Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from Eighties Movies (and Why We Don’t Learn Them from Movies Anymore)

Hadley Freeman is a self-confessed diehard 80’s-movie fan, but she’s focused that obsessive fandom into this razor-sharp look at the lessons you might not have even realized you’d learned from classic 80’s movies. Whether it’s how masculinity is portrayed in GhostBusters the demonization of working women since the days of Baby Boom or the myth of “women’s movies” not making money, this love letter to iconic 80’s films is as insightful as it is funny.

Although my favorite 80’s movie isn’t mentioned–Better Off Dead you taught me so much–Hadley does a bang-up job culling important lessons about race, culture, and the increasingly myopic view of marketability in studio filmmaking today, all while offering some very personal, very funny glimpses of how these movies affected her.