My dad was a huge fan of Falling Down, the movie where the guy pulls a gun in a McDonalds because they stopped serving breakfast

Bond movies, Out of Africa, Gone With the Wind

Forrest Gump. Don't question anything, America's system is the best in the world, anyone who rocks the boat (especially a woman) is an uppity slut who deserves to die of AIDS. My parents aren't even that reactionary, but they worshipped this film and still do.

Dead poets society: celebrates individualism and self-discovery among a school full of Rich white boys with zero discussion of class/race/gender and their privileges due to it. Typical boomer ideals of liberalism, frontier individualism, etc etc.

gambling

The American cultural obsession and normalization of gambling has always left me brutally discombobulated.

A League Of Their Own and its normie gender politics.

The Dukes of Hazzard, and Young Sheldon. My parents love Sheldon and it constantly try to compare me to Sheldon.

fucking Little House on the Prairie - which for whatever godawful reason my mom used to throw on randomly whenever she was feeling nostalgic for her childhood. Shoutout Mary for letting her baby die in a fire, shoutout to Mary for skinny dipping with her friend and inadvertently causing them to drown - the memory of being like 7 and watching these episodes because mom put it on while she supervised us doing our homework is

Funnily enough though, while my mom would throw on Little House - my dad's go-to shows were Tom Baker Doctor Who and/or early Star Trek episodes so clearly there is some sort of fucked up balance between my parents' level of boomerism

My dad thinks the CIA do no wrong. He grew up watching MacGyver

MASH

Which by the way I quite enjoyed last time I watched it a few years ago.

Tons of house fixer-upper shows and Alaskan homesteading reality TV

My mom was really into the Left Behind movies, and it really enforced her evangelical beliefs and doomsday beliefs and like. I'm really happy I hardly remember a thing about those movies. She was also into like God's Not Dead and old The Stand as well.

A lot of old 60s classics. John Wayne movies. For more chud adjacent I saw all the dirty Harry movies at a pretty young age. Watched Ben Hur and Planet of the Apes when I was pretty young too. Antony and Cleopatra with Liz Taylor. The Vikings with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas and Earnest Borgnine. That movie is still pretty good. Nice revenge arc. Edit: oh and the Blues Brothers. Even as a kid I knew it was awesome to see two misfits drive a beaten up cop car through a column of neo nazis.

For boomer TV shows I grew up with my dad singing the themes of Petticoat Junction, Addams Family, F Troop, old TV from before my time.

it's really hard to explain what a huge deal "the big chill" was to them... Ive never seen it but I would imagine it validates their turn towards materialism and such.... Forrest Gump was also a huge deal in a similar way about 10 years later and I think a simpleton wandering through life and just happening to win at every turn really resonated with them

on tv, I think "thirtysomething" may have occupied the same mental space as "the big chill" but idk, never watched it.

if you ask me what their cinematic epitaph will be, it will be Peter Fonda in Easy Rider saying "we blew it, billy."

tyler perry movies.

My dad was really into Gran Turismo when I was a kid.

He also religiously watched the Red Green Show but I think he was too dumb to really understand that the show was, at times, making fun of guys like him.

My parents were constantly watching Come and See, which isn't surprising. They were obsessed with every small victory the USSR had against reactionary forces.

Just kidding. This is probably what my kids will say about me when they're talking to their fellow conscripts in the Burger King-Papa John's war.

Edit: Thank God, my parents almost never watch the same thing twice. It's not obscure, but they're most influential media is probably the NFL. Particularly for my mom, they are firmly rooted in her brain. Which is weird, because after decades of watching football she still doesn't know the rules. Still, she refers to the NFL as "the league." I hate it.

Once she had a moment of clarity where she realized the news was bullshit. She couldn't understand why some NFL scandal was being ignored by the sports news. I tried to explain that the week of inane, breathless news between each game was just a commercial for the NFL and that the NFL itself was just a commercial for the US military, and all I accomplished was reaffirming that I'm an idiot.

My mom loved "little house on the prairie" which, I admit, I rarely paid much attention to, but the name of it kiiiiiinda sums a ton of stuff up. My mom loved all those westerns on tv back then like "gunsmoke." I found them boring, but, you know.

She also loved "MASH" and I fucking hated it.

I've still never watched any of these as an adult.

It's kind of on the nose to pick a televangelist talk show, but still, 700 Club was on our TV entirely too much. Song of the South and Gone With the Wind were also cited for "How the South used to be"

my dad loved MAS*H which is such a liberal show with all of it's messaging. unfortunately he died when i was in middle school so i didnt really get to dig into that. It made me watch the show though and while i probably didnt understand everything i think the messages got through to me too. I have watched it through several times as an adult.

My parents weren't into that sort of thing, but if you want a hilarious boomer esque B-Movie I highly recommend movies by James Glickenhaus. I think he might be one of my favourite directors of all time, and he only made about 4 actual movies.

They're pure right wing fantasy, the acting is terrible, the dialogue is hilarious, but then out of nowhere there's just the most ludicrous action scene you've ever seen with notes of fantastic cinematography. I find them so charming. They just come together so well.

In order I'd recommend:

The Soldier. It's like American James Bond. The most ridiculous of them all, so far that he almost seems self aware. USA works with the Israelis to stop some guy blowing up all the oil in the middle east with a nuke. At one point they ramp a car over the Berlin wall. As a bonus, the sound track is by Tangerine Dream, making the movie the first ever ambient action film.

Shakedown - in the UK it was called Blue Jean Cop. The movie opens with a young Sam Elliot in a trashy cinema, falling asleep to a scene on the movie screen from The Soldier, where The Soldier does a 360 Uzi noscope on a ski ramp. The action scenes in this one are an absolute masterclass, and the come out of nowhere. Glickenhaus even predicts 9/11 at one point.

The Exterminator - Porn tier acting in this one. A traumatised Vietnam vet goes around killing gang members and pedophiles with a flamethrower. The lead character is so uncharismatic that he's perfectly casted as the most unremarkable man ever. In one scene where he shoots up a party (that only 5 people are attending), some classic 80s pop song is playing the whole time. I don't remember which song, but it's absolutely hilarious.

McBain - Don't watch this one. Unless you're craving more Glickenhaus. This one stars a young Christopher Walken as some guy who stages a coup in some Latin American country... Except he seems to show up after every firefight is over and never really does anything? It's actually hilarious once you notice it, but it's just too long to be a proper Glickenhausian romp. It opens with bamboo cage fighting in Vietnam, and in the middle of it there's an awesome speedboat scene where quite simply, dudes are rocking. Otherwise, eh.

God, I've waited so long to put my love for those movies into words.

My dad was really into James Bond, Dragnet, and Hawaii Five-O which had an effect on his politics. He also loved Get Smart and somehow watched The Prisoner in the 70s(?????) despite never setting foot in the UK, so I guess it wasn't completely bad.

I guess he's just really into spy TV shows and police procedurals lol

It's a big deal in Aus, but The Castle might not be well known elsewhere.

On the surface It's an ode to the dirt poor little Aussie battler keeping the government from destroying his community to build an airport runway...until you realise they're actually fairly rich tradies larping at true poverty, all their friends are some kind of lower PB with hardly a worker in sight, and to them success is becoming feel good small business tyrants.

Exactly the false consciousness that Howard used to turn Australia into the hyper-racist faux-true blue ocker hellworld it is today.

Animal House for my Dad, Ferris Bueller's Day Off for my Mom.

Also my Dad grew up on the original Star Trek, and I watched TNG growing up too.

My 84 year old Dad fucking loves gunsmoke

So my dad’s all time favorite movie was The Sting with Newman and Redford. To be honest it’s actually a pretty great movie, so I can’t really criticize that. “Chariots of Fire” was another one my parents liked and I never saw it so I’m not sure how terrible it is. Plan 9 from Outer Space was another one they loved, and I can’t criticize that either for obvious reasons, but maybe watching that kinda stuff is a small part of why I’m so weird.

I guess I should mention my parents were also in an evangelical borderline cult and didn’t watch too much popular media since they considered it “worldly”. They would ironically sometimes let us watch very adult films like Predator or Robocop, and I dunno if it’s because they were clueless or just cared way more about sex than graphic violence.

I also remember watching some weird religious shit like “The God Makers” which talks all about how Mormons believe Jesus and Satan were brothers and other stuff that makes them look bad, which there’s plenty of.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention UHF, and now that I think about it they actually had not bad taste in films overall.