Hadley Freeman is a writer who has a love for 80s movies that is unparalleled by anyone I have known in real life. She feels about the genre like I feel about a select few (specifically, Dirty Dancing and Steel Magnolias, so I was over the moon they each had their own chapters) and does an excellent job giving insight both into individual films, as well as the landscape of cinema in the 1980s. And she does so with great humor, in depth personal self-reflection, […]
The Good the Bad and the Eighties
So I had to return my copy to the library weeks ago and wasn’t able to get it back in time, so I might be a little fuzzy on details. Overall, I found that there were a lot of good moments in the collection, and a few that bugged me. Three things really stood out for me. First, I loved the interpretation of Ghostbusters, and the how she drew attention to the gender relationships. What was particularly noticeable to me was how she focused on […]
A Cannonball and a Book Club Review
Life Moves Pretty Fast has been on my TBR since TheShitWizard read it back in January and, while I didn’t vote for it, was excited to see it as the CBR Book Club selection. “These movies, which were largely seen as junk when they came out, were deeply formative, and everyone I know in my generation feels exactly the same way. They provided the lifelong template for my perceptions of funniness (Eddie Murphy), coolness (Bill Murray), and sexiness (Kathleen Turner). Having been born in 1988 I am […]
Book Announcement: #CannonBookClub Reads Non-Fiction
With nearly 50% of the vote, our book club choice for June is Life Moves Pretty Fast: Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies by Hadley Freeman. Check out the discussion questions, and join the discussion starting June 14th. As always, I hope that if your vote wasn’t our final choice, that you’ll make the time to read both at some point during Cannonball Read 9 (for those that are curious, the runner up was Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann). […]