More photos after the jump!Joe: Where was the beef? What was Willis talking about? Who could it have been now? The 1980s presented us with so many baffling questions. Last January, Mr. Clark and I embarked upon a hazardous journey through some of the the decade's more memorable films in search of answers to these and other queries. And we did learn a great deal about the decade of Reagan and the Rubik's Cube. But more importantly, we learned something about -- wait for it -- ourselves. Along the way, we screened comedies, horror films, dramas, comedies, science-fiction films, and even comedies. Wait, did I mention "comedies" more than once? I'm sorry. It's just that those movies were so god damnably hard to write about that they left a permanent scar on my psyche. Anyway, now that our year-long vision quest is complete (damnit, we should've done Vision Quest!), I thought it was important to get some "closure" on the whole process, which is why I've invited Mr. Clark here for this frank and unguarded conversation about the movies we reviewed. I think I'll start with the obvious question: why the 1980s rather than some other, perhaps more tasteful decade?
Craig: That's a good question, Joe. I was six at the dawn of the decade and 16 when it went bye-bye, so I suppose one could say the '80s was when I came of age as a consumer of popular culture. I'm sure that must also account for why most of the movies I wanted to cover (such as Explorers, Spies Like Us, Buckaroo Banzai and Weird Science) were ones that hailed from the middle of the decade, when I was on the cusp of puberty and thus the most impressionable. And yes, we did lean rather heavily on the comedies as the expense of other genres (I notice that we didn't cover a single action film in the whole lot) and we also shied away from some of the biggest stars like Stallone, Schwarzeneggar, Cruise and Murphy. Even as we set out to watch movies that people had actually heard of (as opposed to things like Trapped Ashes and Repo! The Genetic Opera, which people could happily go their whole lives without ever seeing and never know the difference), we still managed to avoid most of the biggest movies of the decade. Could that be the result of our lingering contrarian streak? Inquiring minds want to know, Joe!
