Hacker Cinema
Caddyshack
1980 · Film · 98 min
Directed by Harold Ramis
At an exclusive country club, an ambitious young caddy, Danny Noonan, eagerly pursues a caddy scholarship in hopes of attending college and, in turn, avoiding a job at the lumber yard. In order to succeed, he must first win the favour of the elitist Judge Smails, and then the caddy golf tournament which Smails sponsors.
2 positive9 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
Anyone who read The Great Gatsby in high school should be familiar with the disdain for the nouveau rich amongst old money. The movie Caddyshack also does a good job at depicting this.
Thank you!!
Confession: I’ve never seen Caddyshack. But after everyone telling me about my bags reference to the movie, I watched the clip where the golf bag shoots out the club haha and I can see the crazy coincidence
Looks to be a different source from the OP, but let's go down the chart for 1980 past the top ten:
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1980/
Kramer vs. Kramer (book)
Ordinary People (book)
Popeye (comic)
The Shining (book)
Cheech and Chong's Next Movie (sequel)
Caddyshack (original - franchise starter)
Friday the 13th (original - franchise starter)
Brubaker (book)
The Jazz Singer (remake)
Flash Gordon (sequel/remake)
Bronco Billy (original)
Raging Bull (book - biopic)
Maybe you should go back a few decades until you can find a time when the top 20 were mostly originals. Would have to be before the Star Wars/Jaws blockbuster era, probably.
Same. 29. I think it's just that we grew up with the internet, and although we haven't 'seen it all,' we've picked the low-hanging fruit.
When I was a kid, the first time I walked into a video store, it blew my mind. I spent every weekend for years binge-watching 3, 4, 5 rented movies. Now, I haven't actually watched a movie in years. I think that although there are new movies coming out, the patterns are fundamentally the same and so movies have gotten boring. After you've seen Apocalypse Now, Evil Dead, and Blade Runner, the Wire, Caddyshack, Oldboy, No Country, Night of the Living Dead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and on-and-on-and-on, you've seen damn near most of the plot variations that can conceivably be constructed. So, new stuff just looks the same as the old stuff and it's not so exciting.
Same with the internet. I discovered 90% of what I still think is cool by the time I was 13. I picked the low-hanging fruit. So, now I'm at the point where I go deep on things. It's not sexy, but it is pretty rewarding. Used to think Magic-1 was awesome, well now Ben Eater's 8-bit-kit is half-assembled on a table in my living room. Used to think rock climbing was cool, but now I have to put in weekend after weekend at JTree moving over granite. Used to think Fravia was cool, well now it's time to construct my own web-crawlers. Used to think metalcasting and the Lindsay Catalog was fascinating, but now it's time to build actual internal combustion engines from scratch. Used to listen to the old Defcon DVDs on a pre-iPod mp3 player, but the time came to actually work through Erickson's AOE.
I think it's a natural evolution of life. When you're young you make a shallow pass and find what really resonates with you. When you get older, you spend more time digging down deep into those things and it's not as exciting as it once was, but there is a satisfaction from getting good at those things.
An alternate approach is to try viewing the internet through the lens of cannabis. I've had many nights in life where smoking some pot and watching YouTube has segued into a late-night coding session implementing something fun in Python that's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. Pot has a way of helping you see things you've seen a million times in a completely new light. Some people love it, some people hate it. YMMV.
Most people seem to hit this point in life and just have kids to keep stuff interesting when things start to get boring. They take up a lot of time, teach you a lot of stuff, and suck up a ton of time.
Here's one that's out of the norm around here- Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story by Chris Nashawaty.
Caddyshack is one of my favorites comedies. I've always imagined its creation was a well thought out journey from the first idea to the finished movie. It turns out it was not. The movie didn't really take shape until it was being edited and getting ready to be released.
The book is a description of how it was created. A great read on describing the process from idea to award-winning movie.
I've worked with very creative teams and wondered how anything gets done. It's very different from the engineering/techie way of getting from point a to finished. The process that created Caddyshack is a great example of that.
It seems to me the author does a lot of hand-wringing over the loss of ownership of things I didn't particularly care if I own or not. I think back to Thoreau's "don't own anything that eats or needs painting". I had DVDs because I might want to watch the movie again. But if I were to never see Caddyshack ever again, I could live with that, so now I might just buy it on iTunes. Apple has shown themselves worthy enough in my eyes to trust that I will always have access to Caddyshack. But here's the kicker before some of you get your dander up: if Apple were to somehow screw me Microsoft-style and my movie just disappears, for the pittance I paid I don't care. Because it beats boxes of DVDs taking up space in the attic.
We’ll have ovens and thermostats that you set with your voice, and a toilet and bathroom that periodically give you the equivalent of a medical check-up.
Until we are required to have such things, I do not care that I have the option. I have a Nest, I have Hue lights, I've gone to the trouble of hacking together a HomeKit server that can talk to the cameras. You know what? All of that shit could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care much. Oh, I was all excited when I got the gear, it's handy, and I would be inconvenienced by the disappearance. But the novelty of that stuff wore off fast for me, and I don't consider it a requirement in my life.
And I think that's key: as long as we can do without your subscription whatever, the author's hand-wringing is a bit overdone.
You should learn to read better, what I said was "he had modest success post SNL with those movies and a long string of flops" and the "those movies" are referred to are Ghohsbusters, Caddyshack et al, the ones he did right after SNL. There is 10 year period of flops between "Ground Hog Day" and "Lost in Translation." I also stated that. Notice you didn't mention a single movie from that 10 year period? Exactly.
There was nothing smug about either of my replies. There is also nothing ignorant about replies and I'm well aware of his career arc. I'm not even sure what point is but it sounds like you might be upset because I called you out on your presumptuous comment. Grow up.
"modest success"
Yes, because Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie were small, modestly successful, movies that only a few people have heard of.
I mean it's not like Ghostbusters was one of the most successful comedy movies of all time.
It's not like Groundhog Day from 1993 was was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" or anything.
No, clearly he just had "modest" success in just those 13 years post-SNL. I mean we'd better not even mention his award winning turns in movies starting the late 90s had we?
Yikes, I take it back - it's not your youth, it's your smug ignorance that's showing.
My youth? I am old enough that I saw both Ghostbusters and Caddyshack as a kid in the theater when they were new movies. As such your comment or attempt at snark is quite laughable. I've been an avid Bill Murray fan for I guess most of my life now. He was not a legend back then, he had modest success post SNL with those movies and a long string of flops and was actually considered "washed up" for quite some time. So no, the whole "living legend" thing started around the time that Sophia Coppola cast him in "Lost in Translation" and introduced him to a new generation of kids. This phenomenon is particularly amusing to Murray fans in my age group.
Your lack of facts is showing.
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine, Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.
...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.