Baby Boomer Movies are the god damn worst. If you're watching a movie full of smug, middle aged asswipes talking down to kids (because they themselves were never inexperienced), glorifying their own generation (who's number one accomplishment was divorce), and somehow getting laid depsite being old, ugly, cynical, self-righteous, narccissitic pricks, then you're probably watching a Baby Boomer Movie. The point of this blog is to point out BBMs, review them, and explain what makes each a part of the worst/best genre ever. Hopefully, after reading this primer and some reviews, you'll be able to suggest other BBMS for the blog.
Let's start with what BBM movies are not. Don't get me wrong- just because there are babies boomers in the movie doesn't mean it's a Baby Boomer Movie. There are very few BBMs made before 1995, and many BBMs since have starred baby boomers with otherwise good resumes, such as Clint Eastwood, whose Gran Torino is fucking sweet, while he inexplicably took one of the biggest dumps in movie history with Space Cowboys. My point is that one has to be discerning when picking out BBMs.
The BBM is its own sub-genre whose defining characteristic is that when you watch it, you get the same wrenching knot of hatred in your chest that you get when you see cops beating up poor people, or your mom telling you that your friend can't sleep over for no reason at all (what a total bitch), and the only way to release the anger is to go to Seattle and fire-bomb a cop car, or wait 'til you're 18 and go nuts, fucking/drinking everything you can get your hands on.
George Clooney's career makes for a great lesson on what makes a BBM a BBM. Take two movies: Michael Clayton and Up in the Air- Two movies made within a couple years of each other, both critically acclaimed, one a powerfully subtle exposition on the ties between big business, oil, blahblahblahblahblah; the other an orgy of baby boomer self-fellatio, a tribute to the collossal superiority of smug, domineering, wrinkly-bagged old fucks and how the world isn't fair, and wuv is weawwy weawwy hawd and boo hoo hoo, and how "these kids just don't get it," and how maybe, just maybe, if our grey-maned benefactors would deign to stoop below the Olympian clouds and impart merely a pinch their melifluous wisdom, there may still be hope for the future. They're not betting on it, but maybe. It's basically a 2 hour expansion of the scene in Ferris Beuller when they go to the fancy restaurant and the dick-head maitre d stiffens his back and says, "I weep for the future."
Baby boomer movies can also be horrendously shitty comedies geared directly toward baby boomers (Couples Retreat), romantic comedies for baby boomers (Something's Gotta Give), or even movies that didn't intend to reach out to The Shittiest Generation but slide comfortably into our category because if you like it, you're either a baby boomer or retarded (Save the Last Dance). (I had a super-bangin girlfriend in high school who never let me anywhere near her privates whose mom saw Save the Last Dance by herself (because get this- she was divorced! No shit! A divorced baby boomer! No way!) and said she loved it cause it, "Has a great message!" Only baby boomers say shit like that and, upon watching it I realized that the message was the only redeeming thing about it, and thus it blows, and thus it's a BBM.)
So, you see, as a category or genre, it's pretty broad, yet somewhat discriminating. BBMs are usually dramas (Up in the Air) , but they can also be comedies (Couples Retreat), action movies (The Expendables), or any number of crazy miscellaneous movies who's standard category is harder to pin down (Save the Last Dance, Space Cowboys). What they all have in common is smugness. What most of them have in common is that middle-aged know-it-alls are generally worshipped and glorfied in ways that simply don't exist in real life. There are good movies about Baby Boomers; Baby Boomers have done a lot of cool, admirable things in the world; but as a generation and sub-genre of movies, they are the god damn worst.
(I would like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due. I didn't come up with the idea of BBMs on my own. The inspiration, if not the outright idea, came from this aweseome article in Vice Magazine from a few years ago, and from discussions with my equally-hateful brother who is way more knowledgeable about movies than I. Read the whole article and remember why you hated your parents and all their friends when you were a kid).
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