This movie is depressing for people who were born in a much later age

I thought I was the only one. I feel like a 1950's Mickey Rourke boy waiting to explode watching this film and films like porkys. I loved growing up as a kid in the 80's and 90's but as the 2000's came I got very unhappy. Id love the time travel and feel and breath these decades American Graffiti 50's, Sat Night Fever 70's and To live and Die in la and Beverly hills cop 80's. Style and the sun as changed alot so much it ruins films now. I'd love to be in films and make em like this again. Actually make people feel good again

I can relate. I wasn't born in 1962. My mother took me to this movie, and I was only 6 years old at the time. She would have graduated high school in 1949, so I don't know exactly how this movie fits in her life. And I think pretty much everyone in this movie was unknown, so it wasn't as if the movie had star power. I'm glad she took me though. It's a great movie, and it does have a nostalgic-like feeling.

However, as a child of the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s, I wouldn't have been one of the cruising girls or even at the sock hop. I was extremely unpopular. I don't think I want to return to my high school days. I think I just want the feeling that I had a lot of time in front of me and that things would get better. I kind of want that feeling back.

Instead, I am surrounded by the same things matthijs is: social media, financial crisis, globalization, etc. Everyone is staring into a screen, even out in public.

It does kind of make me wonder--was it so safe back then that you could cruise in your vehicle, and if you saw a cute guy/girl and you'd never seen them before, you would willingly get into their car?

And speaking of cars, I think that's the main reason I watch this movie! That, and to feel nostalgic for a time I never knew (if that makes sense).

This movie is like the definition of nostalgia—fake/forced/generated nostalgia. For christsakes, it was made just a decade after the period in question!

Even funnier -- it’s set in 1962, which is right about the time when the notion of “Oldies” (music) was created. “Doo wop” (white guys) wasn’t actually the music original to that time so much as it was a REVIVAL of the doo wop (Black guys) of the 50s. Yup, that’s right - 60s kids were already reviving the 50s and here we have a 70s movie reviving the 60s. There is something very Californian about it -- very “we live in breath in the shadow of Hollywood and its simulacra.”

Media creates this kind of nostalgia feeling all the time. If you were born much later, you have gotten plenty of images sold you in film/TV media that tells you “what the 60s were like,” wherein the very feeling of nostalgia is built in. Should I say it again? They had already nostalgia-cized ( < made-up word alert) “the 60s” in the 70s. SO born later you’re getting the Nostalgia 60s fed to you over and over.

Note in particular the constant use of musical tracks, in that very simplistic “popular songs from our youth bring nostalgia” way.

In short, the 60s weren’t any more “authentic” or glorious than any other decade. Just think if today, in 2015, you made a film about 2005 and tried to make it all nostalgic. You’d stick some kids listening to reggaeton or Black Eyed Peas or some crap, someone dying in Hurricane Katrina, someone going to fight in Iraq …whoop de doo. Coming of Age my tush.

Your film gods: Lee Van Cleef and Laura Gemser
http://tinyurl.com/pa4ud44

I was born in 1957 and saw this movie when it came out, and yeah, I too felt nostalgic, even though it was from an era only ten years prior. A lot happened to change things in those 10 years. There was an innocence lost but a lot of the problems were there but were swept under the table, and we are only seeing this story from the side of popular successful kids in high school. Now, of course, I look back at 1974 as a time of innocence...

A good movie dealing with nostalgia can affect someone from another era. I feel that way when watching Meet Me in St. Louis, for example.

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

I'm 26 and I just watched this. It made me really sad because I miss being young and reckless, I wasn't nearly as free as the kids in the movie though. It also made me sad because the movie is pre-cellphone. These kids are walking/driving around having real interactions with real people. Walking up to total strangers and having experiences. One of the best nights I've had living in the city was sharing a drink with a man on the street and then walking around with him and chatting up girls in front of bars. He said he used to be in the navy, he was covered in tattoos and carried a little dog with him. It seemed that everyone in this movie was having interactions like that, but this was one of only a handful of interactions I've had in the 6 years of living here.

Today, everyone is so insular with their social circles. People used to go to bars and talk to strangers, now they go to the bar and look at their phones while they wait for their friends to show up. It's sad.

---
You'll never get what you want if you don't know what it is.

Dude, welcome to how I feel when I watch ANYTHING of this type. American Graffiti, Happy Days, heck, I feel nostalgia for the 80s AND the 50s at the same time watching the original Back to the Future! Both those two decades are so much more appealing than what we live in now it's ridiculous. If I had control over when I was born, it would never be now.

I was born in 1961, so I feel the same sense of nostalgia for this time period in which I was alive, but not old enough to really experience it. This film is a total mood piece--it really does a great job of conjuring up the nostalgia, but also for setting the time and place. You really feel the night progressing, and those early morning hours. The sounds when the train is going by (when Dreyfuss is hooking up the cop car with cable) takes me right back to that time, because I also grew up in northern California in a medium-sized town, and the Southern Pacific rail lines zoomed right through every town in that area.

My medium sized town was Marysville, and in the late 70s it had a very active cruise. We would drive back and forth up the main drag, smoking, drinking, hanging out in the fast food parking lots, meeting friends and (trying to) meet girls. I think we were all trying to capture the same fun we'd seen in the movie. It was an interesting time.

I got the same feeling of nostalgia when I first read Kerouac's "On the Road." I wanted so badly to hang out with Dean Moriarty. I just wanted to climb into those pages and hop a freight with those guys.

You're not alone, man. It's just good storytelling.