Review: 'Rewinding the '80s'

When I think of the movies of the eighties, I tend to think of a really fun filmography, whether we're talking about horror, teen movies, sci-fi, or fantasy, the genre that tended to most bleed into all the others. Following a decade in which the defining cinematic style was bleakness, eighties cinema seems like a toy box of action, loud music, product tie-ins, and welcome silliness. 

Of course, the eighties wasn't all Back to the Future and E.T. It was also the decade of Sophie's Choice, Chariots of Fire, and Gandhi.

Despite a colorful, cartoony cover that definitely seems more E.T. than Sophie's Choice, John Malahy's Rewinding the '80s is more Sophie's Choice than E.T. It often reads like an intro to film text book, both with its dry prose and the way it breathlessly checks off as many eighties films and defining moments in the decade's cinema as possible. 

If you're the type that hates it when your favorite movie isn't mentioned in a book about movies, you probably won't be disappointed by Rewinding the '80s, unless your favorite movie is The Naked Gun or Tampopo (and if you haven't seen those two, you should). It covers an amazing amount of ground in just 265, abundantly illustrated pages. That means most of the films Malahy name checks don't get discussed in great depth, but he does slow down when hitting key spots, like the films of Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg or how commercialism or the cold war influenced the decade's films. 

It's impressive that Malahy managed to weave so much material into his discussion, but it's sometimes difficult to get a clear sense of what defined the cinema of the eighties or how the films of its decade helped progress the art of film when the author moves through so much of that material so quickly. Ultimately, that attempt to take on too much may be a bigger issue than the book's tone, which does loosen up a bit whenever the author gets into the more populist nooks of the eighties, such as its teen and horror flicks.

If Rewinding the '80s doesn't consistently capture the spirit of its decade-of-focus in its text, it certainly does in its layout, which is full of color photos, which include stills, poster reproductions, and behind-the-scenes shots, such as one depicting Spielberg playing with his toy soldiers. Sure the caption indicates that he was just planning a shot for Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that guy was nothing if not a big kid. He knew what eighties movies were all about.