Personal Lists featuring...

Trading Places 1983

9

Shows and movies released between 1980 and 1989.

27

List created and maintained by https://listrr.pro

3

I well remember being taken to Blazing Saddles at the age of 10, when I was far too young to understand most of the jokes. At the same time, I could see how important Blazing Saddles was to my parents and their friends. They quoted from it for months—years—afterward.

As much as savoring a particular joke, I realize now, they were trying to reclaim that initial, joyful shock to the system. There’s not a film on the WGA’s 101 Funniest Screenplays that doesn’t produce such an unexpected jolt, if not a sustained quake, and for the same reasons Blazing Saddles did—by transgressing accepted norms.

One question that this list asks, however: Should a great comedy simply be gauged by the laughter it elicits? “Satire is what closes on Saturday night,” George S. Kaufman famously quipped. A number of the comedies on this list went under-appreciated at the box office and by critics; years, if not decades, had to pass before the work began to receive its due. This was as true for Buster Keaton’s The General as it was nearly half a century later for Harold and Maude, and 30 years after that for Office Space.

The oldest movie on the list is Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), while the most recent is Bridesmaids, released in 2011. The latter also has the distinction of being written by two women—Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, working in slapstick, a genre historically dominated by men. Bridesmaids comes in at no. 16, immediately after When Harry Met Sally, written by the legendary Nora Ephron. Comedy screenwriting has long been a playground that women and writers of color have not had enough time in. The work of Richard Pryor on Blazing Saddles, Tina Fey on Mean Girls, Amy Heckerling on Clueless, and Hagar Wilde, co-writer of Bringing Up Baby, makes you wonder what a list would be if the playground had been more inclusive all along.

In the end, the variety of films on the list—as different as Being There is to Airplane! or Duck Soup is to Fargo—indicates how difficult it is to gauge a great comedy by any set of particular criteria. Better to say the best comedy writers and comedians are like astronauts, launching themselves beyond the ozone layer of the tasteful and the expected in order to find the forbidden or the outrageous or the merely uncomfortable. Whether that produces an outrageous comedy like Mrs. Doubtfire or a satire like Dr. Strangelove, the goal is still provocation. And truth.

Written by Paul Brownfield
2015-11-15

1

I started off by gathering ratings from IMDB (User/Critic Average), Rotten Tomatoes (Tomatometer, Critic Average, Audience Score, User Average), Metacritic (Critic Average, User Average) and Letterboxd (User Average). I was then able to determine a rating (out of 10) for each individual rating and therefore come up with an average rating for each site. Each site’s average rating was then weighted fairly so that no site’s ratings were favored above the rest.

The next step was to make sure that each film was treated fairly. Other top movie list’s like IMDb’s Top 1000 removes films that have under a certain viewing number (25,000 I think), but rather than ruling out films that may have been overlooked by the general audience (especially older films), I opted to alter these films score by carefully deducting points depending on how many people have seen it, and therefore voted on it. I also thought it was needed to make sure that recent films (released within the past 36 months) were also not favored, as it usually takes 3 years for the average rating to settle down. So I also added a deduction to these films that fell under this rule.

Taken from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3hbiio/update_1001_greatest_movies_of_all_time_plus/

15

New Year’s Eve Movies to Cue up as We Get Ready to Ring in the New Year.

2

Netflix's Stranger Things is a critically acclaimed science fiction horror drama television series created by the Duffer Brothers.

As an homage to the 1980s, it's infused with references to the pop culture and films of that time.

This is a list of every movie or tv show that is referenced in or that inspired Stranger Things.

1

One man's journey to watch 3650 movies of the 80s

9

Films that depict anti-capitalist, socialist, or syndicalist tendencies.

7

My personal Classic comedy list

6

Awesome movies for the family

3

HollyWood Movies based on Popularity

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