Discussion Topics: Life Moves Pretty Fast

Our Discussion Post is live – join us now to discuss Life Moves Pretty Fast. 

We’re quickly approaching our second Book Club of the year: Non-fiction. Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman won the vote, and we are just over a week to go time. Our group chat about Eighties Movies and this book will get going around 2 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday June 14 both here and in our Facebook group, the Book Chat.

Book Club is open to anyone and everyone, and with this choice’s theme I imagine we’ll all have lots to say. If there’s a pressing topic you’d like to see addressed, leave a comment down below and I’ll see what I can do about getting it included in the main post here or other on Facebook.

As a reminder to get finished (for myself as much as anyone else) here is a preview of our Discussion Topics for next week:

• How well do you feel the examination of how movies have evolved to what we have on offer today was handled by the book?
• Freeman focuses her work on the big movies of the decade, not the critical darlings. It is inevitable that in a book coming in at a crisp 305 pages many of the largest; most loved films are left out (heck, Freedman puts 20 of them in her epilogue). Which of yours didn’t make the book, and what lesson did it teach you?
• Movies today say so much about society’s changing expectations of women, young people, and art from their eighties counterparts. Why do you think some of these changing expectations have occurred?
• What do you make of our shared nostalgia for the movies of the eighties, combined with the industry’s bad reputation during the same decade of declining quality: the period in which franchises, sequels and lazy, easy money-grabbing took over from the auteur cinema and personal visions that are associated with American films in the ‘70s?
• Which movie were you surprised to see included? Or, which movie’s “lesson” felt off to you?
• What do you make of Freeman’s stance that eighties movies are a lot more “politically engaged and female-friendly and even moral” than similar fare from the past fifteen years?
• Freeman’s tone and authorial voice: does it work for you? Does it match her subject?
• Plus some additional movie specific ones here and over on Facebook.

Okay everyone, I’ll see you next Wednesday to chat the 1980s, movies, and culture.