It’s Thursday and I’m back with a new Thursday Movie Picks feature post. This series is hosted by Wandering through the Shelves and offers you a weekly prompt to post some movie recommendations/talking points according to the theme. Usually, you are supposed to post about 3-5 examples, which I find a very manageable amount.
Today’s theme is Movies That Haven’t Aged Well and was suggested by Getter @Mettel Ray, which is another fantastic blog if you are interested in all sorts of TV and movie content. I can really only recommend checking it out! As for the topic at hand, I have no idea if I’ll do well or not. I have a feeling that, if you take a closer look, a lot of movies from the past did not age well and have quite a lot of issues people wouldn’t tolerate these days. I’ll do my best to bring up some good examples, but just know that I know that there are a lot more movies out there that have issues.
American Beauty
This movie always creeped me out, but has won like 5 Academy Awards and was huge back in the day. I know that it’s not the only movie/story about a middle-aged man discovering himself and lusting after much younger/underage girls, but with this one, it’s just especially uncomfortable because of the discoveries about Spacey’s real life on top of everything.
The Breakfast Club
I liked the movie a lot when I first watched it and still think it has iconic scenes, but you really can’t think about a lot of those scenes too much or it will get really troublesome. Molly Ringwald has written her own essay about the matter, detailing why she is not comfortable with some scenes now (e.g. just think about the up-skirt-shot, even though a body double was used at the time, because she was still underage). Read her own words here.
Never Been Kissed
We can acknowledge that an adult made inappropriate remarks to someone they thought were their student and underage, even if that wasn’t the case in the end, right? I don’t want to bash these movies just to bash them, because that’s not the point of this post and Never Been Kissed is not the only movie with that sort of stuff. Even 10 Things I Hate About You had a principal that talked to her students about her erotic novel, which is just as inappropriate.
Life and Other Disasters 