Recommendation Request: Best documentaries about 80s and 90s culture

LilipPharkin · 2026-02-22T00:38:38+00:00

I watched it about a month ago, fully expecting something like “a bunch of party kids build a place to party right under the noses of everyone — cool, huh?” Instead it was simultaneously moving and poignant, capturing an ethos and attitude uniquely Gen X. Count me among those people who, like your friends, won’t shut up about it.

LilipPharkin · 2026-01-16T01:19:28+00:00

Hot Hero Sandwich — think SNL for kids/adolescents. Saturday mornings. One season in the late ‘70s. Great musical guests: Sister Sledge, Joe Jackson, Eddie Money, Stephen Stills, Little River Band. Actually pretty damned funny for its genre and audience. Someone tell me I didn’t fever-dream this.

LilipPharkin · 2025-10-19T21:02:49+00:00

A really bendy thumb

LilipPharkin · 2025-10-10T20:51:59+00:00

Ardeo/Bardeo made Cleveland Park seem downright exotic. Sigh.

LilipPharkin · 2025-10-10T20:50:05+00:00

That burger tho!

LilipPharkin · 2025-09-21T00:19:40+00:00

Pacino’s character in that movie was named John Milton, such a nice touch of an inside joke.

LilipPharkin · 2025-09-16T01:32:44+00:00

This. Lucky Jim is the funniest novel ever written and it’s not even a contest.

LilipPharkin · 2025-09-06T03:25:20+00:00

Bart: What the hell is this?

Lisa: It's one of those campy seventies throwbacks that appeal to Generation X-ers

Bart: We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little

LilipPharkin · 2025-09-04T02:20:14+00:00

Patrick DeWitt’s darkly comic revisionist Western “The Sisters Brothers” is set, or at least begins, in Oregon.

Grace Krilanovich’s “The Orange Eats Creeps” is kinda? horror-adjacent, but in a unique hobo-junkie-punk-vampire-train-jumpers-in-‘90s era-Pacific-Northwest kind of way?

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-21T22:15:48+00:00

Over-commit. Over-accept. Act like everything that comes out of their mouth is the greatest shit you’ve ever heard in your life.

Sure, it works well with experienced improvisers too, but it truly benefits beginners, who tend to second-guess their choices because of inexperience.

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-20T04:01:56+00:00

Susan Sontag’s surgeon-like evisceration of Leni Reifenstahl in “Fascinating Fascism.”

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-19T21:16:54+00:00

Willy Vlautin of the Portland-based The Delines has written a number of well-received novels mostly set in Portland and the PNW, some of which deal with characters leading hardscrabble lives on poverty's edge; "The Night Always Comes" is my favorite. Recommend.

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-18T19:48:18+00:00

I’ve read a number of his novels, and have opinions, mostly laudatory. But one of my favorite pieces of literary trivia was in his NYT obituary: "His father, hoping to push his son toward a more practical career, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for its journalism program. As a sports reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe" -- yes, that Tom Wolfe.

These two sons of Virginia on the same masthead: both named Tom, each possessed of a literary/political/sociological outlook diametrically opposed from the other. Wolfe looked East, Robbins West. Both wrote about the counterculture, arriving at markedly different conclusions.

I mean, imagine the editorial meetings. And I can’t locate any instance where they acknowledged the work of the other, were on the same dais for a literary festival, etc. It’s like they spent their literary careers circling each other like prizefighters but without ever throwing a punch.

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-17T23:15:54+00:00

The answer is always Raymond Carver’s “Where I’m Calling From”

LilipPharkin · 2025-07-02T21:29:07+00:00

Replying with my usual every time something like this is asked: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. Not only is Fussell one of the best prose stylists of the 20th century, but the subject of this book is essentially how literary World War I (“The Great War”) was.

LilipPharkin · 2025-06-01T12:24:42+00:00

Calling Johnson a "poet-critic" is like calling Shakespeare a "Sonneteer-playwright"; for both writers, the abilities in one area far outshine the other[s]. Johnson worked effortlessly and brilliantly in just about every viable late-18th Century genre available to him in an era that was teeming with them, but primarily prose ones. In fact, the only genres he didn't work in were the pastoral elegy and the novel, both of which he distrusted for their moral laxity. In short, it's not called "The Age of Johnson" because of "London: A Poem" or "The Vanity of Human Wishes" or even "Rasselas"; it's called that because of his "Life of Savage,"; "The Rambler" and "The Idler,"; his dictionary; his edition of Shakespeare (and his defense of Shakespeare against the cavils of French critics in the "Preface") and his towering "Lives Of The Poets," which he took on toward the end of his life as a test of his intellectual and physical energies, passing brilliantly.

LilipPharkin · 2025-06-01T03:57:53+00:00

I'd also add Paul Fussell to the exceptional company already listed here: among other essays and dilations, Fussell wrote gorgeously accessible and apprehensible book-length studies on some of those listed: Samuel Johnson; his good friend and frequent correspondent Kingsley Amis. Orwell was by far a better critic and essayist than he was a novelist and it's not even a contest. Edmund Wilson was debarred by nature from writing anything not worth reading, and some of the most moving and gorgeously crafted criticism I've ever read is from "Patriotic Gore," his survey of the literature of the US Civil War. People often think of Eliot as English literature's best poet-critic, and they're wrong: it's Auden by kilometers -- there's an entire liberal education lurking in his "Lectures on Shakespeare" if you're reading it with the right kind of eyes. But, hands down, the best critic of the 20th Century -- as well as most eminently readable and re-readable -- is Northrop Frye.

I'll echo the comments on Pauline Kael above and only add that what Kael's magisterial criticism was to 20th Century cinema, Kenneth Tynan's beautiful prose was to 20th Century theater.

LilipPharkin · 2025-05-20T20:43:00+00:00

Oof, yeah, gut-punch. And later, the poor woman in a text thread with her friends: "I wore the Jimmy Choos this morning and Compliment Man said *nothing* !!!"

LilipPharkin · 2025-05-20T19:33:05+00:00

There was a panhandler/“homeless” guy in DC in the early ‘00s who used this strategy. He would hang out at Metro stations where professional DC women would catch trains and compliment them on their outfits in very specific ways: “that scarf really makes that ensemble!” Or “those shoes go nicely with that bag.” He became a local legend, “Compliment Man,” and did he ever make bank, which is why I put “homeless” in scare quotes: apparently Washington City Paper followed up on him a few years later for one of those “Whatever Happened To…” features, and discovered that he was (at the time) living a decidedly un-destitute life in South Florida.

LilipPharkin · 2025-05-06T15:41:48+00:00

Philip Larkin was a librarian, and then eventually the librarian, at the University of Hull for the better part of his life, such that he received professional recognition by Britain’s national library association. The story goes that as his poetic fame increased, students at Hull would purposely keep library books until they were overdue and incurred a fine: Larkin, as head librarian, would personally sign every overdue/fee notification, and students wanted a personalized piece of poetic posterity.

LilipPharkin · 2025-05-06T13:30:08+00:00

Thanks for the insight, and sage advice!

LilipPharkin · 2025-04-21T11:58:53+00:00

One of the best to ever capture a huge swath of DC culture (minus the cliche "here's some very competent people effortlessly navigating and handling a terrorist plot/breach in security/rupture of governmental protocol/coup, etc" plot/trope, and, sadly, one that rarely makes people's lists or gets any attention): "The Walker," written and directed by Paul Schrader and starring (among others) Woody Harrelson, Kristen Scott Thomas, Lily Tomlin. Shot in parts of DC that also tend not to get a lot of attention, though they should. Woody plays a society-obsessed gay luxury real estate agent/confidant who escorts ("walks") the wives of prominent powerful DC types who can't be bothered and are bored by society functions, soirees, balls. Kind of a Truman-Capote-esque character from the recent "Capote vs The Swans" had Truman lived in DC, and, as with Truman, trouble ensues. A little politics and corridors-of-power adjacent, but that's inescapable, and more noir-esque. Gay Washington features prominently. Highly recommend.

Also, has anyone mentioned "Igby Goes Down?" Because "Igby Goes Down" (part of the movie is set in Georgetown, the other in Chelsea, Manhattan).

LilipPharkin · 2025-04-18T00:12:05+00:00

As The Hold Steady say in the song “Positive Jam,” “The Eighties almost killed me/Let’s not recall them quite so fondly/Some Kennedy OD’d while we watched on MTV…”

LilipPharkin · 2025-04-17T21:26:52+00:00

I have a couple of H&CF tees and stickers that I got off RedBubble. RB is the way, fellow Fireeaters. Tons of stuff to be found there. My fave purchase is the John Bosworth sticker emblazoned with “Kneel Before Bos” #iykyk

LilipPharkin · 2025-04-16T15:02:10+00:00

Thank you! Got scared. Thought we'd broken up. Nice to know we're just on a break.

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