With Valentine’s Day approaching, it felt like the right moment to step away from jump scares, body counts, and box office noise—and spend an hour with something far more enduring: love, as expressed through film music.
Cinema has always struggled to say what love feels like. Dialogue often collapses under the weight of it—becoming either too poetic or painfully banal. Film scores, on the other hand, have an uncanny ability to articulate what words cannot: longing, ecstasy, restraint, obsession, memory, and heartbreak. Sometimes all at once.
This episode’s juried selections are not simply “romantic” scores in the conventional sense. These are works that understand love as complicated and often uncomfortable—love that consumes, love that lingers, love that is sacrificed or denied. From classic Hollywood to modern cinema, these scores don’t just underscore romance; they interrogate it.
Some of these films are sweeping and operatic. Others are quiet, restrained, almost painfully intimate. But what they share is an emotional honesty—music that trusts the listener to feel deeply without being told how.
So settle in. Let the music guide the conversation. This is ReelTalk—and today, we’re listening to what love sounds like.
Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry
When satire ceases being satire–we’re living inside it.
There are films that feel timely, films that feel dated, and then there is Network—a work so disturbingly elastic that it seems to recalibrate its relevance with each passing decade. What Sidney Lumet’s incendiary masterpiece offered in 1976 as provocation now functions as diagnosis. Network ceased being satire the moment we began living inside it. And at fifty years on, it is no longer prophetic so much as instructional—a grim field manual for the media ecosystem we willingly built.
On its surface, Network is a scathing critique of television news and the corrosive marriage between journalism and entertainment. But that reading now feels almost quaint. Today, the film operates as a far more expansive lens—one through which we can examine social media’s performative outrage, the collapse of editorial integrity, the rise of influencers over actors, and “content” replacing cinema as both commodity and aspiration. The film’s possibilities for interpretation are not merely endless; they are inescapable.
You can listen to the NETWORK episode of ReelTalk, which serves as a great companion piece to this article through your favorite podcast service. For your convenience, I’ve included some links that may work for you.
When I survey the contemporary media landscape—where outrage is currency, truth is malleable, and spectacle supplants substance—I often find myself echoing Howard Beale’s immortal lament: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” The tragedy, of course, is that Beale’s righteous fury is swiftly commodified, packaged, and sold back to the public. In Network, that process is the warning. In 2026, it is the business model.
What Network ultimately offers is not just a critique of television news, but an elegy for every so-called Golden Age of legacy media—journalism, cinema, and serialized television alike. Watching it now, I am reminded of Norma Desmond’s aching declaration in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Substitute “pictures” for platforms, algorithms, and engagement metrics, and the lament lands with devastating clarity. In my view, social media and streaming have not merely disrupted cinema and television; they have delivered a mortal wound—one from which craft, patience, and collective cultural experience may never fully recover.
Network endures first and foremost because it is built on one of the most ferocious screenplays ever put to film. Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning script is not merely well-written; it is weaponized language—monologues that cut like scalpels, dialogue that oscillates between blistering satire and operatic tragedy, and ideas so densely packed they continue to unfold decades later. This is writing that trusts intelligence, that dares to be verbose, ideological, and confrontational in a way modern studio cinema rarely permits. Chayefsky understood that words—spoken with conviction—could be more explosive than spectacle, and he built Network accordingly.
What makes the screenplay extraordinary is its refusal to choose a single target. It indicts television news, corporate capitalism, religious fervor, political apathy, and audience complicity with equal venom. The famous “mad as hell” speech is not a populist rallying cry so much as a trap—an emotional release engineered to be monetized, emptied of meaning, and repackaged as programming. Chayefsky was not predicting outrage culture; he was anatomizing it. In an era where dialogue is often sanded down to algorithm-friendly soundbites, Network feels almost alien in its literary ambition—proof that cinema once trusted language to carry weight, risk, and consequence.
Sidney Lumet’s direction is the perfect counterbalance: disciplined, precise, and deliberately unflashy. Lumet stages the film like a moral courtroom drama, allowing performances and ideas to occupy the foreground while the camera observes with quiet authority. His restraint is crucial. Rather than amplifying the satire through stylistic excess, Lumet grounds the absurdity in realism—office spaces feel oppressive, boardrooms feel sterile, and television studios feel eerily sacred. The effect is chilling: the madness is not heightened by cinematic flourish; it emerges organically from systems that feel frighteningly familiar.
Together, Chayefsky and Lumet create a film that feels less like a movie and more like a controlled detonation. There is no indulgence, no wasted motion, no attempt to soften the blow. In contrast to today’s cinema—often drowned in visual noise, diluted themes, and studio-mandated ambiguity—Network stands as a reminder of what happens when writing and direction operate with absolute clarity of purpose. It is fearless, articulate, and devastatingly focused. And perhaps most damning of all: it proves that cinema once had the courage to tell audiences the truth, even when that truth was deeply uncomfortable.
Yet if Network endures as forcefully as it does, it is not solely because of its prescience. It endures because it is performed with astonishing precision and gravitas by one of the greatest ensembles ever assembled. Peter Finch’s Howard Beale remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable figures—a man whose breakdown is mistaken for authenticity, whose humanity is exploited until nothing remains. Finch’s posthumous Academy Award win feels less like recognition than inevitability.
William Holden, meanwhile, brings a weary, world-worn melancholy to Max Schumacher that resonates deeply with his earlier turn as Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard. Both characters are men who recognize the rot of the system even as they remain complicit within it—observers with just enough moral clarity to feel shame, but not enough power to stop the machine. Holden’s quiet resignation here serves as the film’s conscience, a reminder of what professionalism and restraint once meant.
And then there is Faye Dunaway, delivering a tour de force for the ages—one of those rare performances that does not merely dominate a film, but defines an era of acting. Her Diana Christensen is ambition incarnate: ice-cold, ferociously intelligent, and utterly unencumbered by empathy. Dunaway doesn’t soften the character or seek audience approval; she weaponizes Diana’s ruthlessness, allowing her to move through the film with the predatory calm of someone who understands power not as responsibility, but as leverage. The performance is so precise and so unflinching that it almost feels inhuman, as though Diana has already evolved into the algorithmic logic the film warns us about—ratings as morality, attention as currency, and human cost as an acceptable casualty.
It is no accident that Dunaway earned the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role. The Oscar was not simply recognition of a great performance; it was an acknowledgment of something rarer—a character so vividly realized that she became a cultural archetype. Diana Christensen is not just a television executive; she is the prototype for the modern media operator, the spiritual ancestor of today’s content strategists, brand architects, and engagement-obsessed executives. Dunaway plays her with surgical control, her clipped delivery and laser-focused gaze conveying a woman who has replaced conscience with metrics long before such thinking became normalized.
In the broader context of film history, Dunaway’s work in Network cements her status as one of the greatest actresses of all time—very much in the lineage of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, yet operating outside the classical Golden Age of Hollywood. Like them, Dunaway possessed an unapologetic intensity, a willingness to embrace unlikable women, and a commanding screen presence that bent films around her gravitational pull. But unlike Davis or Crawford, her era offered fewer guardrails and less mythmaking; Dunaway emerged during a transitional moment in American cinema, when performances could be raw, confrontational, and morally untidy.
That makes her Diana Christensen all the more extraordinary. It is not a performance cushioned by studio glamour or softened by melodrama—it is sharp, modern, and terrifyingly plausible. Decades later, Dunaway’s Oscar-winning turn feels less like a relic of 1970s cinema and more like a warning label we ignored.
The supporting cast—Beatrice Straight, Ned Beatty, Robert Duvall—forms a devastating chorus, each representing a different facet of institutional decay. Straight’s Oscar-winning performance, in particular, remains one of the most remarkable achievements in Academy history. The fact that Straight’s Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was won with comparatively limited screen time only underscores the magnitude of her presence. Every line, every glance carries weight. Gravitas is not measured in minutes.
It is impossible to discuss Network without reckoning with its unprecedented—and now unthinkable—Oscar performance. The film received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and an astonishing four acting nominations across all performance categories. Even more remarkable: Network won three of the four acting awards—Peter Finch (Best Actor), Faye Dunaway (Best Actress), and Beatrice Straight (Best Supporting Actress)—with Finch’s win occurring posthumously. That trifecta remains a singular achievement in Oscar history.
What makes this feat so haunting in retrospect is not merely its rarity, but what it represents: a time when the Academy rewarded performance-driven cinema rooted in language, ideas, and moral urgency. These were not roles engineered for “Oscar moments” clipped for social media circulation. They were fully realized characters inhabiting a screenplay that demanded intelligence, restraint, and theatrical rigor. Even Beatrice Straight’s win—earned with fewer than six minutes of screen time—speaks to an era when gravitas mattered more than exposure, and emotional truth outweighed narrative gymnastics.
Contrast that with the modern awards landscape, where performances are often subsumed by brand visibility, platform allegiance, and campaign machinery. Today’s Oscars frequently feel less like a celebration of cinema than a referendum on cultural relevance as defined by streaming metrics and algorithmic reach. In that context, Network’s acting sweep feels not merely impressive, but elegiac—another artifact from a period when cinema trusted adults to speak, listen, and think.
This is where Network dovetails uncomfortably with my broader reflections on the erosion of cinematic prestige and journalistic integrity. The film arrived at a moment when studios still believed movies could challenge audiences, when networks still pretended journalism was a public service, and when awards bodies still recognized craft over content. That ecosystem no longer exists.
Today, companies like Netflix and Disney—titans of scale and convenience—have played outsized roles in flattening the cultural landscape. Netflix’s content-first philosophy has blurred the line between cinema and disposable product, prioritizing volume over vision and treating storytelling as a data problem to be optimized rather than an art form to be refined. Disney, meanwhile, has transformed legacy filmmaking into brand maintenance, where risk is minimized, mythmaking is franchised, and even news-adjacent programming is filtered through spectacle and marketability.
In that environment, Network feels almost confrontational. It reminds us that journalism once aspired to truth rather than virality, that cinema once valued language over noise, and that performances once carried weight beyond their runtime. The film’s Oscar dominance is not simply a historical footnote—it is a marker of how far the industry has drifted from rewarding seriousness, substance, and moral clarity.
Ultimately, Network foresaw where we were headed with terrifying clarity. But perhaps its greatest sorrow is that it did not imagine how eagerly we would embrace that future. Our media landscape has not merely changed; it has lost its soul. Journalism has become performance. Cinema has become content. And authenticity—once a virtue—has been repurposed as branding. Half a century later, Network stands as both benchmark and indictment. It is proof that cinema once mattered enough to scare the powerful—and a reminder that somewhere along the way, we stopped demanding that it do so.
Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry
From the Big Screen to the Smallest: The Oscars and the Final Lament for Cinema
In 1929, the Academy Awards were born alongside the consolidation of cinema as the defining art form of the twentieth century. The Oscars did not merely honor motion pictures; they sanctified the big screen as a cathedral of light where stories were projected larger than life, and where audiences gathered together in reverent silence to be transformed. Nearly a century later, the announcement that the Oscars will move to YouTube in 2029 feels less like an adaptation and more like a capitulation. It’s a moment of inflection that reads, unmistakably, as a eulogy.
Anyone who has followed my work on Twitter or my blog for any length of time knows that I effectively gave up on the Oscars years ago. Even so, this announcement demands cultural analysis and reflection on its deeper implications. One needn’t be a devoted viewer of the ceremony to recognize the ongoing erosion of cinema itself; disengagement does not preclude clear sight, and distance often sharpens it.
There is a morbid irony in a ceremony created to celebrate cinema’s grand scale choosing to live on the smallest screen possible. The Oscars migrating to YouTube is not simply a platform change; it is a symbolic reversal of values. The institution that once affirmed spectacle, patience, and collective experience now aligns itself with the very medium that played a decisive role in cinema’s metaphoric death—fragmented attention, algorithmic taste-making, and content flattened into disposable scrolls. What was once king has voluntarily donned the motley of the court jester.
For decades, the Oscars functioned as a kind of cultural mass. Even when ratings declined, the ceremony retained its claim to seriousness. It insisted—sometimes stubbornly—that movies mattered, that craft mattered, that the labor of hundreds could still culminate in something worthy of ritual. To move this rite to YouTube is to concede that cinema no longer warrants ceremony at all. It is now content, indistinguishable from reaction videos, vlogs, and monetized outrage. The awards will play not to the gods of light and shadow, but to the lowest common denominator of engagement.
This decision cannot be disentangled from the broader arc traced in the manuscript on which I am presently writing Are You Still Watching? Solving the Case of the Death of Cinema, which is my followup book to Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror releasing in October 2026. The internet did not merely change distribution; it reprogrammed desire. It replaced anticipation with immediacy, reverence with irony, and stars with personalities. The movie star—once a distant, luminous figure whose very remoteness fueled myth—has been rendered obsolete by constant access (except for you Tom Cruise–you are the last remaining movie star in the classical sense). When everyone is visible at all times, no one can remain larger than life. In this sense, the internet did not just kill the movie star; it dismantled the conditions required for stardom to exist.
The Golden Era understood something we have since forgotten: limitation creates meaning. The big screen mattered because it was rare. The theatrical experience mattered because it demanded surrender—of time, of attention, of comfort. The Oscars mattered because they crowned achievements that could not be reduced to metrics. Box office was discussed, but it did not dictate value. Craft, risk, and ambition still held currency. One cannot imagine the architects of Hollywood—those who built studios, nurtured stars, and believed in cinema as a national dream—viewing this moment without despair. The roll call of names etched into Oscar history now echoes like a rebuke.
The move to YouTube completes a long erosion. First came the shrinking theatrical window, then the dominance of streaming, then the rebranding of films as “content.” Each step was defended as pragmatic, inevitable, even democratic. Yet inevitability is often the language of surrender. By placing the Oscars on YouTube, the Academy signals that it no longer believes cinema deserves its own stage—literal or metaphorical. It accepts, finally, that movies are just another tile in the feed.
What makes this moment especially tragic is that it arrives cloaked in the rhetoric of accessibility. YouTube promises reach, youth, relevance. But to what end and at what cost? Cinema was never meant to be optimized for virality. Its power lay in duration, in immersion, in the audacity to ask audiences to sit still and feel deeply. An awards show on YouTube does not elevate cinema to the digital age; it drags cinema down to the logic of the internet, where attention is fleeting and meaning is provisional. That which is required by the desired algorithm will be that which dictates the ceremony and pageantry thereof.
And yet, this lament is not without pride. There was a time when this industry truly was an industry of dreams. When the Oscars crowned films that expanded the language of the medium. When a win could alter a career not through branding, but through trust—trust that audiences would follow artists into challenging territory. That history cannot be erased by an algorithm, even if it can be buried beneath one.
If the Oscars moving to YouTube does not signal the death of cinema, it is difficult to imagine what would. It is the final nail not because it kills something vibrant, but because it seals a coffin long prepared. What remains will continue to exist—films will still be made, awards will still be handed out—but the animating belief that cinema is a singular, communal art form has been surrendered.
The tragedy is not that the Oscars will stream on YouTube. The tragedy is that, in doing so, they admit they no longer know what they are mourning.
This loss of self-knowledge did not arrive overnight. Long before the platform shift, the ceremony began to erode its own authority through an increasing embrace of socio-political posturing by hosts and award recipients alike. What was once a night dedicated, however imperfectly, to the celebration of films, performances, and craft gradually transformed into a sequence of soapboxes. The Oscars mistook moral exhibitionism for relevance, and in doing so alienated a broad public that tuned in not for lectures, but for an affirmation that movies themselves still mattered.
This is not an argument against artists holding convictions, nor a denial that cinema has always intersected with politics. Rather, it is an indictment of a ceremony that lost the discipline to distinguish between art and advocacy. When acceptance speeches routinely overshadowed the work being honored, the implicit message was clear: the films were secondary. Viewers responded accordingly. Ratings declined not merely because of streaming competition, but because the ceremony no longer respected its own premise. Had hosts and winners remained anchored in the films—celebrating storytelling, performance, direction, and the collaborative miracle of production—the Oscars might have retained their standing as a cultural commons rather than a partisan spectacle.
In surrendering the focus on cinema itself, the Academy weakened the very case for its continued relevance.
Progress is often invoked as an unqualified good, but history suggests it is more accurately understood as an exchange—one that invariably involves loss. Sometimes that “loss” isn’t’ felt immediately, but there is inevitably some mild, moderate, or signifiant loss somewhere. Every cultural advance carries a cost, and the measure of true progress lies in whether what is gained outweighs what is surrendered. In the case of the Oscars, the pursuit of modernity, relevance, and moral signaling came at the expense of gravitas, neutrality, and shared cultural meaning. What was gained—momentary applause within narrow circles, fleeting relevance in the news cycle—proved insufficient compensation for what was lost: broad public trust, ceremonial dignity, and the sense that this night belonged to everyone who loved movies, not just those who spoke the loudest.
When institutions confuse change with improvement, they often wake to find that they have survived only in form, not in spirit.
Taken together, the Oscars decline follows a macabre logic—a ceremony founded to exalt scale, craft, and collective experience gradually surrendered its authority by de-centering movies themselves—first through moral grandstanding, then through technological appeasement, and finally through full assimilation into the internet’s attention economy. Each step was justified as necessary, inclusive, or inevitable. Yet the cumulative effect was corrosive. The Oscars did not lose relevance because audiences abandoned cinema; audiences abandoned the ceremony because it no longer stood for cinema as something distinct, demanding, and worthy of reverence.
What remains is a hollowed-out ritual, stripped of its gravitational pull, migrating to YouTube not as a bold reinvention but as an admission of defeat. The move completes the journey from cathedral to feed, from shared cultural moment to algorithmic afterthought. It confirms that the Academy has chosen survival at the cost of meaning—and in doing so, has preserved the shell of the institution while relinquishing its soul.
Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, reflecting on the industry’s changing fortunes, once delivered an epitaph that now feels uncomfortably prophetic: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” A century after the birth of the Oscars, her words resonate with renewed clarity. Cinema did not shrink because audiences demanded less; it shrank because its stewards accepted less.
The Oscars’ migration to the smallest screen is not progress; it’s the final confirmation that something vast, communal, and luminous has been allowed to diminish, and that what replaced it was not worth the cost. A ceremony that no longer centered movies should not be surprised when audiences stopped gathering to watch it. The move to YouTube, then, feels less like a sudden betrayal and more like the logical endpoint of a long retreat: from celebration to commentary, from reverence to rhetoric, from a shared night at the movies to just another argument in the feed.
Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry
When we look back at the films of the 1980s, it’s impossible to separate the images on screen from the songs that scored them. This was the decade when movie music didn’t just underscore the action—it defined it. A single track could embody the spirit of a film while simultaneously capturing the mood of an entire generation. And remarkably, so many of those songs remain with us today. They’re still streamed on playlists, still belted out at karaoke, still instantly recognizable from their opening chords. The 1980s gave us movie songs that became cultural landmarks, and in many ways, they’ve never stopped playing.
Among the long arc of cinema history, the 1980s stand out as the high-water mark of the movie song. This was the era when a soundtrack single could leap to the top of the charts overnight, transforming into a cultural event in its own right. Whether it was an infectious pop hook or a soaring power ballad, these songs weren’t just background music; they were stitched into the fabric of the films and the culture itself. Think of the triumphant synth-drenched pulse of Flashdance…What a Feeling, the high-octane rush of Danger Zone, or the emotional catharsis of Wind Beneath My Wings. The decade leaned into the marriage of sound and image with unapologetic boldness, and in doing so created songs as enduring as the films they came from—sometimes even more so.
Why have they endured? Partly because they articulated universal experiences—ambition, risk, heartbreak, friendship—in melodies and lyrics that were at once sincere and unforgettable. The 1980s were an era of spectacle, melodrama, and unabashed emotion, and the songs mirrored that ethos. They became sonic shorthand for youth, energy, rebellion, and joy. In an age when MTV amplified every movie track into a visual pop event, these songs weren’t merely incidental—they were emotional anchors, marketing juggernauts, and narrative engines. Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now carried Mannequin’s optimism beyond the multiplex and into wedding halls. Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 gave voice to working-class frustration while climbing the radio charts. And Don’t You (Forget About Me) is now inseparable from Judd Nelson’s raised fist in The Breakfast Club. These weren’t just songs in movies; they became shorthand for the decade’s imagination.
Why don’t we have these same kind of songs today? There’s been a cultural shift–most noticeably in the 2020s, but has its roots in the mid to late 1990s. By the 1990s and 2000s, the conditions that made such songs possible began to fade. Pop soundtracks increasingly licensed pre-existing hits rather than commissioning originals. Franchise filmmaking turned toward instrumental scores and brand cohesion rather than big, show-stopping anthems. And as music videos lost their central cultural role, so too did the symbiotic relationship between cinema and pop radio. The cultural machine that once elevated a movie song into a generational anthem simply no longer works the same way.
Reflecting upon more recent years, much of 2020s pop and movie music is created in a climate of deep cynicism and fragmentation. Songs today are often crafted for algorithms, for virality on TikTok, or as ironic counterpoints in film soundtracks rather than as emotional anchors. Other songs carry with them a tone of anger or polarization. Audiences, steeped in skepticism toward institutions, media, and even each other, tend to reward irony, detachment, or knowing self-parody over the kind of unguarded sincerity that defined the 80s. A song that earnestly belts out its hopes risks being labeled “cheesy” or “dated,” whereas in the 1980s, that very boldness was the point.
One of the most striking contrasts between the 1980s and the 2020s is the sense of permanence. The movies and music of the 1980s were made with a boldness that seemed intent on lasting—on making an impression that would outlive the decade itself. By contrast, much of today’s popular culture, both in film and in music, feels designed for rapid consumption rather than long-term resonance–its largely disposable.
Songs today are often crafted not for endurance but rather for algorithms—engineered to spike on streaming platforms, go viral on TikTok, or capture a brief window of attention on curated playlists. In that sense, music has become increasingly functional: it serves a moment, a meme, a mood, but rarely aspires to the kind of cultural monumentality that defined the best of the 1980s. The hooks are short, the structures lean toward repetition, and the lifespan of a hit can sometimes be measured in weeks rather than years. The same phenomenon is evident in today’s movies. Franchise blockbusters dominate the box office, but their cultural imprint often fades once the next installment arrives. Films are built as nodes in larger intellectual property ecosystems, not as singular artistic statements. Just as contemporary songs often feel interchangeable—quickly eclipsed by the next release—so too do many films function as disposable content, part of a cycle of endless consumption rather than enduring cultural landmarks.
By comparison, the movies and songs of the 1980s embraced scale and spectacle not just for immediate impact but for legacy. A hit song wasn’t simply filler for a soundtrack; it was an anthem meant to outlive its film, designed to thrive on the radio, MTV, and in the cultural memory. Similarly, films were often built as self-contained phenomena: E.T., Top Gun, Back to the Future—movies that carried an aura of event cinema and refused to feel like disposable installments. This is not to say that contemporary culture lacks quality (although that appears to be increasingly true, in the opinion of this scholar and critic), but rather that its structures encourage disposability. With so much “content” (the use of content versus film or music is intentional) being produced at such speed, both music and movies are often designed to capture attention briefly rather than to linger. The result is a cultural landscape that feels ephemeral, where few works are positioned to endure in the way that 1980s soundtracks and films continue to do.
Suffice it to say, the movie songs of the1980s sought to define a generation; today, music and movies often just try to define a moment.
It appears all too clear that in the 1980s, movies weren’t just stories we watched; they were songs we sang, dances we learned, and emotions we carried. It wasn’t simply a golden age of movie music—this era was the last time cinema’s soundtrack felt like the heartbeat of the culture. In our present times, wherein pop culture often reflects uncertainty and disillusionment, the 1980s (extending into the 1990s) stand as the last great era when music from movies felt larger than life, confident enough to aim for forever. Moreover, these songs transcend generations by speaking directly to universal desires—love, empowerment, joy, escape—modern songs often feel locked, chained to their cultural moment or fixated on a particular socio-political lament.
The 1980s–when cinema sang! What the 1970s did for cinematic scores, the 1980s did for music that wrapped us in the cinematic experience.
This week, on my show ReelTalk on WKGC Public Media, I sat down with returning guest and friend of the show music professor Dr. Steven DiBlasi to countdown our Top Ten Movie Songs of the 1980s. Our respective lists both aligned and diverged, covering the wide spectrum of great, memorable movie songs. This is where I am going to direct you to listen to the show (approx 1hr) to avoid spoilers, but if you’re more of a reader than a listener, then you can find our ranked lists below.
More, just search WKGC Public Media in your podcast service of choice
Top Ten Movie Songs of the 1980s
Mine (Ryan’s)
Dr. DiBlasi’s
10.Stir It Up (Beverly Hills Cop)
9. Trust (Batman)
8. Danger Zone (Top Gun)
7. Wind Beneath My Wings (Beaches)
6. Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (Mannequin)
5. 9 to 5 (9 to 5)
4. Goonies R Good Enough (The Goonies)
3. Maniac (Flashdance)
2. NeverEnding Story (The NeverEnding Story)
1. Flashdance…What a Feeling (Flashdance)
10. In Your Eyes (Say Anything)
9. The Heat is On (Beverly Hills Cop)
8. Don’t You Forget About Me (The Breakfast Club)
7. Footloose (Footloose)
6. Fight the Power (Do the Right Thing)
5. Take My Breath Away (Top Gun)
4. Purple Rain (Purple Rain)
3. Eye of the Tiger (Rocky)
2. The Power of Love (Back to the Future)
1. Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters)
Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media and host of the public radio show ReelTalk “where you can join the cinematic conversations frame by frame each week.” Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry
What a picture! Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning is an exhilarating end to a 29 year old journey. The scale and scope of the final chapter in Tom Cruise’s tenure as Ethan Hunt is out of this world. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the cast and crew of this film delivered their best to “all those that [they] will never meet.” That’s us–the audience–we are those they will likely never meet. Such a fitting climax to one of the biggest franchises ever to hit the big screen. For everything the movie did right and excellent, it’s not without some shortcomings in the screenwriting. While the first act starts off a little clunky, it does eventually falls into place during the first act. Additionally, fans of the franchise will love the narrative connections to the preceding films, particularly Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible III. This is truly a cinematic spectacle deserving of every second on that big silver screen. Tom Cruise proves that he is still the definitive movie star.
Ethan Hunt and the IMF team race against time to find the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence that can destroy mankind.
Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie brings Mission: Impossible (in its current incarnation) to a climactic close after 29 years. More than delivering a bombastic conclusion to the genre-defining franchise, he connects this film to all the preceding M:I films through both plot and character. Every moment feels earned–this movie and the cast and crew thereof–spare no expense of time or money in providing audiences with a spectacular cinematic experience that reminds us why big screen stories need the BIG SCREEN. Even though I do take issue with McQuarrie’s screenwriting in the first act–the first 15 minutes, or so, do feel a little disjoined and rushed–thankfully the remainder of the first act does fall into place. Not only do the characters have heart underscoring all the electrifying action sequences, the filmmakers involved in this have a heart for the audiences around the globe.
The IMF (Impossible Mission Force) oath reads, “We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close, and for those we never meet.” And, in this movie, I don’t think that it merely means that the covert operatives and spycraft engineers carry out their missions behind the scenes of life, the way in which the line is delivered, I am all but certain that it’s a wink or nod to the audience indicating that McQuarrie, Cruise, and everyone involved make motion pictures for those they know, their friends and family, and everyone else out in the world that they may likely never meet. There is probably no other working actor out there that so vocally champions cinema like Tom Cruise. This is particularly true during and after COVID with his release of Top Gun: Maverick. Even in a press conference wherein Cruise was asked about the proposed international filmmaking tariffs by a reporter, and he redirected them to The Final Reckoning, because “we’re here to talk about the movie.” The trademark charisma, physics-defying stuntwork, and charm that Cruise brings to the screen serves as evidence why he truly is the definitive movie star working today.
Picking up in the months following the train incident from Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning thrusts audiences right into the middle of a world on the brink of WWIII. The entity has infected the internet and it looks like the end of the world, as we know it. Once again, Hunt is being hunted down by his government (and probably other governments too) because he refuses to let the United States have the key that would potentially give them control of the entity’s source code, because no one should be entrusted with that level of power or responsibility–not even Hunt and his IMF team. Ethan Hunt continues to stand up for what is right, the greater good even when it is the most unpopular stance or opinion to hold. Hunt and his team desire to destroy the entity so no one has access to its power and the entity cannot destroy the world so it and Gabriel can remake it in their image. The Final Reckoning forces us to look inward, and ask ourselves how we would react when faced with a world on the brink of disaster. Could we resist giving into our innate self-centered nature, even when disguised as the most logical choice? This movie is a challenge to humanity to always hold onto hope even when it appears to be impossible.
After the clunky start to the movie, the narrative begins to find its tone, pacing, and direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a “McQuarrie Cut” that adds in cut scenes at the beginning. Other than the stars themselves, the star of this movie is practical effects and filmmaking themselves. The CGI is minimal, and is rarely front and center. McQuarrie and Cruise lean into practical effects, mechanical magic, and other elements that give the film a tangible dimension. You cannot replace the way real light bounces off real objects and into the camera lens in this outstanding motion picture. The Final Reckoning is as much a celebration of the decades-old franchise (and TV show even before the original movie in 1996) as it is a celebration of classical filmmaking. Even the scenes and sequences that felt a little too death-defying or unrealistic, they certainly feel naturalistic within the world on screen (though, I’d be lying if I said that some came a little close to being even unbelievable in a Mission: Impossible movie). Even thought he aerial stuntwork in this movie is the most intense we’ve seen, this movie also includes a lot of underwater stuntwork and action sequences. And I must say that is’t he dark, claustrophobic underwater sequences that had me on the edge of my seat. It really is nothing short of incredible what McQuarrie, Cruise, and their teams were able to do in this motion picture.
For fans of the franchise, particularly those that have rewatched the whole franchise leading up to this moment, there are characters from the past that appear in substantive ways and even plot points that were never fully explored int eh past are brought full circle. Few, if any, characters feel like one-dimensional space-fillers–which can easily happen in an action movie–every character has a purpose, has a motivation. We care about our central characters’ survival, we experienced a gut-wrenching death in Dead Reckoning, so we know that these IMF agents are human, they can die. All the more reason why we are completely invested in their survival.
Even though we may get a Mission: Impossible movie in the future, maybe even one with one or more of the IMF team members from this original run of movies, Cruise has stated, in not so many words, that this movie represents his final Mission: Impossible movie in which he is the star. If we have future M:I movies, I’d like to see him make an appearance or play a supporting role, because Tom Cruise IS Mission: Impossible. What I love about these movies is that they seek to entertain first and include any more thoughtful ideas or questions in the subtext or emotional drivers of characters. Entertainment first. So many movies nowadays have such a cynical view of life and traditional values, but here is franchise built on that which brings us all together as a community. High concept? Sure, but that high concept nature of the M:I movies has never meant a meaningless or vapid experience. These movies, and others like them (regardless of genre), are what cinema is all about. And I am sure going to miss looking forward to the next Mission: Impossible movie.
Thank you Tom. And thank you McQuarrie and past writers and directors for 29 years of unparalleled thrills and excitement on the silver screen.
Ryan is the general manager for 90.7 WKGC Public Media in Panama City and host of the public radio show ReelTalk about all things cinema. Additionally, he is the author of the upcoming film studies book titled Monsters, Madness, and Mayhem: Why People Love Horror. After teaching film studies for over eight years at the University of Tampa, he transitioned from the classroom to public media. He is a member of the Critics Association of Central Florida and Indie Film Critics of America. If you like this article, check out the others and FOLLOW this blog! Follow him on Twitter: RLTerry1 and LetterBoxd: RLTerry
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