(Overrated) Movies That Provide Iconic Imagery That Define Generations

Have you ever watched one those “decade in review” shows? You know the type: generally found on basic cable, they offer comedians and television personalities of all types sniping at cultural touchstones from years past with the benefit of perspective and a deft comic touch. Anyway, have you noticed that, even within these irreverent shows, there are a few sacred cows – movies that are revered as being super-important signifiers of their time?

Well, those movies suck, and here’s a decade-by-decade breakdown of these so-called “important” films and why they’re actually terrible.

1950s: “Rebel Without A Cause.” Nicolas Ray’s film is emblematic of the explosion in teenage culture that came in the 1950s. “Blackboard Jungle” will forever be known as the movie that introduced rock-n-roll music to a mass audience, but “Rebel Without A Cause” will stand as the zenith of 50s-era teenage iconography because of its introduction of James Dean as a troubled bad-boy. What is overlooked, however, is the fact that Dean simply isn’t all that good in this film – his moment of rage (the famous line “you’re tearing me apart”) is terribly emoted, and Dean’s other setting – that of studied cool – seems to conceal the possibly-blasphemous notion that he’s not that good of an actor. My verdict: this movie is only legendary because of Dean’s infamous car-accident death, which gave more credence to his performance than anything that actually occurred on celluloid.

1960s: “Easy Rider.” In the famous coda of this 1969 film, which has long been held as emblematic of the counterculture and the shift in values that occurred with the continued insurgency of youth culture, Peter Fonda’s Captain America character says, “We blew it.” He couldn’t be more right. Filmmaker/star Dennis Hopper created a film with some magnificent imagery – the famed shot of the lead characters riding their motorcycles through the American West, for example. However, the movie has extreme difficulty in maintaining any type of consistent narrative structure; its use of jump-cuts (especially during the Mardi Gras scenes) may have been revolutionary (and anticipated a legion of faux-artistic music videos in later decades), but subvert the viewer’s best efforts to stay with the film. This may be a film best viewed with, um, chemical interference; without it, it doesn’t really hold up. They blew it.

1970s: “Saturday Night Fever.” This movie is 119 minutes long, and feels like a much longer film. The imagery it presents – that of strutting disco king Tony Manero (John Travolta) – serves as shorthand for the 1970s, largely because it presents a number of dance-oriented scenes centered around the feel-good, gotta-dance “me” decade. The dance scenes are good; however, Norman Wexler’s patented ultra-realistic dialogue (also present in films like “Serpico” and “Joe”) falls flat when whiningly delivered by John Travolta and his cronies, who come off as anti-heroes that simply aren’t worth rooting for. “Saturday Night Fever” was an excellent music video, but it’s a terrible, grating movie.

1980s: “The Breakfast Club.” People of a certain age absolutely worship this film – why, I don’t know. This might be John Hughes’s worst movie (and this is a man who brought the world “Baby’s Day Out.” The heavy-handed grouping of character archetypes – the nerd, the jock, the princess, et al – doesn’t flow particularly well as a movie. It’s a group of dramatic monologues, loosely combined. While some of the actors are capable in this movie (Molly Ringwald looks absolutely at ease here), many of the portrayals in this film suffer from inane overacting (I’m looking at you, Judd Nelson – his Bender may be the worst-acted character of the entire decade, for God’s sake) or are underwhelming, barely-there sketches (Ally Sheedy). To paraphrase William Shakespeare and Robert Downey, Jr, this film is a lot of “sound and fury,” signifying “less than zero.”

1990s: (tie) “Fargo” and “Being John Malkovich.” While I actually really liked both of these movies, and have seen them each several times, they’ve come to emblemize a different kind of filmmaking excess: the overindulgence in character quirkiness in a film. Frances McDormand’s pregnant Midwestern police officer may have been a revolutionary role at the time, but how many films tried to piggyback on this eccentricity without a compensatory amount of plot? (The answer: a lot, with varying degrees of success, from the terrible “Drop Dead Gorgeous”.) “Being John Malkovich” was a movie that suffered from chronic underacting – while I enjoy the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze a great deal, I think that they could have done a lot better with the conceit behind this film, which supposes that there’s a portal into the brain of a prominent character actor. This film introduces several fascinating characters, but doesn’t do a tremendously good job of grounding them in anything resembling reality. As someone who has dabbled in acting in the past, I applaud the effort to create fascinating, distinguished characters – however, they can simply not carry a movie by themselves. These movies are emblematic of that late-90s desire to be grittier and more “real,” but instead serve as reminders of what happens when quirks overcome plot as a dominant feature of a film.

I don’t think that there’s really a definitive film for this decade yet – and there is still a solid ¼ of a decade to determine this. But it bears thinking – what will provide the iconic filmic images of this decade? Will it be one of the “Frat Pack” comedies of the last few years? Will it be “Borat” or something similar? Who knows! That said, I promise this – once this decade is defined, I’ll find something that’s very wrong with the film that defines it.