When people think about Dirty Dancing, they think about romance. They think about the music. They think about that iconic lift. But maybe it’s time to rewatch the film through a different lens: what if this isn’t Baby’s coming-of-age story… but her father’s slow descent into vacation-induced madness? In our latest episode of The Regular …
Read more “Dirty Dancing (1987): A Father’s Worst Nightmare”
What do you get when you cross a Mountain Dew commercial, a Rocky-style underdog story, and more montage footage than actual script pages? You get Rad—the 1986 cult classic that lives and dies by slow-motion stunts, blaring synth-pop, and the idea that BMX racing is the most important thing in the universe. In our latest …
When Romancing the Stone hit theaters in 1984, it wasn’t expected to become a defining film of the decade. The studio had doubts. The director, Robert Zemeckis, was still proving himself. And the genre—a mix of action, comedy, and romance—wasn’t exactly a sure thing. But what audiences got was a near-perfect blend of thrills, laughs, …
Read more “Adventure, Romance, and Mud Slides: Revisiting Romancing the Stone”
Let’s be honest—“It holds up” gets thrown around more than Fast & Furious sequels. But what does it really mean when we say a movie still works decades later? Is it some mystical combination of nostalgia and lowered expectations? Or is there something deeper at play? At The Regular Guy Movie Show, we believe the …
Read more “The Regular Guy’s Guide to What Holds Up in a Movie”
At first glance, RoboCop might seem like your average 80s action flick—just another excuse to blow off limbs, fire off one-liners, and teach evildoers that crime literally doesn’t pay (it explodes instead). But beneath the titanium-plated chest and industrial-sized squibs is something more sinister—and smarter. RoboCop isn’t just a movie where a cyborg punches through …
Read more “RoboCop’s Violent Satire: Smarter Than It Looks?”
(By Giving Us a Bunch of Dumb Teenagers Who Thought They Had It All Figured Out) There are teen movies that put adolescence on a pedestal—wistful coming-of-age stories that make growing up look like a carefully curated Instagram feed. And then there’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which looked at the chaos of teen life …
Read more “How Fast Times at Ridgemont High Captured the Messy Reality of Teen Life”
There are movies that whisper.There are movies that speak clearly.And then there’s Flash Gordon—a movie that arrives in a rhinestone rocket ship, punches subtlety in the face, and asks, “Did someone order camp with a side of Queen?” Released in 1980, Flash Gordon is what happens when you give a space opera a makeover by …
Read more “From Queen to Costumes: The Wild Style of Flash Gordon”