see? you had a thoughtful response full of informed nuance across generations.... mine looked more or less like a line by line personal attack: Where the fuck did you live? oh yah... Connecti-fucking-cut. How did your rich, white, privileged Connecticut ass escape the conversation? I've been fretting about the environment since elementary school in the 80s. If you didn't know, shame on you. What in the cis-hetero-patriarchal bullshit is this? because of course you do. I had to go look you upGas was cheap, and we didn’t yet know that we should feel guilty for burning it.
Movies had tits in them. God, I miss tits in movies.
I live with my girlfriend and my cat Suavecito.
Yeah I had an observation in the back of my head about how he romanticized Generation X because he lived in abundance, whereas my take on Generation X was "welcome to Thunderdome, bitch" because I did not. But realistically, the whole schtick is "we were promised abundance and instead we live in scarcity" which definitely sucks? But at some point you need to put on your problem-solving cap and I think there's a lot of people whose problems have always been solved by their parents. And your parents can't bring the malls back. So... there's actually a point here. It's not the point he wants to make so he didn't, but fundamentally, ratings in the '80s hinged largely on how much violence was in them, not how much nudity. Blade Runner is a PG with two boobs, Total Recall is a hard R with three. Andromeda Strain is rated G, fer chrissake, because nobody cusses and nobody shoots anyone else. What happened, fundamentally, is the 'boomers took over and started protecting everyone else's children from tits. Now? Now you can show someone blowing someone else's head off in close-up and get a PG-13 but the minute an aureola shows up it's an R.What in the cis-hetero-patriarchal bullshit is this?
I think tits are a shorthand way of thinking about the ways in which romance is portrayed on screen these days, and the ways it's portrayed in little-to-none. Top Gun has a great romance story, e.g., and there's no tits. You just don't really see that in the action-thrillers of today. Like no one is contemplating a remake of Basic Instinct, which was a cultural phenomenon in like '92 or whenever. It's easy to forget that Rom-Coms can be good, because they're so, so, so bad nowadays. But in the 80s you had when Harry Met Sally, and in the 90s As Good as It Gets. WTF even passes for a rom-com these days? Nothing that's ever going to attract a co-ed audience. Admittedly, I don't read cis-hetero as a pejorative in the way one is supposed to these days. But romance is dead in movies and in real life, and bringing it back in movies is a good start to bringing it back in real life.
I think tits are tits. There's a certain amount of un-cladded-ness that you pretty much need to have in any light sex comedy just to set the tone. Much of the nudity in the '80s was exploitive, no doubt but when you penalize "here are boobs" and don't penalize "here are guns" there will be more guns. Take Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's simply a different movie without Judge Reinhold fantasizing about an undressing Phoebe Cates. Is it exploitive? Sure. Is it more exploitive than Leaving Las Vegas? Is it more exploitive than Risky Business? The smart, active, empowered characters in that movie are the prostitutes, full stop. Is anyone going to remake Risky Business? Never. Perish the thought. There are three Human Centipede films, ten Saw movies and what got an NC-17 in 2000 purely for plot is a billion dollars worth of Jennifer Lawrence vehicles by 2012. This movie is, beat for beat, Romancing the Stone. It's not spectacular? But neither is Romancing the Stone. For that matter, I would argue that the buddy movies have gotten more inclusive. I'll take this sort of thing over Poison Ivy or Beautiful Creatures any day.WTF even passes for a rom-com these days?