1982: Greatest Geek Year Ever!

This was a documentary that caught my attention when I heard a couple of podcasters check it out. It went on a list of ones to see and I decided to put this on while at work late in the day. I treated it like a podcast where I would look down if something was interesting. If not, I would listen to different experts, actors and filmmakers who were alive during this year. To preface, I was born in 1987. 1982 though was a year that I've seen a good number of things from.

Now that I have that set up, this year truly was stacked like these people were talking about. This sparked me to go through Letterboxd to list my favorite films from each year regardless of genre. It was something that I was already doing for horror, but I was curious about everything together.

This year is featuring things like Blade Runner, The Thing, E. T., Poltergeist, First Blood, Rocky III and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. That's not even different pop culture things that spawned from these films or just in general. This runs through, hearing from the likes of Mick Garris, Robert Meyer Burnett, Ron Howard, Adrienne Barbeau, Darin Scott, Keith David, Sean Young, Roger Corman and Leonard Maltin. I'm leaving out so many more. Just hearing their insight truly got me excited. It makes me wish I was older or could go back in time.

I'll discuss how this was made and it has great production value. This runs 164 minutes and it didn't feel like it. They focus on different films from across genres. They incorporate in clips, talk about why each one did so well or how it was ahead of its time. Talking about the impact from it during the era and now. This is how you do a documentary. This is one of the best, I will say that.

I highly recommend it if you're a fan of this era or just want to learn more about this year. It's getting my highest marks for a doc.

My Rating: 8 out of 10.

No pun intended - you can always make a case for something ... and against it. But I have to admit, they do have quite a few strong points here. The movies that were released that year ... I mean geek galore! And while some are sequels (Star Trek), even those seem to have taken a turn. I love the first Star Trek movie, but it was weirdly serious. I reckon the sequel did try something different.

Of course you have many other films, like The Thing ... some...thing that was not that popular the year it came out (ET may have something to do with that), but has proven to have stood the test of time! One of the best movies ever ... same or similar things can be said about Blade Runner.

The documentary (which played as part of Frightfest) goes in depth with a few of those ... letting "famous" geeks ... well geek out! Or fanboy out or whatever you want to call it. It may have a frantic pace - but it is quite enticing to say the least ... if you are a Geek, you'll probably love this ... you may not agree with everything, but that is the fun of it ...

All in all good documentary - lots of famous commentators. Heartfelt recollections of their experiences making, being in, and watching the films. Really reminded me of how good I felt back then with seeing original story telling in the scripts; not all this triple-rebooting going on these days!

I only made it half-way through the documentary though, because the F-word was used at least twice by the end of the commentary by Director Nicholas Meyer...he was recounting his own personal experience with a studio executive, but the words could have bleeped-out, and it would have been just as informative.

I can only review episode 1 of this 4 part series as the rest is not available to me yet, but so far it's good.

You can see it's not the highest budget documentary ever made, with title cards, fonts and flat graphics looking somewhat basic & home-made, but it's good where it counts, with the most important thing in place: plenty of interviews and soundbites with people who actually appeared in the movies, or were involved in making them, plus a surprisingly large number of names from the video game industry. For instance I was happy to see Nolan Bushnell of Atari. The early eighties console and arcade scene was inextricably linked to the films in the minds of kids of the time, one of which I am.

The first episode does have a few too many fast cuts, sometimes the rush of comments from different people spending no more than a few seconds on each person can get a bit messy, but I can see that they are trying to fit a lot in the first episode by way of an introduction to the whole thing, so maybe in the next episodes things will calm down a bit. In this episode, the main focus does eventually settle down on Poltergeist & E. T. and plenty of interesting and entertaining information is divulged, including quite a lot on Spielberg's cancelled project "Night Skies", which directly influenced E. T., which I was not aware of.

The most important thing you take away from it is the sheer Spielbergian wonder of the film and other films of the year, because of course Spielberg was possibly the single most influential person of the early 80s genre blockbusters, so he does deserve the spotlight he gets in the second half of the show. Even though he himself is not interviewed (the show is not quite made on the scale to get interviews with Lucas, Spielberg etc), plenty of people who worked with him and knew him are interviewed, so it works.

I will definitely be watching the coming episodes and can recommend this without hesitation.