Oddly enough, I hate the artwork on this episode but I love the fact that I was able to match the films’ respective fonts. You win some, you lose some.
We conclude our mini-series with another pair of films that you can’t help but love. Unfortunately, they’ve also had a ripple effect, and the ripples weren’t so great.
We open with Halloween, from 1978. This film was directed by John Carpenter and stars Jamie Lee Curtis. She’s a teenager who has some truly weird adventures in babysitting. It also stars Donald Pleasance as the voice of reason that everyone ignores.
Halloween set many of the horror/slasher film tropes in motion, for sure. But Hollywood has this unfortunate habit where everything has to be bigger, and scarier, and gorier, and just…more. And so other films of the genre suffered specifically because they tried too hard to replicate the original.
From there we jump to 1989’s When Harry Met Sally…, which also set the template for a lot of films in that “star-crossed lovers” rom-com category. The bad news is that the films in its wake didn’t pay enough attention to what made this couple star-crossed, and Hollywood wound up cranking out a lot of films that looked the same, and (perhaps worse) sounded the same, soundtrack-wise, but were clearly not the same in terms of quality.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
In Reel 79, we’re going to take you on a tour of the dark side of television. We’ll start with A Face in the Crowd (1957), directed by Elia Kazan and starring Patricia Neal and Andy Griffith, in one of the few times you’ll see him as this kind of character. From there we go to 1976 and Network, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Peter Finch and William Holden. These are two films that were so oddly prophetic that most people today don’t realize they were originally intended to be satire. Join us, won’t you?
