Younger Hexbears, if the spirit of boomerdom visited your household, boomer is more a state of mind than a specific birth year, so feel free to share your stories too.
There are some obviously better-known movies like Wall Street, but I remember an obscure one called “Let It Ride” that was played on tape over and over and over again so many times that it was like the theme song of the household for a while. It was a Richard Dreyfuss film about a gambling addicted asshole who seeks to triumph over his gambling problems by… gambling. Until he gets vibes about winning and then wins at gambling. 
As a boomer bonus it portrays The Wife as a bad person because she’s… upset at the protagonist’s gambling addition. Oh yeah and she suspects he’s eager to commit some adultery. How dare she… the way to show her is to have a much younger love interest that is totally into the protagonist because he starts to win at gambling! 
For anyone that has had gambling-addicted boomer parents, the kind that thought a fun outing for the kids was going to the racetrack, or to Vegas, you may have similar stories of poverty perpetuated because your 
also liked to “Let It Ride.”
My dad was a huge fan of Falling Down, the movie where the guy pulls a gun in a McDonalds because they stopped serving breakfast
That was one of the earliest examples I can remember of “a lot of the audience really missed the fucking point” movie, and it had the same reason: the camera and the script is focused on D-FENS and his ongoing
violent rage and that was seen as sympathetic, even condoning, of his actions and anything said about him by the end of the movie was way, way too late to get absorbed.
Bond movies, Out of Africa, Gone With the Wind
Most Bond movies aged very badly. Like, so badly that it’s hard to go a few minutes into them without going
and offering to turn them off for a fresh viewer that looks unhappy and has a right to be.I used to enjoy them as a kid
Kill James Bond reminded me of some details I’d have preferred not to remember lol
That feel when a “cool spy movie” basically starts with sexual violence dished out by the protagonist.
Sean Connery on hitting women:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
sean connery was the first instance that stands out to me growing up, where i realized that A-list actors can be really stupid. connery played some highly intelligent, moral and cultured characters (ex. Henry Jones Sr)… but in reality, he was a dumb ass with marketable voice and face. if you look at pictures of him when he was young, it’s pretty obvious what he was bringing to the table.
i remember reading that story about how he was approached for the LOTR trilogy to play gandalf as literally the first choice. he turned down 30 million per flick and 15% of box office profits because he “didn’t understand it.” he ended up losing out on nearly half a BILLION dollars. he says he read the book and saw the movies, but still doesn’t understand them. that is literally what he said. personally, i think LOTR is highly accessible material. you could show it to a child and they are not going to be confused by it. but 70 year old sean connery was fuckin’ baffled.
He mows down dozens of dudes just out of nowhere in the beginning of Goldeneye. I rewatched this a few years ago and was like…uh…
I remember my childhood friend her older brother had the James bond Nintendo game and they played it all the time and were obsessed with wall mining and headshots then after that it felt like the james bond franchise was dead because I never met or heard of anyone who cared about James bond since.
I have a (millennial) friend who is obsessed with James Bond. He’s seen every movie, many of them multiple times, and I think he’s also read all the books. We haven’t spoken in a year.
Sounds like a good year lol.
He’s a good guy and quite a character. He’s been one of my closest friends for over twenty years. I radicalized into a Marxist a few years ago but he hasn’t. He’s also trans and I’ve heard that he’s using she/her pronouns but he hasn’t actually told me this so I don’t know for sure. But he’s also pretty rich and has admitted that while capitalism sucks, he can’t support communism because it means concentration camps for everyone (in his mind).
That kind of spy movie is extinct now because it needed the Cold War as a backdrop. James Bond was really the only franchise that survived to this day, and it turned into much more of generic action thriller.
I don’t think the series ever truly tried to adapt to modern audiences - Goldeneye did some winking to the audience about how dated the premise was after history ended and Casino Royale rode the ”gritty and realistic shaky cam” coattails of Bourne, but really it was the same it ever was.
Bond is a nostalgia act and the people who remember the days of Connery and Moore when the franchise was at its cultural peak are getting very old. Last year was the 60th anniversary of Dr. No, and I don’t remember that being a big deal in the media at all. When Skyfall came out, the 50th anniversary got a lot more press, and all of this tells me the marketing ghouls don’t feel like James Bond is worth the money to advertise.
I remember watching the terrible James Bond Jr. cartoon as a kid, and that was just a sad attempt at making a generic 90s cartoon with the characters, real ”fellow kids” energy and of course it was a flop. Unironically, I think Goldeneye on the N64 is more memorable to anyone under like 50 than any of the movies that have been released since the 90s.
Unironically, I think Goldeneye on the N64 is more memorable to anyone under like 50 than any of the movies that have been released since the 90s.
I think the N64 GoldenEye game and Austin Powers are more memorable lmao
The fact that Gone With The Wind has ever had any popularity at all is such a fucking travesty. From the very first opening scene (“puddin’ time!”) that movie is such a fucking disaster. And yes, my film buff mom was into it.
Parenti goes on a hilarious tangent about Out Of Africa in his lecture “Images Of Imperialism: Media, Myths, and Reality”… it’s somewhere towards the middle/end when he’s talking about colonial movies set in Africa.
Here’s a link to an unofficial Spotify rehosting of the audio that I listened to it on:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1QuISSFwyFQGlZKFJvdbwJ?si=R5_SPQkrRfexKN5TqsETKg
Yeah I also listened to this one and it made me think about my mom and her yearning for foreign lands and Roberth Redford, she loved this movie and was in her own mind a leftist (liberal). Then again they all loved Kennedy too, Dynasty and Dallas were their favourite drama shows and Tintin the go to comic. All Western entertainment is mostly empire upholding, personally am pretty ready to burn my Donald Duck comics from my childhood because I can’t unsee it anymore.
The entertainment we consume is absolutely not innocent.
Forrest Gump. Don’t question anything, America’s system is the best in the world, anyone who rocks the boat (especially a woman) is an uppity slut who deserves to die of AIDS. My parents aren’t even that reactionary, but they worshipped this film and still do.
It is the film for unscratched liberals that is also compatible with scratched liberals.
Dead poets society: celebrates individualism and self-discovery among a school full of Rich white boys with zero discussion of class/race/gender and their privileges due to it. Typical boomer ideals of liberalism, frontier individualism, etc etc.
I always hated that movie and never really gave much thought after it came out why I hated it.
Its “uplifting” message, looking back, was “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ONE DAY SO BE A SELF-ABSORBED EPIPHANY-SEEKING ASSHOLE” as some profound wisdom.
That’s about right for most boomer philosophy.
gambling
The American cultural obsession and normalization of gambling has always left me brutally discombobulated.
Hey, the Aussies fucking love it too. And from what I saw/heard of my Philipino ex’s family/culture they love it out there as well.
The Dukes of Hazzard, and Young Sheldon. My parents love Sheldon and it constantly try to compare me to Sheldon.
Young Sheldon. My parents loved Sheldon and it constantly try to compare me to Sheldon.
That’s more recent but very cursed.
Ah just checked, I thought it was much older than that. Still a great example though, along with The Big Bang Theory.
Isnt young sheldon from like 3 years ago?
I still get junk in the mail with fucking young sheldon advertisements on it
What’s wrong with Young Sheldon anyways?
For starters, everything wrong with Big Bang Theory, I assume.
https://popculturedetective.agency/2017/the-adorkable-misogyny-of-the-big-bang-theory
Yep, that’s a big one, but it also has quite a bit of ableism as well.
And racism! It’s sort of a collection of fucked up ideologies.
Young Sheldon
I’m not familiar with the spin-off prequel, beyond the premise, what else makes this show especially cursed?
fucking Little House on the Prairie - which for whatever godawful reason my mom used to throw on randomly whenever she was feeling nostalgic for her childhood. Shoutout Mary for letting her baby die in a fire, shoutout to Mary for skinny dipping with her friend and inadvertently causing them to drown - the memory of being like 7 and watching these episodes because mom put it on while she supervised us doing our homework is
Funnily enough though, while my mom would throw on Little House - my dad’s go-to shows were Tom Baker Doctor Who and/or early Star Trek episodes so clearly there is some sort of fucked up balance between my parents’ level of boomerism
Fun fact, my parents met Michael Landon and he supposedly held me when I was a baby.
A League Of Their Own and its normie gender politics.
My dad thinks the CIA do no wrong. He grew up watching MacGyver
Tons of house fixer-upper shows and Alaskan homesteading reality TV
MASH
Which by the way I quite enjoyed last time I watched it a few years ago.
My mom was really into the Left Behind movies, and it really enforced her evangelical beliefs and doomsday beliefs and like. I’m really happy I hardly remember a thing about those movies. She was also into like God’s Not Dead and old The Stand as well.
I suspect a lot of that was in the roots of “QAnon.”
for sure. before my mom died this year, I was really worried of her stumbling upon QAnon. thankfully she didn’t, but it probably wouldn’t of taken too much. considering she thought Obama was the antichrist for a while, until for some reason, last year she thought Macron was the antichrist. and of course she really loved trump
She wasn’t wrong
A lot of old 60s classics. John Wayne movies. For more chud adjacent I saw all the dirty Harry movies at a pretty young age. Watched Ben Hur and Planet of the Apes when I was pretty young too. Antony and Cleopatra with Liz Taylor. The Vikings with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas and Earnest Borgnine. That movie is still pretty good. Nice revenge arc. Edit: oh and the Blues Brothers. Even as a kid I knew it was awesome to see two misfits drive a beaten up cop car through a column of neo nazis.
For boomer TV shows I grew up with my dad singing the themes of Petticoat Junction, Addams Family, F Troop, old TV from before my time.
My parents were constantly watching Come and See, which isn’t surprising. They were obsessed with every small victory the USSR had against reactionary forces.
Just kidding. This is probably what my kids will say about me when they’re talking to their fellow conscripts in the Burger King-Papa John’s war.
Edit: Thank God, my parents almost never watch the same thing twice. It’s not obscure, but they’re most influential media is probably the NFL. Particularly for my mom, they are firmly rooted in her brain. Which is weird, because after decades of watching football she still doesn’t know the rules. Still, she refers to the NFL as “the league.” I hate it.
Once she had a moment of clarity where she realized the news was bullshit. She couldn’t understand why some NFL scandal was being ignored by the sports news. I tried to explain that the week of inane, breathless news between each game was just a commercial for the NFL and that the NFL itself was just a commercial for the US military, and all I accomplished was reaffirming that I’m an idiot.
it’s really hard to explain what a huge deal “the big chill” was to them… Ive never seen it but I would imagine it validates their turn towards materialism and such… Forrest Gump was also a huge deal in a similar way about 10 years later and I think a simpleton wandering through life and just happening to win at every turn really resonated with them
on tv, I think “thirtysomething” may have occupied the same mental space as “the big chill” but idk, never watched it.
if you ask me what their cinematic epitaph will be, it will be Peter Fonda in Easy Rider saying “we blew it, billy.”
it’s really hard to explain what a huge deal “the big chill” was to them… Ive never seen it but I would imagine it validates their turn towards materialism and such… Forrest Gump was also a huge deal in a similar way about 10 years later and I think a simpleton wandering through life and just happening to win at every turn really resonated with them
I’ve never seen it but when I read about it, I concluded “yeah, a whole lot of boomers certainly do feel that way, responding to the sting of mortality by being selfish assholes.”
