Hacker Cinema
Terms of Endearment
1983 · Film · 132 min
Directed by James L. Brooks
Aurora, a finicky woman, is in search of true love while her daughter faces marital issues. Together, they help each other deal with problems and find reasons to live a joyful life.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I'm trying to think back to the last time I saw a shopping cart in a movie. I think it was probably Terms of Endearment, but I don't think that the cart made it outside.
sigh
Let me guess: you were born in the 70s to 80s, and the 80s/90s were a formative time for you? That is because you don't remember all the shit that played in whatever golden time period you're imagining. You only remember the hits. You're not accurately remembering the broad distribution of what was on the radio and in theaters in the past, which also contained a lot of crap that you likely never would have wasted your money on. Terrible movies got dumped to TV specials or direct-to-video (today they get dumped to streaming platforms), so even if we filter to what was released in theaters, we're missing a lot of crap.
But how about we look at the top grossing films of 1983 [1], 30 years ago? Some of these hold up and are the classics you remember, like #1 Star Wars Return of the Jedi (still a franchise though), #2 Terms of Endearment, #4 Trading Places, #5 WarGames, #10 Risky Business, #11 National Lampoon's Vacation, #13 The Big Chill, #16 Scarface. Bonafide classics, no question there.
But go even a little down the list and you get middling sequels and formulaic franchise films: #6 Octopussy (formulaic Bond film, which was the Marvel of its time), #7 Sudden Impact (Dirty Harry sequel, not great), #8 Staying Alive (Saturday Night Fever sequel, not great), #12 Superman III (one of the worst Superman films of all time, but ahead of Superman IV), #14 Never Say Never Again (another Bond film, better than Octopussy, but still two in one year), #15 Jaws 3-D (one of the worst action films of all time), #20 Psycho II (another meh sequel).
And these are the top 20 movies ranked on how many people paid to see them in the theaters. There are hundreds of others that were regularly shown in theaters that I'm sure you can't recall. Some are classics now (Videodrome, Monty Python's Meaning of Life), but most are not.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/list/ls051080169/
What's disappeared isn't the small independent super-low budget movie... as you said, that market is more active than ever. It's the >$10 million movie that everyone in the country can enjoy, has a name brand actor or two, but isn't just some recycled comic book tripe. Forrest Gump. The Big Sleep. Kramer vs. Kramer. Three Men and a Baby. Four Weddings and a Funeral. Terms of Endearment. etc.