In 1985, Joel Schumacher directed a seminal film that perfectly captures the angst of youth having been unleashed onto the world after graduating from college. Okay, that’s giving this movie too much credit, but St. Elmo’s Fire is still one of the best illustrations of Post-Collegiate Stress Disorder, or PCSD. So let’s go back to the Eighties with one of the ultimate Brat Pack movies!
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
About a week or two ago, I came across a few articles filled with emotional hand-wringing on the part of the generation often referred to as Millenials. I read about how there is a generational conflict between this younger generation, which seems to be dismayed that the world doesn’t think they are entitled to anything; and older generations, who wish these kids would get over themselves. It’s accompanied by talk about the uphill battle this generation faces as it enters a very touchy employment situation–the job market, after all, is terrible–and will have an enormous amount of student loan debt. There is also the sentiment of “You created this mess and we inherited it.”
I found myself thinking about how Millennials need to get over themselves and how they’re all entitled brats, but then I couldn’t help but be reminded of two decades ago when Generation X seemed to be facing the same problems. I am sure that your average Millennial will tell me otherwise, but it seems that there is something universal here: the up-and-coming generation takes crap from the older generation. And I also couldn’t help but watch Reality Bites, the 1994 Winona Ryder-Ethan Hawke film that attempted to capture the struggle that particular group of twentysomethings was going through at the time. Watching it again–and I watch it every once in a while–I knew that I would have a slightly different perspective and perhaps even view at least one of the characters a different way. Not surprisingly, the character I seemed to sympathize with more than I did when I first saw the movie as a teenager was Michael Grates. (more…)
Despite what I’m saying in this post, this scene still is awesome.
Just like last week’s post, this is another that was an old post that I’ve updated and revised for this blog.
I think that if I ever actually met him, I would hate Lloyd Dobler. This is a lot coming from me. Say Anything … is one of my favorite movies of all time, so much so that I have the framed movie poster on the wall of my office at home. But with my tendency to over-examine everything I read, watch, or listen to (just like a good English teacher should) and with the film more than twenty years old, I’ve been thinking a lot about Lloyd and Diane Court and I have come to the conclusion that if I ever had to interact with Lloyd, I probably wouldn’t like him.
It’s not like I think he’s a bad guy or anything; on the contrary, there is something genuine about Lloyd and how he pursues and is devoted to Diane throughout the film that makes him great. John Cusack’s portrayal and Cameron Crowe’s writing and directing don’t hurt, either, because he clearly is the hero in the teen romance story and when he is finally with Diane at the end it feels right. But I still can’t help feel some sort of resentment because Lloyd is pretty much every guy I’m not, or ever was; furthermore, he is one of the types of guys who often proves to be the bane of my existence as an educator.
When I was in school, I was not in the clique that included guys like Lloyd. If I was in a clique at all, that is. I kind of simply existed, floating through the lower echelons of the social scale among the dorks. Guys like Lloyd were guys who showed up to school when they felt like it, took general-level classes and probably screwed around but more or less floated by on their way to graduation. They weren’t stupid by any means, but when I was in high school I probably would have assumed he was unintelligent in that way that every honors student with no life looks down anyone in a lower-level class as a way to compensate for having little or no social status. I didn’t have Corey or her 65 songs about Joe to occupy me on a Friday night; I had whatever was on television, video games, and maybe a few rounds of pool with my friends. Lloyd was cool, the dude everyone relied upon, and who didn’t give a crap. I was high-strung, rarely took risks, and should have left the house more.
Of course, he was also my competition.
Let’s consider Diane Court for a moment. Whereas I’d probably hate Lloyd if I met him, if I ever met Diane I wouldn’t hate her, I would have fallen in love with her and this, in turn, would have made me hate Lloyd more. I know this for a fact because I went to a high school with so many Diane Courts. Bright, beautiful, but kind of unaware. Not a snot, but so focused elsewhere that even she doesn’t know how good she would have it if she played into the school’s social status games. In fact, it’s wonderfully appropriate that Heather Chandler herself says that she wouldn’t have pushed herself so hard if she didn’t feel like she was competing with Diane. And if Heather Chandler is the queen, then that makes Diane an Athena of sorts, someone who is not even known until she leaves the halls of Lakewood High School and actually attends a graduation party with Lloyd, after which, they share this exchange:
Diane: Nobody knew me before tonight
Lloyd: They knew of you. Now they know you.
Of course, it makes perfect sense that Diane winds up falling for Lloyd. Even on the surface it works. Girls like Diane fall for guys like Lloyd all the time. Some would say it’s a “sowing your wild oats” type of thing or an “opposites attract” thing. But there’s so much more to it than that. When a drunken partygoer asks Lloyd how she agreed to go out with him, as in “Who are you,” Lloyd replies, “I’m Lloyd Dobler.” Because he is. He’s normal. She’s not.
And that pisses me off. (more…)
Two months, Bender. Don’t mess with the bull, young man, you’ll get the horns.
A quick editorial note: This is an update of an old post from an old blog. But I was watching The Breakfast Club the other day and thought about it so I dusted it off and posted it here.
Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois. 60062.
Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong. What we did WAS wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us…in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.
So begins what is arguably the best teen-oriented movie of all time, John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. I have, in past lives, written what seems like volumes on this movie and just about anyone under the age of 40 who watches movies is familiar with its story, so I won’t bore you to death with the details of the plot. Instead, I’m going to focus on the one teacher character in the school, Mr. Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason).
Vernon, of course, is the overseer of the five students central to the plot, a veteran vice principal who’s been putting kids in detention probably for longer than he can remember and makes sure that they’re behaving and on task, at least for the first part of the movie before the kids sneak out of the library to get a bag of pot from Bender’s (Judd Nelson) locker. Bender’s the main source of grief for Vernon; he’s a detention regular and the group’s resident “rebel.” Vernon fills the authority figure role well when he comes down hard on Bender for talking back, assigning him two months’ worth of detentions and expels him from the library when he catches him in the gym.
Then, he crosses a line. After throwing Bender in a storage closet, Vernon threatens him …
Vernon: That’s the last time, Bender. That the last time you ever make me look bad in front of those kids, you hear me? I make $31,000 a year and I have a home and I’m not about to throw it all away on some punk like you. But someday when you’re outta here and you’ve forgotten all about this place and they’ve forgotten all about you, and you’re wrapped up in your own pathetic life, I’m gonna be there. That’s right. And I’m gonna kick the living shit out of you. I’m gonna knock your dick in the dirt.
Bender: You threatening me?
Vernon: What are you gonna do about it? You think anyone’s gonna believe you? You think anyone is gonna take your word over mine? I’m a man of respect around here. They love me around here. I’m a swell guy. You’re a lying sack of shit and everybody knows it. Oh, you’re a tough guy. Hey c’mon. Get on your feet pal. Let’s find out how tough you are. I wanna know right now how tough you are.
[offers Bender his chin]
Just take the first shot. I’m begging you, take a shot. Just one hit. Come on, that’s all I need, just one swing…
[Bender pauses, staring]
That’s what I thought. You’re a gutless turd.
On some level, you can take this as the scene where we all see Vernon as a symbol for all of the overbearing horrible authority figures that keep teenagers from doing anything they want; after all, the most memorable line from The Breakfast Club is “When you get old, your heart dies.” But if you follow Vernon after the incident, you get a sense that he’s not proud of what he just did and his subsequent conversation with Carl, the janitor, reveals that he’s more than just a caricature of an ineffective authority figure (which is what Mr. Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is). Carl and Vernon have a pretty standard conversation about “kids these days” and how they don’t respect anything. Carl calls bullshit on that sentiment, saying that Vernon has changed just as much as he thinks the kids have. (more…)
When you’re a total geek and you’ve got a ton of money to blow, what do you do? Well, you spend it on getting a popular girl to go out with you! At least that’s the premise of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” a 1980s romantic teen comedy if there ever was one.
So take an hour or so and go back to 1987 and all of its bad hair as I talk about this Patrick Dempsey classic as well as dive into my own personal review archives, all in the name of love. And getting people to listen.
You can listen here:
In the second episode of the Pop Culture Affidavit podcast, I take a look at Stephen King’s It, both the 1986 novel as well as the 1990 TV movie starring Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise The Clown. It’s a Halloween treat that will remind you why demonic clowns dwelling in sewers will make you swear off the circus forever.
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
And, for your viewing enjoyment, here is a scene from the TV movie version of It:
It’s the very first episode of the Pop Culture Affidavit podcast! Each month, I’m going to be offering a “deluxe-sized” version of my blog posts … mainly stuff that I have really wanted to talk about but that I consider “special” enough to warrant about an hour’s worth of time in an audio format.
This first episode is all about the summer of 2012, including movies, comics, and my trip to the Baltimore Comic-Con.
You can listen here:
Pop Culture Affidavit podcast page
Below are the pictures I took at Baltimore Comic-Con, including people I saw as well as comics and TPBs I had signed.
The line to get into the Baltimore Comic-Con. It moved quickly, which was a pleasant surprise.
“Doom says that this line is too long! Doom shall not wait in line with Loki! Doom shall cut the line!”
I do love anyone with the thought of attending a con as Darkseid.
The new Captain Marvel. A GREAT costume.
So a couple of weeks ago I noticed that White Water Summer was going to be on one of the random movie channels on the higher end of my digital cable menu (Encore? Flix? FX Movies? Movierama? Video Empire?), I thought, “Yes! I am SO watching this and blogging about it!” Then I couldn’t help but laugh when I set up the recording because the of the description that Comcast provided: “Kevin Bacon plays a sadist in charge of adolescents on a camping trip.”
If you take that description at face value along with the title, it sounds like a horror movie, as if Bacon plays the serial killer in some bad Friday The 13th ripoff (which, considering White Water Summer‘s 1987 release date isn’t entirely unrealistic); however, the film is actually a coming-of-age tale that involves Kevin Bacon in one of his douchiest roles, as an outward bound-type counselor named Vic who takes a very reluctant, scared kid named Alan (played by Sean Astin) and several others on a trip into the wilderness.
It’s not a movie that a lot of people have seen–it never made it past its original limited release and I’m sure it wasn’t flying off video store shelves–and it wasn’t well-received, getting a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But I have to say that the reason I wanted to blog about this movie isn’t because it is a great piece to play in a game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” (if anyone actually plays that game anymore), but because this was one of those movies that I rented over and over as a kid and with which I have always felt this oddly deep connection.
As I mentioned, Kevin Bacon’s Vic is an expedition leader who is clearly a full-fledged “nature boy” because when we see him for the very first time, he is walking down the streets of New York City wearing the same fully loaded backpack that you’d wear when hiking through the rough terrain of the Rocky Mountains. He is there to visit Alan, who is basically Sean Astin in his Goonies phase, as opposed to another, older Alan who narrates the movie, which is Astin in his “Kirk Cameron’s wise-assed sidekick” phase. This, by the way, was because most of the movie was filmed in 1985 but shelved, then there were Ferris Bueller/Zack Morris-type interstitials where an older Alan would talk to the camera to offer commentary about what was going on that were shot two years later right before the film was released.
Anyway, Alan winds up being convinced (he’s kind of forced) to go on the trip and heads off with three other guys: Mitch (Jonathan Ward, who played middle child Doug Pembroke on the first season of Charles in Charge), George (K.C. Martel, who played Mike Seaver’s friend Eddie on Growing Pains), and Chris (Matt Adler, who starred in the 1987 surfing flick, North Shore). George and Chris are the older guys who tend to look down on Mitch and Alan and even give Alan the nickname “Dickface.” They head off to the woods and almost immediately, Alan proves to be the “problem” on the trip–he carves his name in a tree, he doesn’t want to catch a fish with his bare hands, he freaks out when crossing a rope bridge, and is literally left hanging when he’s too scared to rappel across a huge rock formation named Devil’s Tooth.
That’s a huge simplification of most of the movie, but most of what happens is basically tension between the very reluctant and often scared Alan and the “Oh come on, you guys are going to be great at this and if you aren’t, I’m going to push you until you DO WHAT I TELL YOU!!!” Vic. The other guys do get into it with Vic here and there, especially the night he leaves them all alone in a thunderstorm and they freak the hell out (George, especially, who hams it up rather dramatically). But for the most part, Alan is “dickface” the entire time and Vic’s their brave leader and a really cool guy. Until that moment I mentioned in Devil’s Tooth, which is when they all turn on Vic by walking away from him to go back to the ranger station, then when he tracks them down (and is slightly unhinged), beat the crap out of him and break his leg. So it becomes up to Alan to take a wounded Vic down a raging river to get help (hence, the white water in the summer).
As far as coming-of-age stories go, it is a bit tepid, especially by today’s standards. There’s no sex, there’s no horror, there aren’t any real quotable linesand one of the few things that you can really laud it for is that it’s shot beautifully. But I rented this movie at least four or five times between the time I first saw it in 1987 and the time I started junior high school in 1989, which is odd for a kid who was subsiding on a steady diet of Schwarzenegger, Seagal, and Van Damme. Sean Astin finally getting up the courage to make his way across a dangerous rope bridge and being left to figure out how to rappel over a ravine isn’t exactly Arnold camouflaging himself with mud and setting all sorts of woodland traps for the alien in Predator; and while Kevin Bacon’s Vic is a total jackass, I wouldn’t say that he’s that Bolo Yeung in Bloodsport. Still, I loved it and still love it because when I was 10 years old, I identified with Alan. (more…)
As of my writing this, we’re about knee-deep in the 2012 London Summer Olympics. In fact, as I glance over to my television, the NBC Sports Network is showing a U.S.-North Korea women’s soccer match (it was either that or tennis). I’ve always been a huge fan of the Olympic Games, both summer and winter, especially at how it has me watching and enjoying sports I would never watch otherwise (I went to lunch with some work friends the other day and we watched a water polo match that was on at the restaurant).
This love of the Olympics has its roots in my love of sports, of course, because if I didn’t like sports I wouldn’t care about the Olympics; however, I feel like sometimes I am the only guy who watches the games for the sheer pageantry of it all. Which is why, by the way, I kept tweeting out snarky bon mots throughout last Friday night’s Opening Ceremonies, pissing and moaning about how badly NBC was mangling their tape-delayed coverage. In fact, NBC’s fail on this part has been so epic this year it’s like a running joke among tweeters and bloggers, especially those who look forward to the games every four years.
But I’m not going to spend this entry complaining about NBC (that’s what Twitter is for). No, I thought it might be cool to sit down for a few moments and think about why I am so enthralled by the Olympic Games and why I will spend so much time watching them, even staying up until ungodly hours to watch women’s gymnastics prelims in the summer or a curling match in the winter. And thankfully it’s not a hard thing to figure out because the very first games I watched were I think the games that people my age think of the most when they think “Olympics.”
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be speaking for my entire generation but I think that the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics really did come to define “Olympics” for quite a number of Children of the 1980s.
I turned seven in 1984, which meant that this was the first Olympic Games that I actually remember. I’m sure that people who are even slightly older than me will tell me they have memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics, especially the “Miracle on Ice,” and to that I say that they’re seriously lucky. Being born in June 1977, I was all of 2-1/2 years old when the underdog U.S. hockey team beat the U.S.S.R. and then Finland to win the gold medal, so if I saw the game against the Russians (which I highly doubt), I don’t remember it at all. Had there not been a boycott of the Moscow games that same year, I may have seen the 1980 Summer Games, but that wasn’t to be.
The 1984 Summer Olympics soundtrack cassette. This is not available on CD or digitally, so I kind of regret not getting it back in the 1980s when I really wanted it.
So, the summer when I was seven years old and was allowed to stay up slightly later than usual, I saw some of the competition, but most importantly I caught quite a bit of the opening ceremonies. I don’t know if it was because my parents thought it was important for me to see it or if ABC aired it live instead of on tape delay (which may have been the case — a 3-hour time difference meant it might have aired live; then again, ABC tape delayed the U.S.-Soviet hockey game in 1980 so I wouldn’t put it past them), but I saw quite a bit, including parts of the Parade of Nations (or as my wife put it, “The Model U.N.”).
In my mind, I thought it was the most epic thing I had ever seen (which is saying a lot because I had been watching Star Wars every morning for the past two years). The audience all had cards on their seats and after a guy came flying in on a jet pack–yes, a JET PACK, which is awesome on so many levels–the PA announcer told them to hold up the cards and the entire stadium was then decorated in the flags of the participating countries. Plus, you had a theme composed by John Williams that to this day stands as one of my top five John Williams pieces (and next to his NBC News theme, one of his most underrated). In fact, I loved it so much that when I saw a copy of the soundtrack on cassette at TSS a few years later, I wanted it. In fact, I coveted that soundtrack so much that I actually took it out of the place where it had been placed and put it behind another cassette on another shelf where nobody but me would find it, not realizing that I probably wouldn’t ever get the money to buy it or that I didn’t have to hide it because it was 1988 and nobody but me was coveting the soundtrack (for the record, I never did get the tape).
“The Book of Alien,” published in 1979, had me scared out of my mind when I was a kid.
I think of all the movies I’m looking forward to this summer, Prometheus is at the top of the list. I know that being a huge comic book reader I would probably be more excited about The Avengers or The Dark Knight Rises, but when I heard that Ridley Scott was making a movie that had ties somehow to Alien, something in my nerd past reawakened and I remembered (suddenly? I mean it’s not like I ever really forgot) that when I was about 11 years old, the world he created in Alien was the center of my universe.
Okay, to be fair, the reason for that was more due to James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, because up until the time I was in the fifth or sixth grade, I had only ever seen anything to do with Alien in the movie book–The Book of Alien–that someone on my bus had been passing around when I was in the second grade. Furthermore, what I had seen was a picture of the movie’s infamous “chestburster scene” (although at the time we called it “when that thing came out of the guy’s stomach”) and it scared the crap out of me.
I refused to watch Alien until I finally sat down and watched it during the summer before sixth grade–this was either the day before or the day of the incident where my father, who was wallpapering the living room–stepped on a razor blade and wound up with a few stitches in his foot. I don’t think I thought very much of the movie when I first saw it because it wasn’t as cool as Aliens, which I had already been watching on constant replay for the better part of a year.
Can you really blame me, after all? I was eleven or twelve and it was the middle of the “action Eighties” where I was into any movie that had large guns that shot lots of people, it quickly became my favorite movie. My friends and I would “play” Aliens (I was often Hudson to my friend Tom’s Hicks, although I think one time I actually played Ripley which I’m sure that some psychologist would have jumped on … but I have a feeling I just wanted to be one of the leads) when we wanted something slightly different than the “army” games we were used to playing after being kicked out of the house for watching Aliens way too many times.
But with anything from my childhood, my interest faded after a little while and I paid less attention to Ripley, Hicks, Hudson, Newt, and the other characters and more attention to things like baseball and the WWF. I would gravitate back toward Alien when I was in junior high after watching the original theatrical trailer while waiting on line to ride The Great Movie Ride at what was then called Disney’s MGM Studios in Disney World. I knew I had seen the movie before, but trailers were hard to come by in 1990–you either had to have it as part of a commercial break on something you taped off of television or on another video tape that came out at that time, and considering that Alien was released in 1979 and then released on VHS for the first time by CBS FOX video in the early 1980s, that wasn’t likely to happen in my house. The trailer blew me away and left so much of an impression that I remember trying to duplicate it as part of a computer animation project in my advanced computer graphics class in the ninth grade (I think it was a bunch of stills with quick cuts that wound up with no sound and a title in a really bad font … then again, it was 1991).
Pop Culture Affidavit 