REVIEW: LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST

'Freeman is that undefeatable quarry: the merry philistine. Cultural tastes being the last refuge for the snobberies and attendant anxieties that used to attached themselves to class in Britain, there is great value in a genuine passion that horrifies the room for a writer as punchy and vivacious as Freeman. And decades don’t come much more horrifying than the eighties. The sixties always knew they were cool.  The seventies have received their revisionist due. But the go-getting, greed-is-good, need-for-speed eighties, when producer John Peters, “the man who once permed Yentl’s hair commanded the kind of respect once accorded to Robert Altman”? There’s one lovely moment near the start of her book when Freeman phones up Peter Biskind, the king of seventies revisionism and all things Altmanesque, for advice. “You should really writer about Salvador,” he tells her. “That’s a fascinating film.” She doesn’t have the heart to tell him that by “eighties cinema” she doesn’t mean Oliver Stone’s piercing disquisition on American foreign policy in Latin America, but Three Men and Baby.   “I love the silliness of eighties movies, their sweetness, the stirring music, “ she writes, “I adore montages and anyone who doesn't thrill to a power ballad is lying to themselves” — from my review of Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast for the New Statesman