amirite?!). His every entrance onscreen is announced by a background gong, like something out of an old Tintin comic now banned by school libraries. Twenty-four years later, America’s National Public Radio described Long Duk Dong as ‘one of the most offensive Asian stereotypes Hollywood ever gave America’.
2 Scary black people who teach white kids about real life
Adventures in Babysitting
(1987): This film is adorable. It exemplifies so many of the best things about eighties teen films – the sweetness, the silliness, the innocence. However, it also exemplifies one of the worst things, which is using black people as a signifier for danger. Here, for reasons that need not be overly elucidated, babysitter Elisabeth Shue must leave the safety of the white suburbs and travel into the ghettoised city where she encounters all sorts of dangerous black people, ranging from car thieves to gangs to fans of blues music who force her and her youthful charges to sing some bee bop. See also:
Risky Business
and
Weird Science
.
fn10
3 Blacking up
Soul Man
(1986): When I tell people today that my sister and I actually rented this film from the local video shop back in 1987, I can see them looking at me the way I used to look at my grandfather when he talked about growing up in a time of segregated public bathrooms. Seriously, who knew people were still alive today who lived in such racist times! In this career-killer of a film, C. Thomas Howell plays Mark, a spoilt white guy whose father, for no obvious reason other than to serve as a handy plot device, tells him he has to pay his own way through Harvard Law School. Mark hits upon the idea of posing as a black student in order to blag a scholarship – because everyone knows it’s super-easy to get a scholarship to Harvard if you’re black. They basically give them out to ‘the brothers’, as Mark would say. So Mark takes a load of tanning pills and carries out this foolproof plan and stupid ethnic stereotypes ensue, all with a white actor in blackface for an entire movie. Perhaps the weirdest thing about
Soul Man
isn’t that it was made at all, but that the black female lead, Rae Dawn Chong, ended up marrying Howell. At least one person wasn’t totally repulsed by his blackface make-up.
4 Black people as comedy slaves
The Toy
(1982): Again, a movie I am amazed was made in my lifetime. In this film, Richard Pryor plays a poor black dude who is bought by a rich white dude to act as a toy for his spoilt brat of a kid. That’s right: a black man as a white kid’s toy. We can all only hope that Pryor was smoking a freak tonne of crack when he signed up to make this one.
5 Scary Asians
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984): We’ve looked at wacky Asians, now let’s look at scary Asians. Eighties movies are full of menacing, mystical and, yes, inscrutable Asians:
The Golden Child
,
Big Trouble in Little China
and, on TV, pretty much every episode of
The A-Team
. Until George Lucas decided in 2008 that, after trashing the legacy of
Star Wars
with his utterly pointless prequel trilogy, he would now decimate people’s memories of Indiana Jones with the appalling
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the
Crystal Skull
in 2008, the worst Indiana Jones film was undoubtedly
Temple of Doom
(1984). Here, Spielberg bravely but unwisely decided to swap his usual villains, Nazis, for a blood-drinking Indian cult. Now, this is weird enough, but even worse is the portrayal of what wealthy Indians eat, which is living snakes, giant beetles, eyeball soup and monkey brains. Ha ha ha, Asian people are GROSS. Happily, Spielberg returned to the Nazis in the next
Indiana Jones
, and that’s probably the only circumstance in which I would use ‘happily’ and ‘returned to the Nazis’ in a single sentence.
6 Wise Asians
The Karate Kid
(1984): I imagine Mr Miyagi (so wise! So inscrutable! So asexual!) isn’t on the Japan Society’s Board of Noted Cultural Figureheads, but at least he isn’t played for laughs. Well, except for when he fails to catch a fly with his chopsticks – how all Japanese people spend their evenings, you know. What a LOSER.
