Word: nostalgia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sometimes, when talking to the older Kenya whites, people who had been around in the colonial days and stayed on after independence, the visitor caught the vibration of a nostalgia so radical that it strained all the way back to the Pleistocene. They had no use for people anymore. They seemed to wish to cleanse the earth of the human stain, and restore it to preconscious innocence...
...Fifties was at least as rotten as any other decade, what with McCarthyism, segregation, the Cold War, the universal conservatism and intolerance. But modern Fifties nostalgia, generated by people who were children back then, is a peculiar kind of tunnel vision that never notices such nastiness. America was complacent and happy, a superpower without a rival in any sphere, and the meaning of life could be easily fit into a popular song with room for doo-wops and a chorus. What a time it was. No wonder we can't seem to get enough...
Images, musical and visual, are the heart of this production; it's like an animated museum of a legendary past. Although it thankfully stays away from the teenage-oriented material of every nostalgia film form American Graffiti to Peggy Sue Got Married, it still treats its adult subjects with a childish joy, playing with baubles of memory like brightly colored toys. One might be left with an unsatisfied desire to know more about the denizens of the Fifties--our parents and teachers--than just their taste in clothing. To be fair, Nite Club confidential never pretends to be more than...
...local park -- name it, they play it. "I wanted the Glenn Miller sound," Stan was saying one recent Sunday night at O'Shea's, where he plays every Sunday night, "and it turned out it was perfect for southwest Florida, for the age group here. The sentiment. The nostalgia. We played the elegant Quail Creek Country Club in Naples last night. When we opened, the people jumped up, and they didn't stop dancing from 8 till midnight." That said, Stan slid into Don't Be That...
...Radio Days has larger ambitions. Rather than a personal history or an exercise in nostalgia, it is a meditation on the evanescence of seemingly permanent institutions. To a child like Joe (Seth Green), it is inconceivable that something as powerful as radio could ever disappear. Might as well tell him that one day his family will cease to be a similarly compelling reality. But here it is, 1987, and Joe is a voice-over narrator of a movie with no coherent narrative, only such anecdotes as groping memory can rescue from the receding past. In the most delicate way imaginable...