Thankyou for an insightful and nicely written piece. I was lucky enough to see this on the big screen a few years ago great experience, I was struck at just how lurid and vivid is the colour and lighting. Like a shop window display...
You're right. It's always so fascinating to go back to a revered movie like this and find all of its oddities! I guess this is to do with Nichols' kind of observational background - he sets up this propsperous suburb like a showroom! And the neighbourhood he visits for the wedding later on is set up like an alien world - dusty and unattractive.
In reviewing this boomer touchstone, I got down Douglas Coupland’s book ‘Generation-X’. I thought he’d have something interesting to say about the baby-boomers. But no, not a thing. The man who literally invented Gen-X (anyone born in the sixties, he says) doesn’t mention the preceding generation, the one we’re all obsessed with, the one that ruined everything. So I’m thinking ‘maybe we’ve got it wrong, maybe it’s our own fault’.
Thankyou for an insightful and nicely written piece. I was lucky enough to see this on the big screen a few years ago great experience, I was struck at just how lurid and vivid is the colour and lighting. Like a shop window display...
You're right. It's always so fascinating to go back to a revered movie like this and find all of its oddities! I guess this is to do with Nichols' kind of observational background - he sets up this propsperous suburb like a showroom! And the neighbourhood he visits for the wedding later on is set up like an alien world - dusty and unattractive.
In reviewing this boomer touchstone, I got down Douglas Coupland’s book ‘Generation-X’. I thought he’d have something interesting to say about the baby-boomers. But no, not a thing. The man who literally invented Gen-X (anyone born in the sixties, he says) doesn’t mention the preceding generation, the one we’re all obsessed with, the one that ruined everything. So I’m thinking ‘maybe we’ve got it wrong, maybe it’s our own fault’.