They'd like you to know that although they're from different California cities, they are now together and in "full effect"

Let’s begin with a simple, known truth: I am the last person that should be writing about G-funk rap music. I grew up in the South, in the middle of the country part of the suburbs. I am fundamentally unqualified to say anything about the quality or s***ness of any rap album, much less an album that’s won multiple Grammys, been ranked #6 on the Vibe 100 Essential Albums of the 20th Century, the 137th Greatest Album of All Time by Rolling Stone or won a mother f***ing Grammy. Also, I may not have been in the right state of mind to listen to this album the 10 or 11 times that I did.* Honestly, of all the things that I’ve approached as Pop Culture Blind Spots, this one has been the most f****** daunting. There are so many potential pitfalls in reviewing something that’s so revered by so many g** d*** people. It’s definitely the biggest task that I’ve taken on since I originally declared ‘Top Gun’ a s*** movie that’s one step below porn. When ‘The Chronic’ was recorded in June of 1992, LA was just coming to grips with the 1992 LA riots that brought absolute chaos to the streets of the city of Angels. The country as a whole was still trying to process what had brought Los Angeles over the f***** edge of absolute chaos (spoiler alert: you can’t let cops beat spmeone up on video tape and then escape prosecution and expect everyone to be ok with that) and that December Dr. Dre’s ‘The Chronic’ sprung into the mainstream with a vengeance. Before we talk about the actual content of the album, I feel like I need to issue a couple of disclaimers:

If only we could go back in time to warn him...

Before he asked us to show him the money, before he told us that we couldn’t handle the truth and before he went crazy because there were aliens inside him that only a dead science fiction writer knew how to control, Tom Cruise threw a bottle of liquor in the air and it was magical. In another Pop Culture Defense, let’s take a look back at Mr. Cruise at the height of his power, ready to take on the world and impregnate Elisabeth Shue in ‘Cocktail’.

You could argue that ‘Cocktail’ is just a Jerry Bruckheimer movie that wasn’t produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (a mistake he’d correct by basically remaking the movie 12 years later in the form of ‘Coyote Ugly’). It has all the hallmarks of a non-explosive Bruckheimer flick: coming of age story with a good looking protagonist who overcomes their blue collar background to make it in the big bad world with built in pop song markers to help convey the tone along the way. But ‘Cocktail’ rises above it’s pay grade with clever writing, great over-the-top performances by it’s three leads and characters that make you want to drop it all and become a bartender…or a bar tender groupie. It’s more philosophical than ‘The Matrix’ and soapier than ‘You’ve Got Mail’ but in the end it manages to become one of my favorite late 80′s/early 90′s movies about bartending.

A Brief Synopsis of ‘Cocktail’: For not explainable reason, ‘Cocktail’ opens with Brian Flannigan (Tom Cruise) flying down the road in a jeep full of dudes trying to catch a bus to New York City (as Starship sings ‘Wild Again’, their contribution to the movie’s iconic soundtrack). Young Mr. Flannigan, having just left military service, is off to seek his fortune in the big city but soon finds that he’s not qualified for anything since he’s got absolutely zero work experience. Dejected after days of rejection, he decides to try business school and falls ass backwards into a job as a bartender alongside Doug Coughlin (played by the other Australian actor from the 80′s, Bryan Brown). Brian’s first night behind the bar is tough as waitresses dressed in TGIFriday’s outfits and sterotypical New York bar patrons scream drink orders at him (Do you know what’s in a Cuba Libre?) but he’s determined to have it all and decides to stick with bartending while still attempting to get a degree in business. We’re treated to a few quick scenes as Brian learns the difference between book smarts (like an assignment to write his own obituary….clever) and street smarts (Doug’s cavalcade of bar tricks and slights of hand). Doug’s lessons are a bit more than just suggestions. No, Doug lives by a series of “Couglin’s Laws” which amount to nothing more than the regurgitations of someone who’s spent a lifetime behind a bar and an afternoon or two in the back of a Philosophy 101 class. As Brian’s skills improve, we get those indelible shots of Doug and Brian behind the bar mixing drinks in tandem while flipping bottles back and forth between each other and dancing to “Hippy Hippy Shake”. It’s nothing if not incredibly charming. Books and actual learning put up a good fight but in the end, Doug and Brian find their ticket to the big time when one of their patrons offers them a job at “The Hottest Bar in New York City”. The boys jump at the chance to leave their local watering shit hole bar and work someplace with a velvet rope and every starving model within a 32 block radius. The bar includes everything you’d expect from a late 80′s NYC hot spot: huge bar, gorgeous people and weird poetry from both patrons and bartenders. It’s at this fancy beat poetry joint that the two meet up with the surest sign that any movie is about to get bat-shit crazy: Gina Gershon. Let me stop here and say that I don’t in any way dislike Gina Gershon. In fact, I think she’s a fantastic character actress who brings a certain something to absolutely every role she enters. But…if you’re just watching a movie one day and suddenly, out of nowhere and without warning, Gina Gershon comes on screen you can be certain that things are about to get weird. Gina Gershon, of “Bound”, “Face/Off” and lest we forget “Showgirls” fame is like the harbinger of bonkers. For God’s sake, the woman showed up on “Cop Rock”. How can that not be some kind of fascinatingly weird resume that deserves a special kind of respect? Regardless, Gina Gershon shows up as Coral, a photographer who manages to expose the distance between Brian and Doug with a single flash of her camera. Brian and Coral start dating (and by dating I mean sleeping together) and soon Doug begins to get jealous. But before things can completely implode, the guys discuss their hopes and dreams over a few breakfasts with Coral. Both of the guys want to someday own a bar (which Doug decides should be called ‘Cocktails & Dreams’ which is about as subtle as the bar in “Leaving Las Vegas” being called ‘The Whole Year Inn”) and Brian pitches the idea of going to Jamaica to earn the money to eventually buy a place in New York. Doug’s not much for the idea of “jet-set bartenders”, though. While playing basketball in the park a few days later (as you’ll do), Doug bets Brian that he can get Coral to leave him by the end of the weekend (as you’ll do). All it takes is for Doug to tell Coral that Brian’s been spilling secrets about their wild romps in the sack and she’s out the door like a shot. It’s the final straw and Brian decks Doug right into their fancy bar set up.  Fade to black. But soon the scene fades up on a sunny Jamaican resort (while “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys plays) where Brian’s taken up a bartending gig. With the help of a bit too much booze and definitely too much sun, Brian has to ride to the rescue of Jordan Mooney (because ‘Moneybags McWealthypants’ would have been too obvious a name). Jordan’s an artist and waitress from New York who’s vacationing for an undetermined amount of time with her parents in Jamaica and is played by everybody’s favorite babysitter, Elisabeth Shue. Brian and Jordan start montaging together and soon are in 80′s movie love (walks on the beach, late night dancing in a beach club, ‘Blue Lagoon’-esque sexy time under a waterfall) but trouble lurks just around the corner. Doug shows up in Jamaica (with his new super hot, super rich wife in tow) and manages to get Brian to cheat on Jordan in less than 24 hours. Once again, the boys decide to bet on something classy. This time it’s Brian’s ability to close the deal with a cougar at the end of the bar named Bonnie. Jordan (of course) sees Brian leaving the bar with Bonnie at the end of the evening and flies home to New York City that very night (because that’s plausible). The next day, Brian discovers he’s been found out and decides that the best way to deal with the situation is to fly back to New York with Bonnie and become her bitch. She’s promised him that she’ll reward his puppy dog loyalty by giving him a sweet job at the company she runs but seems to only use that as a carrot to make Brian take her to art openings and get her, well, carrot juice. It’s at one of these art openings that Brian finally snaps and storms off, leaving Bonnie and determined to regain some semblance of his manhood. He hunts down Jordan and finds out two important pieces of information: 1) she’s loaded (as in with rich parents) and 2) she’s loaded  (as in with baby). Brian’s determined to prove that he wants to be with Jordan (as long as nobody bets him to sleep with anyone else) but her dad is determined to make sure that Baby and baby stay in the corner. He offers to buy Brian off with $10,000 but (in a fit of 80′s movie self righteousness) Brian rips up the check and once again declares his love for Jordan…who’s not having any of it. Aimless, Brian seeks out Doug who’s parlayed his rich wife into his own nightclub, yacht and expensive glassware (wait, oh no). But once they’re alone, Doug reveals to Brian that it’s all a lie and that he’s not got “a pot to piss in”. He’s kept it a secret from his wife and drinks basically a whole bottle of liquor in a few gulps so Brian does the only responsible thing and leaves him alone with his thoughts and sharp objects. At her request, Brian takes Doug’s wife Kerry home where she uses the old “let’s talk about my husband’s problems upstairs” trick to try and get Brian in the sack. Thankfully, as if to prove that Brian now has some sort of moral compass, Brian refuses to sleep with his best friend’s wife and instead goes back to the yacht to check on Doug (not that there’s anything to worry about, cause ol’ Dougy is fine). Upon reaching the boat, he finds Doug in a pool of his own blood and it’s pretty obvious that he’s chosen to off himself. Brian responds with the appropriate level of screechy/screamy agony and…Fade to Black. After Doug’s funeral, Brian receives a letter from Doug (which is odd since Doug didn’t know Brian was back from Jamaica and back in New York, but whatever) explaining that he killed himself because he could no longer face the lie of a life that he’d created for himself. It’s just the push that Young Flannigan needs to once again purse Jordan (and her Mooney). He bursts past the doorman, flies into her parent’s apartment and screams out for her. There’s a brief “we didn’t have time to hire a fight coordinator” scuffle between Brian and Jordan’s father but in the end Jordan willingly leaves with Brian…even though his next infidelity is a mere bar bet away. The movie closes with Brian (now the owner of his own local shit hole bar called ‘Cocktails & Dreams’) climbing up onto the bar for one more poem about his unborn children. It’s at this point that Cruise begins to slip into his super terrible Irish accent (something that returns in “Far & Away”) and Jordan reveals that it’s not one baby, its twins! Because what’s better than one kid that a new small business owner can’t afford? Two kids! Roll credits.

Why is it a Pop Culture Defense? ‘Cocktail’ is a landmark movie for the simple reason that it’s all things to all people. Want a buddy movie? Check out ‘Cocktail’ for the complicated yet touching story of a boy and his bartender. Want a complicated romantic tale of young love? Check out ‘Cocktail’ for its overly soapy story of a boy and the girl he knocks up while on vacation. Want a ridiculously over-the-top movie that celebrates all of the excesses of the 80′s? Check out ‘Cocktail’ with it’s yuppies and Gina “I always look like the cat that just swallowed the canary” Gershon. Want a musical? Check out ‘Cocktail’ which is not only the movie that brought us dancing while bartending but is also the movie that introduced the world to ‘Kokomo’ (possibly one of the worst pop songs of all time) AND ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin (definitely one of the worst pop songs of all time). It’s the kind of movie that everyone could go see and enjoy for completely different reasons. Some people enjoyed watching Tom Cruise on a journey of self discovery that took him from the streets of New York to the beaches of Jamaica and back again. Others enjoyed watching Elisabeth Shue take her top off. See, something for everyone. It’s a not so serious movie that dealt with a lot of pretty serious topics like unwed pregnancy, alcoholism, suicide and Gina Gershon. But really, the movie achieves almost a cult like status for one reason: it’s made everyone try to flip a bottle of booze like that at least once. Admit it. At some point in your life, you’ve grabbed a bottle of something and attempted to flip it either in the air or behind your back. Most likely, you’ve done it with a bottle that was sealed and most likely you’ve failed, but you’ve tried it. That motion, that desire to see if you could try to pull of an amazing bar trick can be directly attributed in one way or another to the movie ‘Cocktail’ and for a cheesy 80′s movie, that’s saying something.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly? It looks insane. But add a little Vaseline to that mirror and you get a much happier, blurrier, tipsier view of a movie that struck at the height of the Tom Cruise craze. It’s sometimes hard to remember that Tom Cruise really did use to be the biggest star on the planet. ‘Cocktail’ comes in the middle of a stretch of five movies that solidified Tom as the absolute biggest star on Earth. He made ‘Top Gun’ (hate it), then ‘The Color of Money’ (love it), followed by ‘Cocktail’ (defending it right now), then ‘Rain Man’ (good movie, definitely a good movie) and finally ‘Born on the 4th of July’ all in the span of three years. Those are Micheal Jordan repeat championships caliber stats. Can you even think of another actor in the last 20 years who’s had a run of movies that big and that generally good in that amount of time? Before you say Julia Roberts or Will Smith, I say ‘Dying Young’ and ‘Wild, Wild West’. ‘Cocktail’ is literally lightning in a bottle. It’s Cruise’s star power, confidence and charisma that take something that should be awful (or at best adequate)  and make it into something really special. Want proof? Check out this very simple scene from ‘Cocktail’ where Tom Cruise uses his newly found bartending skills to hit on a woman dressed as a muppet:

Seriously, that’s the guy movie equivalent of a scene with the main character singing into her hairbrush into the mirror but somehow, it all comes off as completely endearing. For me, performances like this are like a magic trick. It’s as if he’s using slight of hand to confound and distract us from the general shakiness of the movie around him. Kid goes from not bartending one day to fancy show-off bartending in the span of a few 80′s songs? Sure. Kid moves to Jamaica to tend bar at a resort only to meet and impregnate the true love of his life? Of course. Wise, truth telling older guide turns out to be incredibly dark “there but for the grace of God goes Flannigan” warning for the main character? Why the hell not! It’s all just window dressing and yet somehow it all works like a charm. You never even see how they manage to saw the lady in half and put her back together before you’re clapping wildly, ready for the next trick.

Final Thoughts: What’s the last piece of the puzzle to make any movie an almost instant classic? Quotable lines. And luckily, ‘Cocktail’ has more than a few that resonate in the lexicon. Whether you’re looking for one of Coughlin’s laws (“never tell tales about a woman, she’ll hear you no matter how far away she is” or “anything else is always something better”) or one of the “poems” Young Flannigan improvs while standing on the bar (my personal favorite being “I make drinks so sweet and snazzy / The iced tea / The kamakazi” simply because no matter how hard he tries snazzy and kamakazi don’t rhyme), the movie is full of lines that are just begging to be repeated in the proper situations. Couple that with a simple action that everyone wanted to try and repeat (like the dance that Uma Thurman does in “Pulp Fiction”) and a soundtrack that unleashed some terrible things on the world and you have a classic movie that’s very deserving of a Pop Culture Defense. ‘Cocktail’ stands the test of time with it’s brash attitude that dares you not to like it. Give it a try the next time you flip past it on a Saturday afternoon. Just don’t blame me when you’re singing Kokomo for the rest of the weekend. It’s a high price to pay, but it’s definitely worth it.

"I'm half fish/half insufferable teenage girl!"

In 1989, The Disney Corporation began a renaissance for it’s animated feature film business with the release of The Little Mermaid. Today, Pop Culture Blind Spot attempts to borrow a bit of that restart juju by providing you with a glance into the past at that very same movie. It’s kind of hard to fathom how I completely and utterly missed seeing The Little Mermaid the first time around…or at least how I missed seeing it later in high school during my “Watch sappy, girly, nostalgic kids movies because girls like them” phase. But somehow, I completely missed the boat (zing) on the first of the string of Alan Menken & Howard Ashman Disney movie musicals.

When you read what I think about a movie that so many of you hold very dearly in your hearts, I worry that you’ll immediately jump to some conclusions that aren’t quite true. It’s not as simple as saying “You just don’t like musicals”. On the contrary, I love musicals. There is a playlist in my iTunes right now called “Show-Stopping Numbers” that only contains numbers which I consider among those that stop a Broadway show. It’s also not as simple as saying “You just don’t like Disney.” It’s just not true because I love Disney. I still count the 1967 version of The Parent Trap among my all-time favorite movies of all time. At some point, we’ve all wanted to have Mary Poppins appear at the window and help us jump in and out of chalk painting. And before you say it, my feelings about The Little Mermaid have nothing to do with my disdain for the world’s least effective, non-super “superhero”, Aquaman. He sucks all on his own and I can’t judge others just because they have a passing resemblance to that failure of imagination. No, my feelings about The Little Mermaid are more complicated than that. But first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same brine-soaked page…

A Brief Synopsis of The Little Mermaid: Ariel is a 16-year old who doesn’t listen to her father and gets into trouble for it. Spoiler Alert! She’s a mermaid and her dad is King Tritan, the king of the ocean (take that, Aqua-dumbass). Although she has a guaranteed spot in her father’s undersea burlesque show with the rest of the king’s daughters, Ariel dreams of being a human so she can put to use all the great SAT vocabulary words she’s learned…like “street.” For years it seems, Ariel’s been collecting bits of human trash and collecting them in her creepily-named “grotto” which she can visit to bask in all her hording tendencies. Among her treasures: a fork (oooooh!), 20 corkscrews (whaaaat?) and an in-tact print of Georges de La Tour’s Repenting Magdalene (no, really). Whenever she finds a new trinket, she takes it to the surface to have it identified by the only trusted source of information in the entire ocean, Scuttle the Seagull (played by the always intoxicated  Buddy Hackett who you may remember as the always intoxicated mechanic from the Herbie the Lovebug series in the 1960′s). It’s during one of these trips to the surface that Ariel sees Prince Eric (played by Christopher Daniel Barnes who you may know from either the two 90′s Brady Bunch movies…or from the “Tiger Beat” poster you had on your wall from ages 10 – 15, depending on your point of view). Although she’s been assigned a full time protector by her father (in the form of Sebastian the crab), Ariel still manages to travel to the surface to watch a celebration for Prince Eric which, unfortunately, is struck by a sudden storm. The storm tosses Eric into the ocean and it’s up to Ariel and the rest of her sushi platter friends to save him from drowning. After rescuing him from a watery grave but before disappearing into the world of the merpeople, Ariel sings to Eric in a way that only future Disney princesses and stalkerish ex-girlfriends can. Upon waking, Eric can barely remember why he agreed to be in this movie in the first place, but totally remembers the beautiful voice that woke him from his almost coma.

Meanwhile! all is not happy in the world of the half fish/half hotties (seriously, even her dad is rocking a six pack, look it up). Although King Triton is the unofficial dictator of anything below sea level, Ursula the Sea Witch is desperate to control the kingdom…which is hard to believe since this is a Disney movie and things like that never happen. Triton finds out that even though he assigned a tiny crab to watch her, Ariel has once again disobeyed him and gone to mingle with the humans. In an act of dad rage, Triton uses his weapon (which, ironically, is also called a triton) to destroy all of the crap that Ariel’s worked so hard to collect (including that print of Georges de La Tour’s Repenting Magdalene. Ursula uses that moment of sadness to strike, offering the distraught Ariel the chance to get legs and become a real girl once and for all…which is odd since this is a Disney movie and things like that never happen. Unfortunately, there’s a catch and Ariel must give up her beautiful voice for a set of what are B-/C+ legs, at best. Ariel agrees and Ursula removes her voice and gives her legs (which are needed for both jumping and dancing, as Ariel pointed out earlier). She’s got three days to get true love’s kiss from Eric or she’ll be stuck as Ursula’s personal assistant forever. Sebastian the crab and Flounder the “Lenny” of fish, drag Ariel to the shore where she’s eventually discovered by Eric and his dog, Max. Max, although a member of the animal kingdom just like the talking fish and talking crab, can’t talk at all continuing a long line of Disney prejudice towards some dogs in their stories. Eric takes Ariel back to his castle where she’s treated like the survivor of a shipwreck, given free things and never once asked for identification. She still can’t speak though and she’s beginning to realize just how hard it is to mime “I used to be a mermaid who saved you from drowning and sang to you beautifully before becoming a human girl so I could hook up with you” even though that’s a beginner level phrase in charades. On the second day of her stay at Eric’s castle, they almost kiss while on a boat ride. A kiss that would have broken the spell and let her live happily ever after with Eric (which is weird, because this is a Disney movie and kisses never do things like that) but is instead broken up by Ursula’s non-talking eels (either personify everything or personify nothing, c’mon).

Hearing how close Ariel got to breaking the spell, Ursula goes all Veronica on her Betty ass and uses a spell to become “Vanessa” (which, if you look it up in the Disney dictionary is a synonym for “harlet”). Ursula’s plan is to use Ariel’s voice to seduce Eric away from Ariel so the spell won’t be broken and a distraught King Triton will have to give her the kingdom in trade for his bratty daughter. Eric, being a guy, is immediately drawn to the idea of “new girl” (Ursula also casts an enchantment on him so he’ll fall in love with her) and they decide to get married. This follows the logic that if a girl sounds like someone you heard in a half dead state you should marry her immediately (which is actually strange because this is a Disney movie and that actually doesn’t happen all the time). Ariel runs away crying because the boy she’s known for less than two days is marrying someone else but luckily drunken Buddy Hackett is there to discover that super cute Vanessa is actually kinda chubby Ursula. He tells the news to Ariel who immediately grabs her slow witted fish friend Flounder and heads after the wedding barge that Vanessa and Eric have set sail on (since everyone knows that all royal weddings must take place on barges for legal purposes).

Sebastian runs (swims?) to tell Triton what’s happening and Buddy Hackett becomes as useful as Aquaman by summoning all kinds of sea creatures to help him stall the wedding. In the struggle, the shell that Vanessa/Ursula is wearing that contains Ariel’s voice is broken and she’s able to once again sing like Jodi Benson. Realizing that it was Ariel that saved him and not Vanessa, Eric runs over to kiss her but it’s too late and she turns back into half a Long John Silver’s #7 meal. Ursula switches from hottie to hideous and absconds with Ariel. Even though the ocean has a strict “Don’t negotiate with terrorists” policy, Triton relents and agrees to give up control of Waterworld in order to save the red-headed brat. Ursula becomes the ruler of the ocean (you’re not even #2, Aqua-douche) but is confronted by the Ginger Fish and Prince Eric (who’s feeling guilty about just how far he went with Vanessa the night before). During that fight, Ursula kills her non-personified eels which totally pisses her off. Ariel and Eric make up just in time for gigantic Ursula to rise from the seafloor and attempt to kill them. Even though she’s wrecking ships left and right and despite the fact that they totally made out the night before, Eric steers a ship into Ursula’s big belly and kills her. Ursula’s death breaks all of the spells that she had cast (which is odd because this is a Disney movie, yadda yadda yadda) and Eric barely makes it to shore without drowning.

With Ursula’s death, Triton immediately becomes king again and uses his power to permanently transform Ariel from fish-lady to lady-lady since he sees just how much Ariel loves Eric. It actually reminds him of when he and Ariel’s mother first met and fell in love…before she drown? or disappeared? ran off with Jonah? Who knows. The movie closes with Ariel and Eric married on a boat (with T-Pain) surrounded by their human and merpeople friends. And then a Disney artist paints a giant dong on the VHS cover for the movie. No joke.

Why is it a PCBS? For most of the girls that I grew up with, The Little Mermaid holds an almost mythical place in their hearts. I cannot tell you how many talent show performances of “Part of Your World” I had to sit through between the ages of 10 and 14. Before it became synonymous with ads for the Disney Cruise line, it was ubiquitous in Disney commercials, specials, parades and all other manner of singing events. There was merchandise galore and even a Saturday morning cartoon that basically retconned the whole story and had Ariel still as half a fish. In essence, The Little Mermaid took over popular culture for a while even though I didn’t see it. The other reason that it’s a huge PCBS is the simple fact that it brought Disney back from the animated dead. Before The Little Mermaid, Disney animation was lost in a sea of odd choices (Who greenlit The Great Mouse Detective?) and terrible musicals (sorry Billy Joel but Oliver & Company was a trainwreck and a half). The Little Mermaid kicked off a string of hugely successful Disney musicals that each went on to have their own “dong castle” moments (like Aladdin’s “All good teenagers take off their clothes” and the flying “SEX” in The Lion King). The Little Mermaid was the first step in the revitalization of hand drawn animation at the studio that really pioneered the art form. They brought luster and pride back to artists who slaved over celluloid for years to make a single animated feature and animation was returned to it’s former ink and paint glory…till Pixar came along and totally ate everyone’s lunch.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well…as unpopular as this stance may be (and judging from the reaction I got when discussing the idea of writing this with a friend), I think the movie comes off as dated both in style and in substance. And I don’t mean dated as in “belongs in 1989.” I mean dated as in “belongs in 1959.” You don’t have to dig too deeply into the story before you can see what I mean. For example, the basic premise of the movie is that a teenage girl who has everything (and that’s not hyperbole, she actually refers to her self as “the girl who has everything” in song) decides to disobey her father and run off to fall in love with a boy…at 16 years old. And when she does run off to meet him and gets into horrible trouble, her father bails her out and gives up everything just to save her disobedient ass. Now, it’s true that I’m not a parent and that I was that disobedient 16 year old child…but come on. In the end, Ariel suffers no consequences at all and is allowed to do exactly what she wants…at 16 years old. How is that a lesson for children? “Don’t want to do what your parents say? That’s ok! Run away and at worst you’ll get to live in a castle for free. At best, you’ll become a princess.” And all of her rule breaking and running away is for what? A prince who at first almost makes out with her even though she can’t talk because some fish are singing about how he should and then dumps her for a chick he’s never met because she sounds like a girl he had vague hallucinations about during a near death experience. Prince Eric falls right in with a long line of completely stupid Disney princes (sold separately). He’s one dimensional, completely clueless and willing to use completely arbitrary qualifications in order to find the girl he’s going to love forever (see: Prince Charming in Cinderella who’s weird obsession with shoe size almost cost him the girl of his dreams). Is Eric the ideal that girls should be skipping town in order to find? No. Is he a pretty good Peter Brady impersonator? Yes. If he’s willing to almost fall in love with one girl who doesn’t speak and then agree to marry a different girl just because of the way she sounds, what does that say about his character? The story also seems to be playing pretty fast and loose with the rules of this reality. I’ve already mentioned how there seem to be some animals that were in the bathroom when they were handing out human personalities but why is Ursula half human/half octopus? Does that mean that throughout the ocean there are more half human/half _______ things in existence? The under sea world seems like a weird mix of autocratic rule and Island of Dr. Moreau experiments and not the happy-go-lucky musical extravaganza that Sebastian would have us believe. All in all, the story comes off as a retread of all the other Disney movies without any of the lessons learned. At least Belle learned that she could truly love someone for who they were on the inside, Aladdin learned that eventually Robin Williams will shut up and Simba learned that life moves pretty fast so he should stop and look around every once and a while so he doesn’t miss it (I may have that last one wrong)

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day, is The Little Mermaid a bad movie? No. Would I watch it again? No. Do I understand why so many people around my age remember it so fondly? I guess so. But to those that read this and vehemently disagree with my opinions about Ginger Fish and her under sea adventures, I challenge you to go back and watch the movie now with fresh eyes. Isn’t it a little strange that the only chubby person in the entire kingdom is the evil one? If the eels can’t talk, how can they understand the very specific instructions that Ursula gives them via dialogue?  Was Buddy Hackett really the best choice for the seagull or was he just the only person available to record that day on the Disney lot? Ladies, if a man either loves you in a day even though he doesn’t know your name or loves you specifically because of the way you sound when you talk or sing, call the authorities.

When you compare it to the later Disney renaissance movies (Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) it just feels a bit empty and soulless. Put it up against the masterworks from Pixar (Toy Story, Wall-E, that movie about the fish that gets lost, etc.) it just doesn’t hold a candle. In the end, it’s just like that copy of Repenting Magdalene by George de La Tour that Ariel has in her grotto…something pretty that’s just completely out of place.

"Rule #1: No party cars, boats, trains, elevators or bobsleds at Disneyland"

One of the dangers of the Pop Culture Blind Spots is that over time, things have a tendency to get built up in your mind. Think about it in terms of summer blockbusters: Your friends see a movie without you and every time you see them they tell you how great the movie is. By the time you finally see it, you’ve sat through all the reminiscing and high fiving that you can stand and you’re almost sick of the movie before the credits begin. In essence, by waiting to experience something the experience has been ruined. Can anything really survive the hype to live up to it’s potential after all this time? That was one of my main concerns about my recent trip to Disneyland. How could anything live up to the billing of “The Happiest Place on Earth”? The same way Motown lived up to calling itself “Hitsville U.S.A.” It just is. But before I go into the details of how they manage to pull off that elaborate magic trick, let me say that the whole Disney experience wasn’t exactly a complete blind spot for me. As a kid I went to Walt Disney World (once with my family and three times with friends in high school…trusting parents, don’t ask) so it’s not like I never experienced Mickey Mouse and Monorails. But Disneyland is a whole other animal that deserves to be considered as something totally different than the behemoth that’s rising outside Orlando, Florida. Hopefully, I’ll do a decent job of explaining why.

A Brief Synopsis of Disneyland: It’s a massive theme park in Anaheim, CA based on the characters and properties of the Walt Disney Corporation. For the purposes of this PCBS, I’ll be considering both Disneyland and California adventure as two pieces of the same puzzle. Do I know that they’re different parks? Yes. Is that going to stop me from lumping them together? Of course not. Should you use the comments section below to tell me why I’m wrong? Go ahead. Anyways, Disneyland breaks itself down into different sections (Tomorrowland, Adventureland, Frontierland, etc.) each with themed rides and attractions that fit into those loose constructs. It’s escapism at it’s absolute biggest with almost every experience you have guided by the invisible hand of the folks behind the park. Think you want to be a pirate? There’s a ride for that. Always dreamed of fighting for the fate of the galaxy against an evil emperor? Yep, there’s a place for that. What about an old-timey trip on a riverboat? Sure, why not. It’s as if they peer into the heart of every kid, figure out what will make them squeal at the top of their lungs and then design an experience around that reaction. While Disneyland is broken up into different lands, I like to think of the attractions there in as falling into three different categories all together:

• Nostalgialand: Think of this as all the things that are designed to wow you once as a child and then tug at your heart strings for the next 40 years. For example, when I was a kid we had cassette tapes that included music from all the old Disney movies as well as the classic Disneyland attractions. So before I ever went into the Enchanted Tiki Room, I knew that it was a tropical hideaway where all the birds sang words and the flowers crooned. By the time I actually got to see the Enchanted Tiki Room, I’m sure that my little 5th grade self almost peed my pants. Since then, whenever I heard that song, I get all wistful and nostalgic. It’s basically marketing genius. And while a lot of folks would see them as separate, I think all of the original rides likes “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” and “It’s a Small World” fall into this category. You ride them as a child and feel like you’re in a dream. You ride them as an adult and it makes you feel like a kid again. (See also: Pirates of the Caribbean, Jungle Cruise, Haunted Mansion, etc.)
• Innovationville: These are the parts of Disneyland that take a concept and blow it out to it’s sometimes ridiculous results. It’s almost as if Disney has a room full of R & D guys just sitting around thinking up crazy shit to try.  Take for example “Soaring Over California” (celebrating the stuff from the state you live in!) which probably was developed by a guy who said “What if we made a ride where it looked like you were flying over stuff in an IMAX experience?” Stop right there and you’ve got a great ride that you’d find at someplace like Six Flags. But that’s not good enough for Disney. He had to push it “Then we pump in the smells of the things it looks like you’re flying over so your brain is completely f’ing confused!” It’s the fine line between madness and genius and smell-o-vision + flight is really close to it. But he had to push it “And then we get Puddy from Seinfeld to do the intro movie. It’ll be completely random!” And it was. I just imagine that there are dorms full of nerds in white coats just sitting around thinking of the next bat-shit insane thing that Disney could build. (See also: A Bugs Life 3D (“Let’s freak people out with bugs in 4D and call it 3D!”), Indiana Jones and the temple of WHAT THE HELL IS THAT IN MY EAR! and the classic Space Mountain (Nerd 1: “Let’s build a roller coaster indoors!” Nerd 2: “Ok, but only if we can run it in the dark. Otherwise, no dice.”))
• The Unincorporated Village of Thrillers and Spillers: Because Disneyland is being run by a giant, multi-national corporation that’s seen great success over the last 50 years, they’ve had some capital to burn on making the absolute best versions of all the rides you normally find at amusement parks. Personally, I think it’s because they understand a couple of things: branding and limits. First, the branding. When you’re riding a ride at Disneyland, no matter what it is, they’ve taken the time to create a complete experience based on the theme of that ride. For example, when you’re waiting for the Matterhorn (a bobsledy coaster that runs in the big mountain you can see from all over the park) you’re treated to a line experience that gives the illusion of a mountain in Old Bavaria. There’s Oompa music playing, the safety announcements are done by a voice with a bit of an accent and even the stand that they controls for the ride are on is branded to look like it’s come right out of a ski chalet. Once you’re in your sled, the ride up to the top of the mountain is dark with a few flashes of things you might see in a mountain setting like the eyes of bats or stalagmite crystals. Even the folks running the Matterhorn are dressed to match the surroundings of that specific ride instead of a generic polo shirt like you’d find at other amusement parks. It’s a complete experience even as you ride down from the top of the mountain past yetis and melting snow caps. They’re doing everything they can to sell you on the idea that this is a sled run down a mountain instead of just a ride. It’s branding at it’s finest. The other thing that Disney does so well is knowing people’s limits. Sure, sometimes it’s fun to ride a coaster that’s going to flip you upside down 6 times in a row, go under water and go higher and faster than any coaster has gone before…but you can’t make a day or two out of those types of experiences. They’re draining and after the third or fourth one, they stop being fun and start being a chore. At Disneyland, it feels like they know how to push it right up to the edge of uncomfortable while still making it fun. Yes, Space Mountain left us feeling a bit Swoozie Kurtz (a phrase that I wish I could say I coined, but was in fact uttered by my very Swoozied at the time friend, Nicole) but it didn’t stop us from riding other rides and even coming back for more Space Mountain later that same day. They’re thrill rides that have been finely tuned to live on that edge between screaming with joy and just plain screaming. This kind of care and thought is why I can say that the best tube based water ride and log flume ride I’ve ever been on were both at Disneyland. (See also: Screamin’ California, The Tower of Terror, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain)

Add on top of that all the crazy things that you only see at Disneyland (a castle, characters, big ass parades, etc.) and you can really get a sense of why Disneyland is so iconic.

Why is it a PCBS? For me, Disneyland is the first great amusement undertaking that connected with Americans on a national scale. It’s influence (and the influence of it’s original creator) have permeated pop culture over the last 55 years in ways that I’m sure Walt Disney never imagined. From “The Simpsons” parody of everything Disneyland with their trip to “Itchy & Scratchy Land” to the Stark Expo from the “Ironman” series, Disneyland’s become a part of our the zeitgeist. One of my favorite references to the park (and it’s less than stellar opening) comes from “Jurassic Park”. When things start to go wrong, Hammond’s defense is that “When Disneyland opened in 1956, nothing worked!” To which chaos theory expert Dr. Ian Malcolm quips “But John, when Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists!” To call it a national treasure isn’t even really a stretch. It’s iconic in nature and so much a part of so many people’s childhood’s that it can easily be considered something that everyone should do at least once in their lifetime.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? While Disney isn’t exactly in the rear view mirror, I did learn a few valuable lessons from my recent trip to the house of mouse.

1. Everyone’s Right: While I can’t sit here and say that there’s absolutely nothing bad about Disneyland (since I know there is thanks to a few books that I’ve read on the subject), I can say that every good thing you’ve ever heard about the experience is true. It’s fabulously clean, extremely well organized and almost everyone you meet that works there is nice without being up in your grill about it. For example, I was wearing a baseball cap with the Green Lantern symbol on it while there (because the sun and I are totally broken up) and was complimented not once, but twice by employees during our two days there. I even had the obligatory Marvel vs. DC conversation with a nice young lady behind the counter at a store as I was making my purchase. Everyone I talked to just seemed to really be enjoying their job and was genuinely good at it. Also, my friend Matt claims that he met the “nicest churro lady ever” while purchasing a delicious churro one afternoon. (If you know of a nicer churro lady, please use the comment section below to let me know about it). One final example is the photographer who was obviously a bit loopy by the time she snapped our picture in front of the train station as we were leaving the Disneyland side of the park to go to California Adventure. She made sure that we all looked good for the photo and even managed to show us the way to blow up a fist bump into a jellyfish. It was odd but endearing. On sheer force of attitude and will, it’s the happiest place on earth.
2. Lines aren’t necessarily a bad thing: Lines are a fact of life inside amusement parks. No matter where you go, you’re going to be forced to stand in line at some point for some amount of time. At Disneyland, it seemed like even when we were in line, we were being entertained by either each other or by our surroundings. (Side note: even though we went over a holiday weekend we never stood in what I would consider a “soul crushing” line. Longest wait was about 25 minutes and that’s more than reasonable). It was during one of these line standing around events that it really became clear why I was having so much fun. For me at least, rides are more about the 5 minutes right before you reach the top of the hill or the scary entrance and the 20 minutes after when you’re sharing your different experiences on the way to your next destination. Travel time and lines and the build up to rides facilitated some of the most fun I had during the trip. Lots of laughing, lots of re-telling of events (like when a ride had a sudden stop that caused a friend who was yelling “Wheee!!!” to accidentally spit on the seat in front of them) and lots of talk time made me realize that lines are an important part of the Disneyland experience.
3. Absolutely no partying whilst on a ride: As you can see in the image that I chose for the top of the post, there is absolutely no partying while on a ride at Disneyland. Yes, I know that ride safety is important and I’m all for keeping everybody safe during their experience but once we figured out that the “Don’t do this!” picture on every ride basically showed an adult and what I can only assume is a little person hanging out the sides of the ride in full “Party Car” positions, it became vital to point out before each take off. “No Party <insert vehicle type>” became a constant source of amusement at the beginning of each ride.
4. Lots of the rides are based on the idea that the ride is in some way damaged: I had this epiphany after riding Big Thunder Mountain for the third or fourth time. Most of the coaster rides at Disneyland are based on the idea that whatever it is that you’re in isn’t functioning properly and thus goes astray. Think about it. Big Thunder Mountain? Runaway train. Tower of Terror? Busted elevator. Splash Mountain? You got tricked into going over the falls by a rabbit. It’s a Small World? You’ve died and accidentally ended up in Purgatory. Seriously, it’s a coaster cliche…but one that I’m completely willing to live with.

Final Thoughts: Disneyland was a great experience that I’m glad I saved for a time when I could really appreciate it. If Walt Disney World is the fine wine that you sip and savor over a week long visit, then Disneyland is the shot of adrenaline straight to your heart. It’s the concentrated essence of fun that all other amusement parks strive to be. The funny thing is that I feel like I was reminded of a few things about myself as well during my time in Anaheim. If you’ve read any of the other Pop Culture Blind Spots, you know that I tend to be a tad snarky and condescending when it comes to most things. Disneyland was a great reminder that there’s still a whole lot of really big good in the world and sometimes it’s ok not to be cynical about it. Sometimes good really is just good. While others were lining up to watch the parade and fireworks in the evening, we were running from ride to ride trying to take advantage of the short lines. It was our last night there and we’d still not crossed “It’s a Small World” off our list so we ran over and managed to walk right on to the ride. Our boat entered just as the first firework went off so by the time we were through with the robotic kids, the big finale was gearing up. I have to say that standing there on the bridge of “It’s a Small World” watching the final fireworks go off, I got a bit of a lump in my throat. Disneyland is as close to truly “playing” as I think we can get as adults. It’s completely unafraid of being judged and seems to be full of chances for you to let go and just be a kid again. It’s a reminder that sometimes a dream really is a wish that your heart makes and that if you really try hard enough, it really can come true. In a world like ours, I think that’s a great lesson to be reminded of.

Stop grinning, you smug hussy.

Let me start by saying that I truly believe Nicolas Sparks thinks your relationship sucks. Seriously. He believes in his heart of hearts that because you didn’t meet in the middle of a depression, weren’t separated for years by evil parents who locked you away and weren’t torn between the love of your life and something that could be considered “epically tragic” (war, famine, drought, a screening of another Nicolas Sparks movie, etc.) your relationship is basically just so-so. So take it with a grain of salt as I try to explain how I felt about “The Notebook”, the biggest of the Nicolas Sparks sappy romance movies that began with 1999′s “Message in a Bottle” (respect to Mandy Moore, she has to eat) and most recently gave us “The Last Song” with Miley Cyrus (who’s got to be up for an Oscar for her performance….no? really? ok, nevermind.)  And before you say “Well the movie wasn’t made for you” or “You just don’t like romantic movies” or “Such a typical guy reaction”, trust me that’s not it. I love romance. I’m a huge sucker for love and am a bit of a commitment junkie. I love the idea of destiny bringing two people together as only destiny can and may have teared up a time or two at a “Happily Ever After” ending. It’s the substance of “The Notebook” that I have a problem with. The actual mechanics of the story bug the hell out of me and I think they’re setting the wrong expectation level for every single woman that sees them. But before I get too far down that road…

A Brief Synopsis of “The Notebook”: In the beginning, there was Maverick and Betty Ford…the movie opens with James Garner (Maverick from TV and Maverick’s dad from the movie “Maverick”) and Gena Rowlands (Betty Ford from 1987′s “The Betty Ford Story”) meeting in a nursing home. He’s there to read a story to her and she’s there to look confused and ask questions like a third grader for most of the movie. He begins to tell her the story of Noah and Allie, two teens in 1940′s South Carolina. They meet at a carnival and they’re a wrong fit, right from the start. He immediately begins starring at her like she’s one of those posters that looks like nothing but is actually something quite complex (“It’s a pirate ship! If you cross your eyes you can totally see it!”). Instead of accepting Noah’s creepy stares as an invitation to begin the relationship that will define her and all time (suck it, Cleopatra) Allie decides to ride the ferris wheel with a random guy that will soon never be seen again. Not one to take no for an answer, Noah leaps onto the ferris wheel and ends up dangling by one arm until Allie agrees to date him. (Let me also say that in my mind, there’s nothing less safe than a ferris wheel…except for a ferris wheel in the 1940′s. I assume it was just a big erector set that the 40′s carnies moved from town to town in a series of toyboxes…but I digress.) Even though Allie still refuses to date the lumber mill worker from the wrong side of the stereotypical tracks the next day, Noah manages to get to a movie with her because of a little help in the form of Eric from “Entourage.” And apparently, one co-viewing of a Li’l Abner movie was all it took for this Juliet to fall for her Romeo. Once they’re out of the movies and laying in the middle of the street trying to get run over by cars, their relationship is off to the races. In a classic “relationship montage”, Noah and Allie go from “justing dating” to “in a relationship” and before you know it are squarely planted in the realm of “it’s complicated.” Summer’s rapidly coming to an end and (SURPRISE!) Allie’s supposed to go off to Sarah Lawrence for school, a fact that Noah only learns while attending a brunch with Allie’s parents and a long table full of other Richie Rich folks. In an effort to show just how much Noah doesn’t fit in with the others, everyone at the table during that scene is wearing white clothes…except Noah who’s wearing black (See what they did there?). It’s also during this brunch that we get to know Allie’s father, a man who’s not afraid to telegraph the fact that he’s evil by sporting a Snidley Whiplash mustache. He and her mom (Joan Allen playing evil Joan Allen from the “Bourne” movies and not understanding Joan Allen from “Pleasantville”) both think that Noah’s not good enough for their prim and proper little girl. It’s with that backdrop that Noah takes Allie to an old plantation house which he talks of someday buying and remodeling. Hearing the opportunity for future home ownership, Allie chimes in with her requests for the house (white with blue trim, wrap around porch, display case for his balls, etc.) Being co-dependent, he immediately agrees. They’re about to make love on a blanket in the middle of the rotting house when Eric from “Entourage” storms in because Allie’s parents have sent the police to look for her…and because Noah’s obviously told him of his plan to take Allie to the old abandoned house to get it on (40′s guy high five!). Allie and Noah rush back to her house where evil Joan Allen and Snidley Whiplash are waiting to tell Allie how much they hate Noah and all his poorness. Although her father wants to tie her up and leave her on the train tracks (muah-haha!), her mother instead tells her that she’s no longer allowed to slum it with Noah. Hearing the shouting from the other room, Noah heads for his truck but is chased by Allie where they fight and eventually break up…sorta. Although she tries to see him one last time before being dragged off to the city, Allie and Noah part ways that night for years. But distance can’t stop a love like theirs! Noah writes a letter each day for 365 days to Allie professing his love and adoration for her. His light of his love knows no bounds and cannot be tamed by the miles that are between them…but totally gets c***blocked by her mom who intercepts all 365 letters and makes sure that Allie never sees them (told you it was evil Joan Allen). World War II breaks out (as it does) and Noah goes off to war with Eric from “Entourage” while Allie stays behind to go to college and work as a nurse. It’s during one of her nursing shifts that she meets Lon (played by all around handsome guy James Marsden) who, once he recovers, sweeps her off her feet. Lon’s charming, sophisticated and filthy stinking rich. In evil Joan Allen’s eyes, it’s a match made in heaven and Snidley can’t stop twirling his mustache, he just so excited. Noah returns from the war (where Eric from “Entourage” was randomly exploded during a battle…sorry E!) to find that his father has sold their house so Noah can buy the old plantation house and restore it. He takes a random trip to Charleston where he randomly sees Allie and Lon through a restaurant window and goes from stalker eyes to sad eyes in a matter of seconds. He returns to his dilapidated house more determined than ever to remodel it in just the way Allie would have wanted. Meanwhile! While out for a night of drinking and dancing…with her parents…the charming Lon drops the engagement bomb on Allie and she gladly accepts. As Allie plans for her wedding, Noah’s dad dies (way to kick a man while he’s down, Sparks) but Noah still manages to complete his remodel (including painting it white with blue shutters and building a wrap around porch <squeal!>). Noah’s accomplishment is so great that his picture is run in the paper under the headline “Local Sad Sack remodels house in attempt to woo woman that’s totally moved on.” But! Allie sees the picture in the paper while trying on her wedding dress…and promptly passes out. She hatches a plan and tells Lon that she’s got some “business” to take care of back in the town that she and her parents used to summer in. He plays right into her manipulative hands and eagerly allows her to leave for a few days. She makes a B-line for the restored house, finds Noah and scopes out this house that he’s constructed just for her. Two days, a few beers and one trip to some sort of duck orgy later, Noah and Allie have that one great kiss and are right back where they were rudely interrupted by Eric from “Entourage” all those years earlier. They spend a few days in bed and socializing with Noah’s “friend” that  he’s been sleeping with when bored from a few towns over (who, instead of being hurt or upset or angry about finding Noah with someone else instead praises their relationship as something that she strives to have in her life in the future….whuck?). But alas, all good things must come to an end and when Allie awakens to discover that Noah’s created a room just for her to paint in (see, he supports her painting while Lon totally didn’t…even though he had no idea she liked to paint), evil Joan Allen shows up to tell Allie that 1. Snidley’s let slip that she’s returned to their vacation town to hook up with her ex-boyfriend to her fiance, 2. she also once had a summer love (with whom she had a blast) who was from the wrong end of the tax bracket who she abandoned in order to marry her the much more socially acceptable  (read as: RICH) husband and 3. that she totally intercepted all of the letters that Noah sent to her years before…but instead of destroying them she kept them nicely bundled together in the trunk of her car. She gives Allie the letters so Allie can show them to Noah and then leave him to face Lon….who she unceremoniously dumps. Cut to the car pulling up to her dream house and Allie shrugging her shoulders as if to say “Does South Carolina have a joint property law?” and they live happily ever….WAIT. Remember, Maverick’s been telling this story to Betty Ford the whole time. Aside from a few “Princess Bride”-style cut ins here and there, we’ve not seen a whole lot of the genial geriatrics but we do know that they’re married, they have children and Betty Ford remembers none of it. You see, Maverick is actually Noah, not a scoundrel poker player with a heart of gold and Betty Ford is actually Allie, not America’s favorite rehabilitated First Lady. Noah’s been reading Allie the story of their love (which she wrote for him in a “Notebook”) in an attempt to turn back the clock on her debilitating memory loss. He’s been reading it to her day after day hoping to catch tiny glimpses of the woman that he built a house for and is rewarded with five minutes here or there of true lucidity from Allie. As he concludes the story this time, she flashes back to sanity long enough to tell him how much she loves him, ask about their children and begin to dance to their favorite song…before slipping back into the frightening fog that is something like Alzheimer’s. She flips out, has to be sedated and is secluded from Noah…who promptly has his third heart attack. When he’s finally able to return to the nursing home, he’s allowed to sneak into her room and has one more real conversation with Allie before they fall asleep in each other’s arms…and both die. Roll credits.

Why is it a PCBS? The 2004 released of “The Notebook” was the biggest romantic movie to hit theaters since 1997′s “Titanic” (another movie about star-crossed lovers from two different ends of the wealth scale that ended in death) and firmly established Nicolas Sparks, Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams and the return of the curled handle-bar mustache (ok, maybe not that last one). McAdams went on to star in big hits like “Wedding Crashers” and “Sherlock Holmes” while Gosling chose smaller art films like “Lars and the Real Girl” and “Half Nelson”. The two even dated for a time in real life but broke up for good in 2008…I assume that he’s dealing with their breakup by remodeling her dream home and drinking. But really, “The Notebook” flew into the zeitgeist as the new measuring stick for romantics. As a rule, 8 out of every 10 women who saw the movie left the theater in tears with 2 of those needing to have others drive them home because of vision impairment. Being a guy who enjoyed “The Notebook” became a badge of honor used to scam on chicks who were left emotionally raw by it’s pure emotiony emotions (ironically the basic premise behind McAdams “Wedding Crashers”). In particular, one scene transcended the movie and became a touchstone for women everywhere. That kiss in the rain on the dock when Allie realizes that she’s still madly in love with handy Noah which was immortalized on the movie poster became the latest in a long tradition of Hollywood uber-romantic moments (“Here’s lookin’ at you kid.”, “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”, etc.) that become the gold standard for “true romance.” McAdams and Gosling even won the “Best Kiss” award at that year’s MTV Movie Awards and re-created the kiss live for the 35 people that actually still watch the MTV Movie Awards. It became the true definition of “romantic” almost overnight thus forever elevating it into the popular consciousness. Except for, apparently, mine.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well, if you hadn’t guessed by this point, I wasn’t a big fan of this movie and here’s why: WHO ACTS LIKE THAT?!? Here’s the thing, over the past 30 years (since Ali McGraw told Ryan O’Neil that “love means never having to say you’re sorry” in a movie that I’ve still got to watch for a future PCBS) we’ve suffered from a bit of a crisis of romance in America. Look at the way that Allie treats the guys in this movie. She leaves town without saying goodbye to Noah (yes, she leaves a message with Eric from “Entourage” but really, if you love him you should stay regardless of what your parents say) and then decides to forget about him and move on because she never receives a letter from him. It’s later revealed that he’s sent her 365 letters which totally makes up for all the time that she spent thinking that he didn’t write to her…but wait…what makes up for all the time that he spent thinking that she didn’t write to him? Oh right, she didn’t. So on the big relationship scoreboard that’s 365 for him and 0 for her. Next, she finds a nice guy in Lon and yet at the first sign of Noah in the paper, she leaves town and hops right back into bed with Noah. Hell, when her mom shows up it’s not like she’s pacing the floor trying to figure out what she’s going to do about her fiance at home and her personal contractor named Noah. No, when her mom shows up to drop the bomb on her she’s getting ready to paint…topless….on the wrap around porch that Noah built for her. Feel free to use the comments section to attempt to defend her actions, btw. So she’s confronted, caught cheating on her fiance and yet STILL doesn’t really know what she’s going to do or who she’s going to pick. So she leaves Noah, AGAIN, and heads to town to “talk” to Lon. It’s only in conversation with Lon that she realizes what she really wants and heads back to Noah. Don’t even get me started on the fact that in the present day she’s left a Notebook for Maverick to read to her every day in the hopes that it will “bring her back to him.” Why not say “this is going to be really painful for you, why don’t you live with our children, be happy and occasionally visit my crazy ass?” Finally, in one last masterstroke of control, Allie’s the one to suggest that they “go together”. Now I’m not saying that she killed him….but I’m totally saying that she killed him. When all was said and done, were Allie’s choices more or less hurtful to others than evil Joan Allen’s? For me, Allie’s actions leave women with two very terrible lessons:

• “It’s totally ok to jerk guys around as long as you’re crying about it”: Allie manages to hurt the same guy twice and break off an engagement before she finally ends up with Noah. Yes, she’s terribly conflicted about it the whole time, but if the movie were about a guy doing the same thing he’d be burned in effigy from the highest dogwood tree in Charleston.
• “Guys who really love you will build you a house, no questions asked.”: Seriously, where were Noah’s friends to tell him that he was being completely insane when he was building an entire plantation house with the singular goal of getting Allie to return to him. That’s not love, that’s just crazy.

In the end, I feel like “The Notebook” has doomed us to a generation of maladjusted expectations all in the name of “romance.” Thanks Sparks!

Final Thoughts: While this is probably the most vitriolic PCBS that I’ve written, my feelings about “The Notebook” are just that. I feel like it’s a movie with two main characters that learn absolutely nothing from beginning to end. Noah goes from obsessed with Allie at first sight to dying beside her in bed after sneaking into her room. Full crazy town circle. Allie’s allowed to float through the movie, changing her mind on the turn of a dime and fully expecting the men in her life to deal with her eventual decisions. Life doesn’t work like that. Love has consequences and Sparks manages to gloss over absolutely all of them in the name of “epic romance.” We’ve made great strides in the mechanics of relationships since the 40′s and Sparks really tries to turn the clock back on them all with a story that rings incredibly hollow. As a very smart English teacher once hammered home for me, Nathaniel Hawthorne put it best: “Perfection cannot exist in an imperfect world.” And by writing a story without real consequences, Sparks tries to make the love between Allie and Noah “perfect.” Love is perfect only when it’s flawed because then it’s only perfect for the two people involved. If life were like “The Notebook” we’d all be searching for ducks and docks instead of finding the beauty in the lives and people around us. It’s not that I hate “The Notebook” it’s just that I’m disappointed in it’s lack of true heart. Love songs and slow motion shots of birds do not a romantic movie make.

My accent makes me evil, but my costume makes me fabulous.

Before we start, I have to say that no matter what I say about “TRON” in the next 2,300 words, I didn’t hate the movie. Please don’t take my witty barbs to mean that I am in any way disrespecting the memory of this movie that is beloved the nerd world over. I love comics and Xbox and Sci-Fi as much as the next guy and I mean no harm. Read all the way to the end before leaving angry comments or emailing me threats of lightning bolting me the next time you see me.  That being said…the graphics in “TRON” actually made my eyes bleed. Seriously, it was like ocular stigmata from the moment they jumped into the computer. It’s like they were trying to get me to throw things at the screen. But before we get too far down that road, let’s start from the beginning….

A Brief Synopsis of “TRON”: Re-capping the plot of “TRON” is a bit like going into detail about the plot of “Independence Day”. Everything you really need to know can be summed up in one sentence.  In this case, it’s not “aliens invade earth, blow shit up and are stopped by Will Smith being charming”. Instead, “TRON” is really just “guy gets sucked into computer, crazy computer graphics!, guy gets out.” Yes, that’s a simplistic view but it’s true. But to be fair, here’s a slightly more in-depth synopsis. ”TRON” is the story of Kevin Flynn (played by a very young but still very Dude-ish Jeff Bridges), a brilliant game designer who was ruthlessly ripped off by a giant corporation, ENCOM…that seems to be involved in everything from video games to molecular physics. (They are YEARS ahead of the competition in the disappearing/reappearing orange arms race) With the help of two ex-coworkers, Alan and Lora (who is one of Flynn’s ex-flames), Flynn breaks into ENCOM in an attempt to find the file that proves that his old boss, Ed Dillinger (played very British by David Warner) stole a bunch of his games before unceremoniously firing him. Flynn’s been trying to find the file by hacking his way into the ENCOM system with a program called Clu but has been completely shut out by Dillinger and the Master Control Program (MCP). It’s probably right about here that I should clarify a few things. Programs inside the “computer world” have a tendency to look like the people that either created them or that use them. For instance, Clu looks like Jeff Bridges but talks like Jeff Bridges impersonating a stoned robot and the MCP’s in-computer side-kick Sark looks like David Warner but acts like a little bitch 9/10ths of the time. Back in the plot, Flynn breaks into ENCOM and Lora sets him up at her computer terminal (which for safety reasons was placed directly in front of a giant laser) and attempts to “hack” his way past the MCP. Not one to go quietly, MCP takes a play from the HAL-9000 playbook and uses the conveniently placed laser to zap Flynn and suck him into the computer. Instead of immediately killing (or “de-rezzing” Flynn), the MCP goes all Bond villain and decides to let Flynn get trained in the games that it’s forcing rouge programs to play against each other (to the death!) so he can die at the hands of one of the programs he’s helped to create (sort of the digital version of being hoisted on your own petard). While in a holding cell, Flynn meets Ram (get it?) an actuarial program that’s being held by the MCP because he’s a “religious zealot” who still believes that programs work for “users” and not for the MCP. It’s the kind of sci-fi that screams “I read one book about philosophy one time!” but hey, it’s pretty deep stuff for a 1980′s live-action Disney movie. It seems that there’s a bit of an underground movement amongst the programs and it’s led to a sort of civil war between the “religious” programs that still believe in users and those that are willing to become servants of the authoritarian MCP. Flynn and Ram meet another rogue program named Tron (who looks like Bruce Boxleitner’s Alan who was working on a program called TRON that would have basically audited the MCP) and manage to escape from one of the game programs (the iconic Light Cycles) and head off to reach the Input/Output tower so they can contact Alan. Sark takes off after the group in his digital battle cruiser and manages to separate the group (and kill Ram) with some of his tanks. Tron meets up with Yori (who looks like Lora) and they make their way to the Input/Output tower where they meet up with the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland….actually it’s Dumont (looking like Lora’s lab partner and the original founder of ENCOM Dr. Walter Gibbs). Representing the old guard, he still believes in the users and encourages Tron to communicate with Alan while he holds off Sark and his Cylons. Tron places his disc into the energy beam and simultaneously gets information about how to defeat the MCP and creates the movie’s poster. As Dumont holds off Sark, Tron and Yori make their escape on a wacky ship with Flynn close behind. Flynn makes his way onto the solar sailor with Tron and Yori and surprises them with the fact that he’s not dead. With Sark’s ship on their heels, Flynn figures out that he’s got the ability to change the computer world around him and re-routes their ship onto a different light beam seeming to save it from Sark’s replicators. Unfortunately, Sark cuts the crew off at the proverbial pass and seems to kill Tron before taking Flynn and Yori aboard his flying submarine where he makes another class Bond villain mistake: the monologue. Again, instead of just killing Flynn and Yori, Sark decides to tell them how much more awesome he is than them and then proceeds to leave them to die as the ship is de-rezzed instead of actually killing them. Sark flies off with Dumont and some other prisoners that he’s going to feed to the MCP (with Tron stowed away on his ship) while Yori cries and Flynn tries to escape. Upon reaching the MCP, Tron jumps out to surprise Sark and manages to use his disc to give him a reverse mowhawk. The MCP chooses that moment to impart Sark with the unlimited power of the MCP…which means he grows super tall and gets to move around super slowly. Tron starts attacking the shield around the MCP with his disc as Gigantor Sark tries to step on him (great powers, dumbass). Flynn and Yori fly up on the remains of Sark’s flying wire-frame twinkie, share a kiss (because a human kissing the computer program that looks like his ex-girlfriend isn’t weird at all) and then Flynn jumps into the beam coming out of the top of the MCP. Flynn’s selfless act manages to freeze the MCP’s shield just long enough for Tron to throw his Alan-infused power disc into it and the whole world goes from Fascist Red to America Blue. The laser shoots Flynn back into the real world (where it doesn’t seem like any time has passed at all) and he’s rewarded with a printout showing that he was the original programmer for the games that Dillinger stole. Cut to Dillinger’s office where his gigantic Minority Report desk is showing the same information (I totally thought he was going to kill himself in that moment but remember it’s a Disney movie). One more shot of Alan and Lora waiting on the roof of ENCOM for “The Boss” to land in his helicopter. When the door swings open, it’s not Dillinger, it’s Flynn who’s translated his experience as the owner/manager of an arcade to the CEO of a huge corporation…because that makes sense. Roll credits.

Why is it a PCBS? Basically, because it’s “TRON”. Over the years, “TRON” has become a bit of a touchstone for everything from establishing nerd credibility (for example it’s one of the posters on Chuck’s wall on “Chuck”) to spawning it’s own long-running internet celebrity(the TRON guy which I won’t attempt to explain because I just plain can’t). It’s been used as a joke on “The Simpsons” (when Homer accidentally wanders into the third dimension and tries to describe the landscape around him with the question “Did anybody see that movie “TRON”?) and even spawned it’s own re-occurring character on “South Park” (Moses, the super computer used by their version of the Super Friends, looks and sounds like the MCP). It’s basically become the go-to reference when you’re trying to convey the idea of either super nerdy or super inside-y geek speak. I’m a tad ashamed that it took me so long to see it, but after seeing it, I can see why it took me so long. It’s also a PCBS because of all the sci-fi that it’s influenced since it’s 1982 debut. But more about that later…

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well….here’s the thing. As I’ve hinted to before, you definitely have to look past the computer graphics and effects of the movie to truly judge it. On the surface, to call the CGI in “TRON” CGI is to call that table-top game that vibrated football player-shaped cut outs around the field “football.” But I’m not going to spend 200 words telling you something that you already know (Computer graphics in 1982 look crappy compared to today? You don’t say!). So let’s look at the movie for what it really was…ground-breakingly ambitious sci-fi that would never get a green light from a studio today. The story of how “TRON” got made is almost more interesting than the story in “TRON”. A tiny, start-up animation studio in Boston developed an idea for a new production process that allowed for the mix of live actors, animation and computer graphics. They shopped it around town after moving to LA and got Disney to commit to a completely new technology, attached to a far out script, helmed by a first time director. That’s something that would never happen in 2010. For example, it’s no big news that almost everything that’s in theaters this summer is a sequel or property based on some other form of media (book, comic, toy line, etc.). The idea that a studio as big as Disney would commit any sort of dollars to something like “TRON” really speaks to how Wild West the film industry still was in 1982. Disney was looking for something to bridge the gap from their old live action movies (“Herbie the Lovebug”, “That Darn Cat”, “The Parent Trap”, etc.) to their future. “TRON” and their next movie “The Black Hole” were huge gambles on the part of the studio that didn’t pay off in the short term but definitely panned out in the long run. Yes, “TRON” was a bit of a flop at the box office but over the years it found an audience and became a bit of an underground classic (and also entertainment for California school children on rainy days, so the story I’ve been told goes). The other big takeaway for me is realizing just how many sci-fi stories that have come out since “TRON” liberally borrowed directly from it, most notably ”The Matrix”. When I first saw “The Matrix” I was blown away by it’s seemingly original story of Neo jumping between the real world and the simulated Matrix. Sadly, I can now see that it’s really just a rip off of the ideas in “TRON”. “The Matrix” followed the “TRON” recipe to a T: 1 part computer hacker + 1 part digital otherworld + 1 part pseudo-religious overtones, a sprinkle of average guy with a messiah complex, rinse, repeat. It’s the same movie with slicker CGI and guns. Both movies even use foreign actors with major gravitas as their bad guys (Hugo Weaving in “The Matrix” vs. David Warner in “TRON”). But for me, I have to say that the more I think about it, the more I like “TRON”. For a movie in 1982, it was really willing to take chances with storytelling that are still impressive leaps forward (even if they did rely on the “he’s dead! Wait, no he’s not!” gambit more than a few times). In my mind, one of the marks of great sci-fi is the willingness to attempt to set up a totally new world with it’s own rules and then stretch those rules to their limit. “TRON” does just that and although sometimes those rules miss (like when Tron, Flynn and Ram are all drinking from a magical pool to get more energy…an idea that’s never really revisited) it’s still better than most of the recycled crap that’s in cinemas today.

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day, is “TRON” cheesy? Yes. Are the graphics and story a bit out-dated? Of course they are. Does it make any sense that in the real world David Warner is answering to and seems to fear the MCP? No, no it doesn’t. But I can look past all of that and see “TRON” for the ground-breaking and influential movie that I know it is. The fact that so many other people have joked about the look of “TRON” for so long means that the movie has a look and feel so unique that it’s easily recognizable. It’s less campy than “Flash Gordon”, more heady than “Buck Rogers” and well worth the time it takes to watch. Just remember, the next time you sit down to use your computer, check to make sure that you’re not directly situated in front of a laser controlled by an evil computer program bent on destroying you. It’s just common sense.

Dead Eskimo kisses!

I could begin this post by saying that I didn’t enjoy the schmaltzy, over-the-top romance that drips from every corner of the movie “Ghost”…but I recently posted on Twitter that I cried at “Toy Story 3″ so what’s the point in even trying to fabricate that lie? It seems sort of fitting to talk about a movie like “Ghost” that offered a glimpse of supernatural romance the same week that the newest mythical romance movie hits the cinemas. I’m referring of course to “Mormon Monster Movie #3″ (also known as “Twilight: Eclipse”). Both movies offer stories of love and loss set against a world with a sci-fi rule set a bit more expanded than ours. Also, both movies saved money by eliminating their shirt budgets for key scenes. Looking back, the summer of 1990 was really the summer of Swayze. He was at the height of his power…and all because of some clay and a penny.

A Brief Synopsis of “Ghost”: “Ghost” follows the life and death of Sam Wheat (played by a well coiffed Patrick Swayze), a mid-level banker in a Manhattan who’s just moved in with his girlfriend, artist Molly (played by a very weepy Demi Moore). They’re deeply in ditto with each other and are remaking their spacious NYC loft into a living space/pottery barn for Molly’s work. Sam works with shifty eyed Carl (played actor turned director Tony Goldwyn) who’s been laundering drug money through the bank. By a random twist of math, Sam sorta uncovers the money laundering after giving his secret bank decoder passcode to Carl and discovering that there’s an extra $4 million dollars in a random account. After declaring that he’s never been happier and that he’s worried that something might burst that bubble (foreshadowing!), Molly can’t sleep and decides to do a little sculpting. What follows is probably one of the most famous movie scenes from the last 25 years. Sam comes up behind Molly just as she’s throwing a new vase on her pottery wheel and The Righteous Brothers “Unchained Melody” swells on the juke box. It’s a scene that’s better described as sensual than sexy. There’s a lot of inferred gettin’ it on but the only thing that’s really off is Swayze’s shirt. More about this little ditty later. Next,  Sam decides to take Molly to see MacBeth and on the way home from the theater, he’s basically killed Batman’s parents style. It’s at that moment that things begin to go from Rom-Com to Sci-Fi. Sam watches as Molly yells for help and cradles his bleeding body. He’s dead, but in death has basically just moved three feet to the left. Sam spends the next few weeks watching Molly grieve his loss…and watching Carl move in on his lady/apartment/cat. Slowly but surely, Sam pieces together the facts of his death and realizes that Carl’s behind it all. His hired gun, Willy Lopez, sneaks into Molly’s apartment and both spies on Molly while she’s changing and tries to get all stabby on her. Luckily, Sam realizes that even though he’s dead he can still commune with his cat who he weaponizes to scare Willy away. He runs home to a generic run down NY neighborhood with Sam on his heels. It’s in this dilapidated neighborhood that Sam finds Oda Mae Brown (an Oscar-winning performance from Whoopi Goldberg)  a local  ”psychic” who helps people “communicate with ghosts”. Although she’s been faking it for years, she finally makes it when Sam realizes that she can hear him. Using his newfound translator, Sam tries to warn Molly that she’s in trouble. Molly, of course, doubts the whole thing even though Oda Mae knows things that only Sam could know. In spite of Molly’s doubts, Sam devises a plan to screw over Carl. Oda Mae and Sam head to the bank and drain the $4 million dollars from the account. After a bit of convincing (and with a bit of foreshadowing for Whoopi’s future choices), Oda Mae hands the check over to a bunch of nuns…who proceed to pass out. Unfortunately, this makes Carl angry and when Molly accidentally reveals that she saw Oda Mae at the bank using the name of the fake account, Carl goes off the deep end and tells Sam that he’ll kill Molly if he doesn’t get his laundered drug money back. Willy and Carl go after Oda Mae and Sam manages to fight them off with Willy eventually being sandwiched between an affordable sedan…and a mac truck. Instead of seeing the light of heaven that we’ve seen all movie long as people have passed on, Willy is dragged into the shadows and straight to hell by the cast of Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia. Sam drags Oda Mae back to Molly’s apartment and uses a penny to convince her that she’s for real. Then things get weird…Sam jumps into Oda Mae’s body (with her permission) and he and Molly have a bit of a snuggle as “Unchained Melody” swells again. The director chose to have Swayze step in during this scene, but in reality it’s Oda Mae and Molly sensually hugging and touching in the middle of their apartment. Seriously. Think about it. Anyways, entering Oda Mae has wiped Sam out completely (ewww…) and of course that’s the moment that Carl shows up to kill Molly. The ladies run as a cracked out Carl crashes in with a gun ready to get some revenge. Sam can’t help and the fight moves from apartment to fire escape to abandoned apartment with inexplicable set pieces until Carl finally catches up and puts a gun to Molly’s throat. In all the hubbub, everyone seems to have forgotten about Sam…and it’s at that moment that the gun flies out of Carl’s hand (as if moved by a GHOST) and Molly is able to wriggle free. Sam pushes a scaffolding down on Carl who, in a fit of panic, tries to escape out the nearest window…which promptly shatters and basically cuts him in half. The shadow ghoulies show up and, after some final disapproving words from Sam, drag Carl straight to H-E-double hockey sticks. Sam’s saved the day and is rewarded with the chance to be seen one last time by Molly (who you’ve gotta think is going to get married and be happy with someone else before she dies thus crushing their eternal love) and a one way ticket to heaven (which looks a whole lot like the experiment from “Quantum Leap”). After a verbal high five for Oda Mae and one last kiss for Molly, Sam’s off to join the other early 90′s computer generated graphics in heaven.

Why is it a PCBS? Let’s get the numbers out of the way first. “Ghost” was the #2 grossing movie of 1990, a year which saw a slew of great movies released. Finishing second only to “Home Alone”, “Ghost” outperformed “Dances With Wolves”, “Dick Tracy”, “Total Recall”, “Die Hard 2″, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, “The Hunt for Red October” and “Pretty Woman.” That’s a hell of a financial pedigree. It’s still #72 on the top 100 grossing films of all time. It’s made more money than “Aladdin”, “Toy Story 2″, “Saving Private Ryan” and “Return of the Jedi.” Basically, the take away is that “Ghost” was a gigantic f’ing movie. Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her performance and the movie thrust “Unchained Melody” back into the national zeitgeist. Because of “Ghost” two different versions of the song charted in the top 20 in 1990 with the song spending two weeks at #1 that year. It was a huge win for Swayze (who wasn’t even originally considered for the part) and helped him land his next iconic role as Bodhi in “Point Break.” “Ghost” is one of those movies that was basically the result of all the stars lining up at once and shining down on one little movie. One last big number: “Ghost” cost $22 million dollars to make…it made $217 million dollars at the box office. Then there’s that scene. The shot of Sam sitting behind Molly at the pottery wheel has become iconic. It’s a touchstone for sensuality and because of it’s inherent ridiculousness (they’re basically stroking the clay, I mean c’mon) it’s still the object of parody today. It’s been referenced or parodied over 100 times since it’s debut and even popped up on “The Simpsons” again in 2010. The fact that I haven’t seen a movie that was this big, that slipped into the national consciousness this deeply is the purest example of a Pop Culture Blind Spot yet.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly, despite it’s incredibly outdated effects and pottery wheel inferred sex scenes, the movie stands up even after all these years and I believe there are a couple of reasons why:

1. Three solid performances: “Ghost” is the perfect example of performances rising about the source material. Swayze, Demi and Whoopi all brought their A game to “Ghost” and it shows in almost every scene. Throughout the movie, even in scenes where two of the three actors appear, at least one of them is working hard to ignore the other. There are countless scenes where Swayze’s brooding over the fact that Molly can’t hear him even though their together in the room or where Molly is talking to Sam not knowing that he’s actually there and hearing her. Whoopi, who was honored for her performance by the academy, spends most of the movie playing off someone that she’s not even able to see. It’s a study in focus from all three actors in a movie that could very easily have been completely unbelievable in the hands of a lesser cast.
2. It’s classic Sci-Fi: In my mind, great Sci-Fi creates a world, establishes the rules for that world and then twists and bends those rules to make a great story. From the moment that Sam dies in “Ghost” the movie begins to establish some basic rules. Rules like: No one can see or hear Sam except for other ghosts, he can’t really interact with the world and the basic good vs. evil idea of being ushered into heaven or dragged into hell. Then we spend the rest of the movie bending and breaking those rules. No one can see Sam…except for his cat. No one can hear Sam…except for Oda Mae. Sam can’t interact with the world…unless he really focuses as he’s taught by another ghost on the subway. And it’s not until Willy’s death in the 3rd reel that we see the consequences of leading a bad life and being dragged to hell (a fate that only he and Carl endure in the movie). Sam, much like other classic Sci-Fi heroes, is working against the odds to get back to the woman he loves, if only for one last kiss. Classic Sci-Fi storytelling leads to an enduring good movie.

Final Thoughts: Before seeing “Ghost”, Patrick Swayze was attached to two memories in my head. The first, as it is for most people, is Swayze telling Jerry Orbach that “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” in “Dirty Dancing.” The other might be a bit odder. In October of 1990, the fall after “Ghost” became a gigantic success, Swayze hosted “Saturday Night Live.” During that show, he did a sketch with Chris Farley where the two of them were the last two competitors for a single job at Chippendale’s. He and Farley both throw out their best moves for the judges and strip down to the classic tight pants, bow tie and random cuffs. The two of them show each other nothing but respect and seem unaware of the fact that Farley’s just grossly overweight for the job. Swayze comes across as genuine, caring and downright earnest (a stage direction I recently tried to impart to an actor). I now realize that the only reason that hilarious sketch made it to air is because of this supernatural romance movie the summer before. Without “Ghost”, Swayze never hosts SNL and he and Farley never have that dance-off. That right there is reason enough to love this movie. But there’s more to love about the story of boy meets girl, boy dies defending girl, dead boy protects girl and ends up in heaven. It’s a romantic story of longing and loss that thoroughly trounces the pseudo-romance of the “Twilight” series. These characters truly love each other and are torn apart in the worst of ways. The movie brings you into this relationship, makes you care about those involved and then tears the lovers apart only to bring them back together in the final moments of the film in a moment that both bittersweet and strangely cathartic. “Ghost” makes you ask yourself how far you’d go for the ones you love. It also brought the Righteous Brothers to every dance I went to in middle school. That’s the power of pop culture from beyond the grave.

What does it say about the CIA if this is one of their contract killers?

What if everything about you was a lie? That’s sorta the way that this movie leaves you feeling about it’s central figure, Chuck Barris. Based on the “unauthorized biography” that Barris is seen writing in different flashbacks during the movie, it weaves a story that’s so outlandish that it goes from feeling so outrageous that it must be true, to so outlandish that it doesn’t even feel like it can keep it’s own story straight. It’s full of heavy hitting actors, adapted for the screen by one of the best screenwriters of our time, directed by a Hollywood player and starring one of Hollywood’s biggest talents…but does it ever really deliver on it’s promise? That’s the focus of this Pop Culture Blind Spot, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.”

A Brief Synopsis of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind”: Chuck Barris is lonely. Even when he’s surrounded by people and fame, Chuck (played by Sam Rockwell) always feels like an outsider looking in. It’s that outsider status that allows him to transition between television producer and CIA contract killer. That’s the basic idea behind “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and it’s the one that rings true for most of the movie. As a teenager, Barris is the awkward “odd man out” who’s always lusting after the wrong girls in the wrong way. Thinking that a life in television will help him get women, he starts working as an NBC page and eventually transitions to becoming Dick Clark’s personal assistant during the “American Bandstand” years. He writes a pop song for Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon (which helps him bed a fellow Dick Clark staffer played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) but yearns for something more. In one of the movie’s many “stroke of genius” moments, he creates “The Dating Game” and eventually gets to shoot a pilot…that ABC passes on. Chuck goes on one of many benders and ends up getting in all kinds of scrapes and scraps at local watering holes where he’s “identified” by a CIA recruiter, played by director George Clooney. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the “director as actor” move, but Clooney does  a good job here (as he did in “Good Night and Good Luck”) of balancing the two. So begins Chuck’s double life of television producer by day and CIA contract assassin by night. Eventually “The Dating Game” is added to the ABC schedule and becomes a big hit which gives Chuck the cover he needs for his prolonged vacations to exotic locales. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that under the guise of “chaperon”, Barris escorted young “Dating Game” winners to places like West Germany and Poland so he could carry out dangerous assassinations on the side. It’s far fetched at best and neither Barris nor the movie ever make any indisputable claims about his CIA ties. The CIA, of course, denies it all and has since the book was first published. As more and more Barris shows make it to air (“The Newlywed Game”, “The $1.95 Beauty Pagent”, “How’s Your Mother-in-Law?”, etc.) Barris seems to loose whatever grip he had on reality and begins to use his CIA work as stress relief. All the while, he’s juggling his television responsibilities and his complicated relationship with Penny (the roommate of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character and played by Drew Barrymore). Penny’s half spirit guide and half moral compass for Chuck who continually cheats on her while at home and abroad. She’s madly in love with Chuck and seems willing to look past almost anything to be with him, even if that means accepting his terribly behavior. Chuck creates “The Gong Show” in 1976 and steps from behind the camera to host a show that’s derided by critics as “a sign of the end of civilization” but loved by TV audiences. Unfortunately, the zany atmosphere of “The Gong Show” only feeds into Chuck’s growing paranoia and the movie takes a weird turn as old friends start being killed off and Chuck is convinced that he’s next. His contact on most of his Eastern European killing sprees has been Patricia (played by Julia Roberts) and in the end it’s her that’s been mopping up old contacts with her sights set on Chuck. In a final showdown with tea, Chuck pulls a Vizzini and switches the cups to place the poison in front of Patricia and eventually kill her. Chuck returns to the run down hotel room he’s secluded himself to and begins to write “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” Flash forward a bit and Chuck marries Penny and tries to confess his double life to her but she thinks it’s only a joke…a lie he seems resigned to allowing. The movie ends with the real Chuck Barris sitting down for an interview for the movie…alone.

Why is it a PCBS? It’s a movie with a great pedigree. Barris’ book was adapted for the screen by “King of the WTF” Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich”, “Adaptation”, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) even though he was unhappy with the end result. It was also the first movie directed by handsome man about town George Clooney. Then, of course, there’s the list of stars in the movie: Clooney, Barrymore, Roberts, Damon, Pitt, Rutger Hauer and a very young Micheal Cera to name a few. Add to that the fact that the movie had bounced around between studios, directors and stars since the late 80′s (somewhat like “Don Quixote”) and you begin to see why this movie casts such a large blind spot shadow. It also just feels like a movie that I should have seen first run. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this kind of Miramax/Soderbergh/Ocean’s 11 kind of film is exactly what I was in to in 2002…so I’m not quite sure how it slipped through my net. Of course, it seems like a lot of people missed this movie the first time around. It was a bit of a box office bomb but much of that can be blamed on the fact that it opened around the same time as “Lord of the Rings: Two Towers”, “Chicago” and “Catch Me if You Can.” It should have been a bigger movie than it was…and I should have seen it.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly, its a bit of a confusing movie to try and wrap your head around. Along with a lot of the basic biographical gloss that comes with a movie like this, we have a lot of the “American Psycho” style “Is this real or all in his head?” sort of mystery surrounding the plot. A few times, the movie seems to nod to the audience knowingly as if to say “don’t worry, it’s all a dream” but at other times it seems bound and determined to get us to believe that Barris really was part schlock/part killer. Clooney cleverly plays the idea that Barris’ shows are the “downfall of Western society” against the idea that he’s actually one of the few people willing to get his hands dirty to save it. There’s no better example of the movie’s willingness to stretch our suspension of disbelief than when Barris is captured by the KGB in East Berlin only to be traded back to the US for a Soviet spy…who happens to be one of his former “Dating Game” contestants. Is it even possible that things in the Cold War wrapped themselves in a pretty bow like that or is it liberty taken by Barris in order to make a story even better than it was? Or is Barris’ answer to loneliness the creation of voyeuristic television shows and an attention grabbing story about involvement in the CIA? Loneliness is a human emotion that’s hard to convey on film. It’s more than just the act of being alone even though it’s often portrayed as such (think Bridget Jones signing “All By Myself” into a rolled up magazine as the opening credits roll). Barris and Clooney seem to be exploring the idea that you can be lonely, even in a room full of people that adore you and that loneliness will eventually drive you to be a killer for the CIA. I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Sam Rockwell’s performance as Chuck Barris. It’s solid, nuanced and obviously well researched (apparently he spent lots of time with the real Chuck Barris before filming began to nail down the character). It also includes, as always, some spectacular dancing from Mr. Sam Rockwell…a staple of his performance.

Final Thoughts: Overall an enjoyable movie, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” does it’s best to leave us guessing about Chuck Barris’ true past. Personally, I think he’s a master showman who may have just been able to pull off the duality required to be a killer for the CIA. He fits the profile of a killer (as the movie reveals in a late monologue from Clooney) and really seems to enjoy his work in both fields. Even though it wasn’t the movie that Charlie Kaufman says he wrote, it still feels like it’s covered in his fingerprints (shifting timelines, altered states of reality and characters genuinely lost in their own lives). It’s definitely worth sitting down and watching if you haven’t seen it if for nothing else than the classic “Newlywed Game” clip where a new bride misinterprets the question: Where’s the wildest place you’ve ever though about making whoopie?

But I still can’t answer the question: Who is Chuck Barris?

The magic and music of Mr. Rob Lowe...and his super stupid earring.

This movie has Rob Lowe “playing” a saxophone…in a bar…with a band. There’s a part of me that wants to leave this Pop Culture Blind Spot at that. Seriously. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve shouted the word “Really?!?” at a movie. There’s that scene in “Transformers 2″ where they crash out of the back of the Air & Space Museum in DC and seem to suddenly be in Iowa…this was more shockingly unbelievable than that was. There was the moment in “The Usual Suspects” when you realize that Spacey is really Soze…this was more outlandishly twisted than that. It even tops the magical moment when Rob Lowe appeared on the Oscars singing with Snow White. It was just that crazy. Don’t believe me? Relive the magic for yourself. But as much as I want it to be, “St. Elmo’s Fire” isn’t all about a few insane scenes of Rob Lowe playing the saxophone. No, it’s about many more insane scenes with many more stars, culminating in Andrew McCarthy using a blowtorch to try to get to a soon-to-freeze-to-death Demi Moore. But, as always, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

A Brief Synopsis of St. Elmo’s Fire: “St. Elmo’s Fire” is one of the quintessentially 80′s movies that I’ve come across. It epitomizes everything that was wrong with the 80′s. First and foremost, it was co-written and directed by Joel Schumacher (otherwise known as the man who ruined Batman). His name at the beginning of the credits should have been my first clue that something was foul in Denmark. The movie follows seven friends who’ve just graduated from Georgetown as they struggle with the challenges of that period in life when you’re just out of school and trying to “make it” in the real world. The seven friends are played by six of the biggest names in 1985 movies…and Mare Winningham (seriously, who invited Debbie Downer?). Quickly, it’s established that the 7 have spent most of their college lives hanging out at a bar called “St. Elmo’s Bar” (hey wait! That’s like the title!) where they’ve got their own table and quirky inside jokes. Basically, they spend the first third of the movie establishing the fact that they’re all kind of spoiled douches…just so they can spend the 2nd third of the movie falling off their high horses…and the final third of the movie climbing back up onto them as slightly improved human beings. Let’s break down the basics of the plot by brat packer and the lesson they learned over the course of the film:

• Kirby (Emilio Estevez): Martin Sheen’s other kid plays Kirby, the least well off of the group, who works as a waiter at “St. Elmo’s Bar.” Although he’s roommates with Andrew McCarthy’s Kevin, Kirby spends most of the movie in a series of escalating stalkerish attempts to date the woman of his dreams, Andie MacDowell’s Dale Biberman. It seems that Dale was a senior at Georgetown when Kirby & Co. were freshman and they went to one movie back in the day. When Kirby sees Dale at the hospital after Billy’s drunk driving car accident (more on that in a minute) he decides to drop out of law school to become a doctor…just like Dale. After following Dale to a party on his bike in the rain and confronting her, Kirby decides that what he needs to impress Dale is 80′s style cash (think Charlie Sheen in “Wall Street”) so he becomes the personal assistant to the mysteriously never explained “Mr. Ho”. He throws a party in Dale’s honor using Mr. Ho’s house only to find out that Dale’s gone skiing instead. He finds this out by driving to her house (only after attempting to have the operator break into her busy telephone line multiple times) and then drives up to the cabin where he finds her with her beau of choice. After spending the night in their living room, Kirby sets off home…but not before Dale’s boyfriend suggests that he get his camera and take a picture of Kirby and Dale…What the French? While loverboy’s inside the cabin grabbing his Polaroid, Kirby grabs Dale and lays one on her. And surprise! she ends up totally kissing him back you guys! Lesson learned: Stalking works.
• Billy (Rob Lowe): Billy’s stuck in a state of arrested development. Known as “Billy the Kid” he drinks too much, sleeps around and makes Nancy Botwin-sized bad decisions. The movie starts with Billy having just wrecked Wendy’s brand new car while driving drunk. She ends up with a nasty bump to the head and he ends up in jail…for what seems like 10 minutes. After his friends (who’ve rushed to the hospital thinking the worst) bail him out of the 10 minutes of jail he was forced to succumb to, they do the only responsible thing: TAKE HIM TO A BAR. The drunk driving offense is never mentioned again. Soon after arriving at St. Elmo’s we learn that Billy the Kid’s got a wife and kid at home and that his true passion is playing his sax…man. Billy spends most of the movie taking advantage of Wendy (who’s got the puppy dog eyes for him from the get go) and lamenting the fact that he’s no longer the irresponsible frat boy that SOMEHOW MANAGED TO GRADUATE FROM GEORGETOWN. Seriously. After confessing his Peter Pan fantasies to Wendy and finding out that she’s a virgin, he attempts to rectify that situation (if you know what I mean) only to lose his cool (and his friend) when he laughs at Wendy’s 80′s era Spanx. In one terrifying “Rob Lowe plays the Sax” scene, it’s Halloween and Billy’s playing at St. Elmo’s Bar with his band “The New Breed” when his wife shows up with another guy. Even though Billy’s been basically saxing every girl in that bar for the entire movie, seeing his wife there with another man throws him into a double-standard rage and he gets into a bit of a punch up. The fight spills out onto the street where Billy and his wife eventually end up making out as everyone looks on with that “Oh Billy, you scamp” look on their faces. It’s baffling. After promising his wife that he’ll give up the boozing and the ladying, he’s caught drunk in their driveway after attempting to get with Jules. His wife remarries and takes their little girl with her and in Billy’s mind, they’re better off without him. Billy only manages to redeem himself in the end by “saving” Jules with a story about an atmospheric phenomenon and then immediately moving to New York to pursue his love of sax. But not before taking Wendy’s virginity…high five! Lesson Learned: Trying is for suckers. Saxing is forever.
• Wendy (Mare Winningham): Wendy’s probably the most two dimensional of the seven friends and really serves in the “friend grenade” capacity for most of the movie. Wendy’s a pushover. She lets Billy use her for money (and eventually sax practice). She lets her father tell her who to date (and almost marry). All Wendy wants is to be independent! If only she’d gotten a solid education from a well known school…oh wait. Although her father seems to be the area’s greeting card baron, Wendy works in a welfare office and soup kitchen because that’s what people who really believe in things do. After having her heart broken by Billy’s Spanx-related humor, she dates a guy hand picked by her parents to become the next greeting card franchise owner. Her new beau Howie is bland, balding and marked for elimination the moment he appears on screen. Even though her father tries to bribe her with a new car (which she takes) she just can’t get engaged to Howie no matter how much he loves greeting cards. After breaking things off with Howie, she moves out of her parents house, paints the bricks blue in her apartment…and sleeps with Billy before he heads for New York. Oh and that new car? Yeah, that’s the car Kirby drives to the ski chalet to find Dale. Lesson Learned: Be your own person and you get to sleep with Rob Lowe.
• Jules (Demi Moore): Jules has a coke problem. Throughout the course of the movie, Jules faces a bunch of different challenges: her job is hard, she’s advanced 2 months on her salary, she’s sleeping with her boss, her furniture’s been repossessed. But in the end, it’s really all about the fact that Jules has a massive coke problem. Not like a “she’s only doing it at parties” problem or a “fun in moderation with a few dips into excess” problem. No. Jules is basically living as a snow bird. We can see her getting worse and worse as the movie goes on and her friends do try to intervene a few times but basically spend the bulk of the movie wringing their hands together and saying things like “She’s getting worse!” No joke geniuses. She’s basically riding the white horse from the opening credits on. It’s Jules eventual cratering that leads to the big reunion in the final reel. Her furniture’s been repo’d and she’s locked herself in her apartment with the windows open and only a t-shirt on. It’s a long, slow, stupid way to kill yourself but dammit, she’s going for the full on freeze. Luckily her friends run to her rescue attempting to break down the door and cut through the steel bars on her window using a blowtorch (Fun Fact: Blowtorch 201 is a requirement for all Georgetown undergrads regardless of major). But it’s Billy’s story of St. Elmo’s fire (“an electrical weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge originating from agrounded object in an atmospheric electric field”…thanks Wikipedia!). See, the problems that Jules has in her life aren’t anything more than flare ups, like St. Elmo’s fire, which Billy demonstrates using a conveniently placed can of spray paint and a lighter. Of course it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Jules is doing lines off anything not nailed down. Lesson Learned: Coke isn’t a problem, it’s just a coronal discharge, so go ahead and do sandboxes full of it.
• Alec (Judd Nelson), Leslie (Ally Sheedy) and Kevin (Andrew McCarthy): Why are all three of these characters listed together? Because basically they’re all involved in one big cluster f***. Alec and Leslie met in the dorms at Georgetown and have been dating ever since. They’re in love and have just moved in together at the beginning of the movie. Alec’s a career driven political flunkie with a wandering eye. Leslie’s…well, she’s never really anything other than Alec’s girlfriend. I’m sure that at some point Schumacher mentions what it is that Leslie’s doing with her time when Alec’s not around, but hell if I caught it. Kevin, on the other hand, is a struggling newspaper writer (and Kirby’s roommate) who’s been in love with Leslie for as long as he can remember. So much so that he’s stopped dating (and sleeping) with other women. While all the other drama is going on with Wendy, Billy, Kirby and Jules, the movie still has time to give us a “Is Kevin gay or straight?” subplot that involves him discussing the finer points of love with Thelma from “Amen“. Everyone knows that Kevin’s in love with someone but somehow his 6 closest friends never figure out that it’s Leslie. At the party that Kirby throws for Dale, Alec (who’s been trying to get Leslie to commit to marry him so he’ll stop cheating on her) announces his engagement to Leslie only to spark a fight between the two in the kitchen during which she confronts him about his inability to keep it in his pants. They break up and she ends up spending one glorious night with Kevin. They do the thing that he’s not been doing with anyone else on a coffin with her pearls on…don’t ask me, I didn’t write the movie. Kevin immediately assumes that they’ll live happily ever after (but Leslie is quick to remind him that “Sex isn’t love”)while douchey Alec decides that the best course of action is to be petty about Springsteen albums. It’s a solid strategy for both of them that ends with a confrontation on the fire escape outside Jules’ soon to be frozen apartment. Alec almost drops Kevin off the fire escape in a fit of rage…but 5 minutes later, when Leslie decides that she doesn’t really want to be with either of them (she needs time to find herself, you guys!) they decide that it’s somehow possible for them all to remain friends. Lesson Learned: Pearls, coffins and Springsteen are the most important things in the world and longterm damage to a friendship takes more than infidelity.
  

Why is it a PCBS? Released the same year as another major movie starring a bunch of these actors (“The Breakfast Club”), “St. Elmo’s Fire” is considered one of the infamous “Brat Pack” movies of the era. Not only was the movie a hit, but the soundtrack (specifically “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “Love theme from St. Elmo’s Fire”) was a big hit. You can’t really have these actors all together in a movie at this period of time and not consider it to be pop culturally relevant. We can only hope that at some point in the near future, the cast of “St. Elmo’s Fire” will join with the missing players from that John Hughes era of cinema to make one giant super movie. It would be “The Expendables” of Rom Coms.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Is my contempt for this movie obvious yet? For me, in 2010, this movie was a bit of a train wreck. The problems that all of the main characters had were less about the adversities of growing up after college and more about learning not to make insanely terrible choices while acting like a dumbass. The movie is missing a moral center and it shows when we reach the end and still don’t really care about any of the characters. Yes, it’s sad that Billy’s moving to New York and breaking up the group but it’s good because he’d basically been nothing but a drunk and a deadbeat dad for the majority of the movie. Yes, it’s sad that Leslie doesn’t fall into Kevin’s arms and ride off into the sunset with him but if he’s willing to get over his adoration for her so quickly and go back to “just being friends” with her (and with Alec) then why should we care? And if you want me to care about Kirby the Wonder Stalker or Jules and her coke habit, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Basically the movie ends with no one really having learned anything of real value which is fine for the 80′s but extremely hollow today.

Final Thoughts: Am I glad I saw “St. Elmo’s Fire”? Sure. I mean it’s always nice to see actors that you’re familiar with in one character type stretch themselves to the character type slightly to the left. It makes me respect the writing/directing of John Hughes all that much more since the same basic group of actors that he led to some of the greatest movies of the 80′s were able to come up with this train wreck. Unfortunately though, I realized about three quarters of the way through that there wasn’t anything about this movie that’s bubbled up through the zeitgeist after all these years. There’s no one scene, shot or line that seems to get referenced either in film or daily life. The original tag line for the movie was “The passion burns deep.” Unfortunately, looking back, you realize just how shallow a burn it really was.

But hey, the song’s not that bad. That’s got to count for something, right?

Will anyone actually remember that "SOAP" was a television show? The answer to this question and more in this PCBS.

There’s a lot of “SOAP” in the sitcoms that I love. On a couple of different levels in fact. This season’s big breakout hit, ABC’s “Modern Family”, is like a toned down version of the 70′s hit. They’re both shows that really find their comedy in the interactions between the characters instead of the situations they’re in even though “SOAP” deals with some of the most outlandish situations I’ve ever come across. There are also a lot of actors from shows that I’ve loved randomly sprinkled in the cast of “SOAP”. How can you not love a show that’s got both the sassy grandma from “Who’s the Boss?” and the dad from “Blossom”? But most of all, I think “SOAP” was a show that was striving to move the social conversation forward and did so in a disarmingly ridiculous way. It’s a great example of socially responsible TV that accomplishes it’s mission without being preachy (even if basically every religious group at the time disagrees with me in a classically “Oh no! Gay people!” way). At one point in the series, one of the characters is abducted by aliens and replaced with an alien lookalike (played by the same actor). Now that’s good television!

A Brief Synopsis of “SOAP”: How can I explain a show like “SOAP”? Since it’s a sitcom, I actually watched the first four episodes to get a good idea of what the show was like (it’s not really fair to judge a sitcom on 22 minutes and well, my blog = my rules). Every episode opens with a recap of where things left off the week before but since this was the first few episodes they also included a more general description of the situation behind the situation comedy. Basically, the series chronicles the lives of two sisters and their families in Dunn’s River, Connecticut.. On one side of the tracks we have Jessica (Katherine Helmond a.k.a. “Mona” from “Who’s the Boss?”) and her husband, Chester. They’re the affluent Tate family with the big house, bratty kids (Billy, Eunice and Corinne) and a butler…who just happens to be played by Robert Guillaume. Here’s where I admit that when Jessica walked into the kitchen and called Robert Guillaume “Benson” I was genuinely shocked. How did I not know that “Benson” was a spin off from “SOAP”? Now that’s a blind spot. Just to make sure there’s always some conflict in the house, Mary’s father (known simply as “The Major”) lives with the family as well. He’s never quite gotten over the war and spends the bulk of his time hallucinating that he’s still in some WWII European theater. On the other side of the tracks, Jessica’s sister Mary lives in slightly more modest surroundings with her husband Burt (Richard Mulligan a.k.a. the dad from “Empty Nest”) and her sons from a previous marriage Danny (Ted Wass a.k.a. the dad from “Blossom”) and Jodie (Billy Crystal a.k.a. BILLY CRYSTAL). You think that’s a lot of stars for one show? How about this: the announcer at the beginning of each episode is Rod freakin’ Roddy. That’s right, the same guy that spent 20 years telling contestants to “Come on Down!” on “The Price is Right.” That’s star power at it’s finest. The show is basically a send up of daytime soap operas often relying on the ridiculous plot points that have become staples of the genre. In the first four episodes alone we learn the following:

• Jessica is cheating on Chester with her tennis pro, Peter (Robert Ulrich)
• Chester is cheating on Jessica with anything in a skirt (his secretary and as she describes it “half the building”). She’s decided to blackmail him by threatening to expose his dirty business dealings to the SEC.
• Peter is also sleeping with Jessica’s daughter, Corinne but he doesn’t know that they’re mother and daughter.
• Burt hasn’t been able to perform sexually with Mary for some time because of the guilt he feels for killing her first husband…who was in the mob.
• Danny’s followed into his father’s footsteps and joined up with the mob but now wants to get out and can, but only if he avenges his father…by killing his stepfather.
• Jodie’s contemplating a sex change so he can stay involved with his quarterback boyfriend who’s worried that he’s a “latent heterosexual”
• Remember the tennis pro that both Jessica and Corinne have been practicing their serve with? Turns out he’s also Burt’s long lost son from his first marriage.

That’s four episodes. Four. About 88 minutes of television (without commercials). Looking at that list you realize that there are shows on TV today that don’t deal with that much plot in a season, much less in their first four episodes. But that’s the kind of show that “SOAP” turned out to be. Looking ahead at plot details from future seasons you see phrases like “alien abduction”, “leaves the priesthood” and “ventriloquist.” For that reason alone, I tip my hat to what could easily be called the most outlandish sitcom of all time.

Why is it a PCBS? Debuting in 1977, “SOAP” was a program that was determined to break boundaries and deal in taboo subject matter. Much like “All in Family” (which debuted in 1971) and “Maude” (which followed one year later in 1978), “SOAP” is a show that’s often remembered fondly for it’s firsts. It featured one of the first openly gay characters on prime time television with Jody and while the series did seem to often go for the easy gay jokes, it’s still monumental that the character made it to TV at all. The show received 32,000 letters of complaint before it even aired a single episode and 8 of the 195 ABC affiliates refused to even carry the program. Even in 2010, I have to admit that I was sorta shocked by some of the dialog and situations on “SOAP” (which is definitely a sign of something good). The other reason it’s a true PCBS is because it’s got the pedigree. Just look at the list of future stars in the cast list and it’s easy to see why people point to this show as a high point in sitcom history. If “Saturday Night Live” was where Billy Crystal really became a star then “SOAP” was where he learned the skills to get that shot. Robert Guillaume will always be remembered by most people for “Benson” (even though in my mind he’ll always be Issac from “Sports Night”) and that’s a character that started with “SOAP”. And yes, most people remember Katherine Helmond as the smart and slutty Mona but part of the reason that role was such a break-out for her has to be because of the 180 degree turn it was from the dingy, innocent Jessica on four seasons of “SOAP”. Even Ted Wass probably realizes that more people will remember him as Nick Russo on “Blossom” but without “SOAP” he’d never have gotten that role…or moved on to become a bit of an epic sitcom director (helming episodes of “Two and a Half Men”, “Accidentally on Purpose”, “Big Bang Theory” and the pilot for this fall’s “Melissa & Joey”…which he should probably be punished for). But still! Shows like “Modern Family” are the fruits of the seeds planted by sitcom pioneers like “SOAP” which means it’s definitely worth some attention.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? But beyond being shocking and star-making, it’s got something that a lot of other sitcoms don’t ever seem to get: Timing. “SOAP”, much like some of the best episodes of “Fraiser” 20 years later, is clearly based in the old traditions of live theater comedies. The dialog may be cheesy at times and the plots completely unbelievable but the snappy delivery of a clearly very talented cast makes it all just seem like a lot of fun. Take for instance a scene near the end of the fourth episode when Danny’s returned to the house after finding out that he’s got to kill Burt in order to leave the mob (and not be hunted down himself). The scene turns on two things: Burt’s misunderstanding that Danny’s gotten out of the mob and the audience’s ability to see Danny struggling to try and kill Burt while he remains oblivious to the fact. As Burt bursts with monologish happiness that Danny’s no longer involved with organized crime, we see Danny reaching into a kitchen drawer and pulling out a series of more ridiculously non-lethal objects that he might use to kill his step-father. A tiny knife, a corkscrew, a spatula all come out of the drawer before Burt asks Danny to grab the mayonnaise from the ice box. Danny raises the mayo above his head, ready to strike the unsuspecting Burt only to have Burt turn around and nonchalantly grab it  and spread it on his sandwich. It’s only when Mary comes into the room as Danny’s about to strangle Burt with the toaster cord that he realizes that he just can’t do it. It’s a scene that takes maybe a minute and a half but it demonstrates how the writers are using the soap opera conventions (mafioso hits and matricide, to name a few) as guard rails for ridiculously fun comedy. I’m not going to sit here and say that “SOAP’ is high art, but it’s not hard to see the French farce and commedia dell’arte roots that made this show a award-winning success despite it’s insanity.

Final Thoughts: In my mind, it’s easy to trace most of the popular comedies on TV today back to shows like “SOAP”. Most of the time people point to things like “I Love Lucy” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as the most influential sitcoms but to me those shows (while great) were basically just establishing the playing field for all future situation comedies. The living/dining/kitchen set. 30 minutes to resolve any issue. You know, the basic rules. It took shows like “All in the Family” to show us that father doesn’t always know best. “SOAP” revels in the fact that it’s exposing the imperfections of the modern family instead of pretending they weren’t there. It’s not hard to draw a line from the outrageous dialog on shows like “SOAP” to characters like “Glee”‘s Sue Sylvester or “Two and a Half Men”‘s Charlie…although the most direct decedent of “SOAP” might be FOX’s “Married…with Children.” Is it sometimes a little cheesy? Yes. Is it often a bit racist? Good lord, yes. But at the end of the day, the outrageousness of “SOAP” paved the way for the outrageous television we’re enjoying today. If you’ve ever enjoyed an off-color joke on a television sitcom, then you owe a debt to the folks in Dunn’s River, Connecticut.

C'est l'œil du tigre, le frisson de la photo de contact homo-érotique.

Before anyone cries foul that I’m skipping “Rocky” and “Rocky II” and jumping into the series with the third movie I have to say that I don’t think it would matter. I’ve never been a fan of boxing but I’ve really enjoyed some boxing movies that I’ve seen in the past (“Raging Bull” and “Ali” immediately pop to mind). While boxing is a brutally violent sport that’s basically organized concussion handing outing, there’s something about boxing in the movies that makes it seem almost elegant. Think of all those slow motion shots of people getting punched in the face that you’ve seen over the years. This effect was really brought to bear in last year’s “Sherlock Holmes” reboot when Holmes would plan out his attack on an opponent in slow motion. There’s something beautiful about people getting decked 24 frames per second…but I digress. “Rocky III” is less about the slow mo throw down and more about a redemption story told through a series of music-fueled training montages. Seriously, I’d always heard that the Rocky series was one of the first to really use the training montage device that was so popular in the 80′s but I had no idea that there would be so many. Nor did I know just how much of the movie would be filled with sweaty, oiled up dudes. (Seriously. It’s a lot.)

A Brief Synopsis of “Rocky III“: It’s not like everyone doesn’t already know the plot of the movie that made Mr. T a household name, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t deserve a recap. The movie opens on the 15th (seriously? 15 rounds in “Rocky II” and no one threw the “Bullshit!” flag? Ok.) round of Rocky’s fight with Apollo Creed from “Rocky II.” As everyone knows, Rocky wins and becomes the heavyweight champion of the world. We then get treated to the first of many, many montages. This one deals with all the set-up fights Rocky has in the next five years during his reign as the champ. All the while, in the shadows, Mr. T (as Clubber Lang) is gathering his T Rage as he wishes that he could be the star of the musical montages instead of Sylvester Stallone. Fast forward to Philadelphia in “present day” where a statue of Rocky is being dedicated at the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where, in real life, the statue stood until a controversy erupted and the statue was moved around the city to different locations depending on whether or not Sly Stallone was popular at the time). During the ceremony, Mr. T shows up and begins yelling at the champ in regards to his status as a chump and whatnot. While Rocky wants to take on the young upstart his 800 year old trainer Mickey (played by 806 year old Burgess Merideth) thinks that the fight is  bad idea and wants no part of it. Rocky resists until Mr. T invites Adrian over to his place so she can be with a real man…at which point the Italian Stallion loses his cool and accepts the fight with Clubber. Mickey still doesn’t want to train Rocky for the fight and under some intense cross examination from Balboa (who constantly sounds like he’s either really drunk or just kinda slow) admits that all of the title defense fights that Rocky’s had in the past 5 years were with handpicked boxers that everyone knew he could easily defeat. SHOCK! HORROR! Boxing is rigged! Rocky, determined to defend his good name against the young upstart, decides to train in a fancy gym full of women who want to kiss him and guys who want to watch him train…because that’s not weird. He’s selling merchandise and flexing for the cameras during another music montage while Mr. T is seen training in a room that looks like the attic from “Flowers for Algernon.” Needless to say, when fight night rolls around, Rocky gets his ass handed to him…after Mickey has a heart attack right before the fight. Rocky comes out of the ring, a beaten man, just in time to rush to the Penguin’s bedside before he succumbs to death by heart attack…or a broken heart, depending on how you like your allegory. Broken, confused and without a 1960′s Batman villain to train him, Rocky rides around the city looking at all the landmarks to his now tarnished career. How can there be a bronze statue of him if he’s such a failure? How can Mickey’s gym have closed even though we’ve not seen Mickey in the gym for the entire movie? It’s almost too much for Balboa until an old friend steps out of the shadows at Mickey’s gym to offer to train Rocky for a rematch against BA Baracus…I mean Clubber Lang. Yes, Apollo Creed will train Rocky in the ways of boxing in exchange for “one favor” from the champ that he’s going to withhold from the audience until the last minutes of the film but that we all already know is a private rematch against him. Adrian, Rocky, Apollo and Rocky’s racist brother-in-law Paulie head for LA to train for the rematch. Paulie spends most of his time waffling between Italian-American stereotype and maker of derogatory comments about African Americans while Adrian, Rocky and Apollo train up for the big fight using the best gym equipment of all…the music montage. It’s at this point in the movie that things get a little, well, homo-erotic. There are scenes of sweaty, oiled up Rocky and Apollo in all kinds of fun situations. Dancing in the mirror! Running on the beach! Wrestling in the surf! Walking out of a screening of “Love Story”! (maybe I’m getting that one wrong) But seriously, it’s the closest to the old gladiator movies (referenced in the title of this post) that we can get without crossing the line. At one point, Rocky is wearing a half tank top that plays more as a sports bra than a boxing outfit. Way to be progressive, 1982 Sylvester Stallone! Needless to say, Rocky learns a whole new style of fighting (at one point Paulie claims that Apollo is trying to train Rocky like a “colored fighter” which makes no sense since his last big opponent was Apollo, who’s also African-American). On the night of the big fight, Rocky faces the fear that’s been haunting him since his first fight with Clubber and finds a way to beat Mr. T. Basically, his strategy comes down to one, simple tenant of boxing: rope-a-dope. Think about it, Rocky’s entire strategy, the thing he seems to have learned while away in LA that helps him defeat Clubber Lang in the second go round is simply “Let him punch himself out.” Really? That’s what Carl Weathers spent 1/3 of the movie training you to do with his wind sprints on the beach and laps in the pool? The secret is just “let that guy hit you in the face so many times that he gets tired of hitting you in the face”? In the end, that’s what Rocky does…and then knocks him out. The movie closes with Apollo and Rocky alone in the gym with Apollo ready to cash in on that one favor he made Rocky promise to when he agreed to train him. That one special favor that’s just between the two of them that no one ever has to know about. Rocky agrees and the two fighters head for the showers…I mean ring, they head for the ring.

Why is it a PCBS? The Rocky franchise is the stuff of legend. With the original movie made on a shoestring budget and written by a young Sylvester Stallone and the sequel raking in enough money to be the highest grossing sequel of all time (until “Empire Strikes Back” came out the next year), it’s not hard to see why a Rocky movie made it onto my list of must see movies. If the movies lack in substance, they make up for it in iconic imagery and sound. Who doesn’t know that image of a sweat-suit wearing Balboa running through the streets of Philadelphia only to climb to the top of the Art Museum stairs just as the music swells to a crescendo? If the first movie made the “Rocky Theme” must-own music for athletes in training, then “Rocky III” made  Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” the next song on that mix tape. Scenes from Rocky are the stuff of parody legend with send ups in pop culture stalwarts like “The Simpsons” and “Hot Shots” leading the way. How many times has someone you know shouted “Adrian!” after completing a big challenge or raised their arms in “Rocky” triumph after reaching the top of almost any staircase? The Rocky movies are credited with launching the careers of Mr. T, Hulk Hogan, Dolph Lundgren and Bridgette Nielsen not to mention what it did for Stallone himself. They won Oscars, broke box office records and unleashed “Eye of the Tiger” on an unsuspecting nation. What more do you want?

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Upon reflection, “Rocky III” feels like a perfectly 80′s movie. It’s structured as an American comeback story (our favorite kind) where good triumphs over evil and all is put right with the world in a single act. “Rocky III” takes place before Rocky becomes the All-American icon that he ascends to in “Rocky IV” (where he fights the evil Russians who dared to kill Apollo in the ring) but after the sappy everyman story of “Rocky” and “Rocky II” (kid fights his way up from the streets to get a chance at the champ only to lose the first time but finally grab the brass ring in the end). I’ve always been a big advocate of the idea that it’s more interesting to watch someone “becoming” than it is to watch them “be” (see “The Matrix” vs. “The Matrix Reloaded” or “Spiderman” vs. “Spiderman 2″) but the trajectory of the Rocky films seems to avoid that pitfall…at least in the first three. Yes, it took two films for Rocky to become the heavyweight champion of the world but the real victory of the first movie is in his personal accomplishments and the second was his actual victory in the ring. The third movie examines the idea that his post championship life was flawed due to over management and shoddy promotion. It shows the ride that Rocky takes from the heights of his championship in “Rocky II” to the depths of despair and back again.

Final Thoughts: Does this movie make me want to watch the rest of the Rocky series? Well, no. I mean I feel like I understand the events and message of the first two movies even if I’ve only seen Stallone punching cow carcasses on VH1 “I Love the 70′s” re-runs and the later movies seem to devolve into even more outlandish stories of death in the ring and more ridiculous opponents (I believe in the last movie, “Rocky Balboa”, Rocky fought the entire Philadelphia Flyers starting lineup). As as kid I was never really in to things like WWF (which my sister and brother-in-law became fans of for a brief time in the early 2000′s) or ultra violent 80′s action movies but I can definitely see the appeal of this arc of the Rocky saga. There’s something uplifting about seeing someone else who’s beaten down reach deep within themselves to achieve a goal, no matter how ridiculous that goal is. It’s also easy to see how this performance as a caricature of Muhammad Ali helped Mr. T to become a star (not to dwell on my “A-Team” post, but I did read that it was this performance as Clubber Lang that spurred NBC execs to build the show around Mr. T’s unique range). It’s a classic story of redemption told through the eyes of a classic 80′s character. I was fully expecting the ghost of Mickey to show up at the end of the film and tell Rocky that he’d done him proud. Even when everyone had stopped believing in Rocky, we all knew that he still had the eye of the tiger for one more fight….or 4 more fights, depending on the sequels you wish to count. (“Rocky VII: Rocky vs. a Bear!”, “Rocky VIII: Rocky vs. Bizzaro Rocky!”, “Rocky IX: Rocky vs. the Harlem Globetrotters!” and of course, “Rocky X: Rocky vs. Death in a game of Chess”)

He is not, in fact, gettin' on no airplane, Hannibal.

First off, let me say that “The A-Team” that I know, isn’t like the one that you remember. That’s because before today’s screening of the two-part pilot, “The Mexican Slayride”, I’d never seen an episode of the show. That means, to me, Templeton “Faceman” Peck will always be Tim Dunigan who was unceremoniously replaced by Dirk Benedict for the role after the pilot because the producers worried that he looked too young to be a Vietnam War veteran. It’s a move that makes no sense given the fact that EVERYTHING else about the show borders on the ridiculous. I would have loved to be sitting in that meeting with the producers as they discussed replacing a principle actor on an already piloted television series because he looked too young for the role even though they knew that the series was already veering into the absolutely absurd. But before I get caught up in a diatribe about the hilariously awesome, over the top nature of the quintessentially 80′s show that is “The A-Team”, let’s first review the basics. As stated at the beginning of the program, the members of the A-Team were an elite commando unit that, at the end of the Vietnam war, were tried for crimes they didn’t commit. In the pilot, we learn that they were involved in the robbery/liberation of a Hanoi bank. A mission who’s orders were destroyed (along with their commanding officer) in an artillery attack at the end of the war. Since escaping from military prison at Fort Brag (in North Carolina) they’ve joined the seedy underground of Los Angeles (in California) where they apparently help children, run cons, act as movie monsters and live rent free in a Veteran’s Home for the Insane. But! If you’ve got a problem and no one else can help AND you can find them (and pay them, apparently) you may just be able to hire The A-Team.

A Brief Synopsis of “The A-Team”: The pilot begins in a small Mexican town where an LA newspaper reporter named Massey (played Jessica Fletcher’s doctor friend from “Murder She Wrote”) is kidnapped by some local scoundrels. Cut back to LA where one of his fellow reporters, Amy Allen, is trying to convince her editor that Massey’s in trouble even though he’s been disappearing for months because of the depression caused by the death of his wife. Her editor balks and suspends Allen for two weeks with half pay so she can “learn to stop sitting on her brains.” Allen exits to the newsroom where she meets up with Zack (played by Horshack from “Welcome back, Kotter”) who gives her the pilot-worthy run down on the rumored commando force that’s been living in the LA underground for the last ten years. In a scene that can only be described as “blatant exposition”, Horshack lays out the team of John “Hannibal” Smith, B.A. Baracus, Templeton “Faceman” Peck and “Howling Mad” Murdock (their trusty pilot). Amy sets out to contact the A-Team so they can help her recover Massey from his ambiguous Mexican captors. She visits Murdock at the insane asylum and is pointed to a dark alley behind a Hollywood strip club…as you’ll do. She heads for the meeting point at 2 AM and runs into Hannibal (dressed as a hobo) and gives him a $20, sleeps in her car and meets up with Hannibal (dressed as a blatantly racist stereotypical Asian caricature known as “Mr. Lee”) who asks her for $150,000 and a photo of Massey. It’s 48 hours later that Hannibal (dressed as…oh wait…Hannibal) approaches her in a parking garage and let’s her know that she’s successfully hired the A-Team (able to deal with the homeless, racist characters and financial ruin? You can hire the A-Team!). The group converges on LAX where Face has secured a plane that no one’s mentioned up to this point, they drug BA (he’s afraid of flying and oblivious to needles!) and take off for Mexico. And that’s only the first hour of this two hour pilot. In the second half we learn important lessons like:

• No one in the A-Team universe can accurately shoot a firearm: Seriously. The count for the episode was something like 7,000 bullets fired and 0 actually connected. I get that they didn’t want to show blood or actual violence on TV back in the day, but c’mon, a monkey could hit at least one bad guy when they’re surrounded by a firing squad of farmers.
• Marijuana is bad: The A-Team figures out that the warlords that are holding Massey hostage are using fear to force small Mexican towns to work in their make-shift weed fields. The team coats the fields in bleach and then drops leaflets on them…in Spanish…which are never explained.
• Grenades are equal to M-80s: As a kid who spent his fair share of time blowing things up with M-80s, I know what those kinds of explosions looked like. Seeing the “grenade” explosions on “The A-Team” was vaguely reminiscent of those GI-Joe destroying explosions.
• Military justice means nothing: After securing Massey and handing the Mexican warlord and his “guerrilla”  general over to the local towns folk (for some street justice, one can assume) the team runs into General Lynch, who’s been hunting them down for 10 years since their escape from Fort Bragg, at the Mexican airport. Their solution? Punch him in the face and put him in the trunk of their car before taking off for the US of A. Suck it, military tribunals. You have no power here.

At the end of the day, the episode ends with The A-Team adding Amy Allen (Triple A!) as the latest member of their team of misfits. I can only assume that they spent the next 5 years getting into and out of trouble with other mercenaries and the United States military ending with a finale that cleared their name and undoubtedly set them all up for spin-offs…just in case.

Why is it a PCBS? It’s “The A-Team.” Whether you consider it the show that helped solidify Mr. T as the star he is or the launching pad for other 80′s stalwarts like “MacGuyver”, “The A-Team” is considered by many as the ultimate in ridiculous 80′s TV. It’s a show that’s so big it’s been remade into one of this summer’s big blockbusters with stars like Liam Neesom and Bradley Cooper stepping into the major roles. Seriously, for once, I don’t really have to defend why I should have seen an episode of a show other than by repeating it’s name….It’s “The A-Team” for crying out loud.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly, it’s awesome. “The A-Team” reminds me of a simpler time in television. There’s no call for realism, accurate depiction of situations or intense development of character on a show like this. If “Lost” was all about characters and “the journey” then “The A-Team” was all about explosions and super corny jokes. When we first meet Hannibal, he’s dressed as “The Aquamaniac” (a “Creature for the Black Lagoon”-esque character that doesn’t stop him from smoking insanely long cigars) and a random car chase ensues. No one seems tied to plot, character development or for that matter physics. The only point of the show is to tell an entertaining story and deliver a few zingers along the way. It’s easy to see how the 80′s were fertile ground for movies like “Die Hard” (Yippie Kay Ay, Mother Fucker!) and “Lethal Weapon” (I’m getting too old for this shit) when shows like “The A-Team” were weekly fair on TV. There’s something refreshing about truly escapist TV (that isn’t reality) in a world that begs us to take everything so seriously. While shows like “24″ are challenging to our perception of true life political events (or at least started out that way), TV can also be completely and mindlessly fun. That’s what I got from the pilot of “The A-Team”, they were all really enjoying the laughably terrible circumstances that they were involved in, even if they all knew it didn’t much in the long run.

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day a pilot is supposed to make us want to watch more of the series as a whole. So did the pilot of “The A-Team” make me want to watch more of “The A-Team”? Honestly, it did. Growing up, Saturday afternoons were full of re-runs of shows like “The Fall Guy” and as much as I love Lee Majors, I wish I’d seen more of “The A-Team” as a kid. It’s easily the most roller coaster show that I’ve seen in a really long time. I don’t mean that it’s full of ups and downs that challenge the way we see the world. I mean that it’s a fun ride for a very short amount of time that is completely forgettable when it’s over. Sometimes that’s ok. Everything doesn’t have to be “deep” or “meaningful.” Sometimes it’s OK for a show to simply offer an escape from the troubles of the real world…even if the world that it presents is filled with the absolute worst shots ever.

Barry Champlain...he doesn't care what you think.

Have you listened to talk radio in the last 10 years? How about the last 5? If it’s been a while since you’ve ventured to the dark side of your radio dial let me fill you in on what’s been happening. Fear. That’s what’s broadcast live, 24 hours a day across the radio waves and into our homes and cars. Pure, unfiltered fear. What is it that we’re supposed to be afraid of? Well, everything. If you listen to folks like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh then we should be afraid that the government has gone rogue and is secretly plotting to shred the constitution. If you listen to people like Dr. Laura then you should live in fear of the day that your husband says he’s cheating on you because that will mean you’ve failed as a wife. If you listen to Micheal Savage then you should fear the “global warming liars” who’ve concocted the whole idea of an increase in temperature because it somehow furthers their secret agenda to eventually steal all the gold in the world and use it to blow up the moon…I may be paraphrasing there. And all of this is just from the hosts of these venerable harbors of respectable journalism. Each of these talk radio universes have their own galaxies of crazy surrounding them. Just like the anonymity that the internet provides to those that post endlessly on message boards (or write blogs…self bazinga!), talk radio callers get a chance to hear themselves on the air spouting whatever ridiculously malformed sentences they can muster. It’s a chance to be validated by someone they hold dear in a public forum. The best part is that, in an effort to gain favor with the host, calls sometimes begin with the verbal equivalent of the secret handshake (e.g. “Megadittos, Rush”). It’s scary, abnormal, anti-social behavior…but it’s just so entertaining. And that’s the thrust of Oliver Stone’s “Talk Radio.”

A Brief Synopsis of “Talk Radio”: Originally a play written and starring Eric Bogosian, “Talk Radio” is the story of Dallas-area shock jock Barry Champlain. He’s 1/3 Howard Stern, 1/3 Dr. Laura and 1/3 P.T. Barnum. Barry’s the star of “Night Talk”, a weeknight radio call-in show with open phone lines that seem to be jammed with every nut job in the greater DFW area. He’s sleeping with his young, female producer and embroiled in a love/hate relationship with his station manager (played here by the always gravitas-ful Alec Baldwin). Even his radio tech/phone screener (the always entertaining John C. McGinley) doesn’t seem to be really connected to Barry. We join the “Night Talk” gang on the night that Barry finds out his show is being picked up for national syndication. Even in those moments where Barry’s finding out that he’s about to take a huge step in his career, it feels like a hollow victory for him. Through a series of flashbacks, we see Barry’s rise to fame…and the disintegration of his marriage as a result. The relationship with his ex-wife Ellen (played by Ellen Greene of “Little Shop of Horrors” fame) seems to be the only thing that’s ever really brought him happiness. So when he calls her to convince her to come to Dallas for his first national broadcast it seems like he might finally be reconnecting with that which he really held dear. In the end though, the movie’s all about a different relationship: Barry’s relationship with his wide array of “Night Talk” callers. Over the course of the film, Barry matches verbal wits with everyone from a white supremacist who claims he’s mailed a bomb to the studio to a drugged out smack user who claims his girlfriend’s overdosed on the air. No matter who Barry’s talking to though, his disdain remains the same. Barry always believes he’s smarter than his audience. They need him more than he needs them. And in the end, it’s that attitude that proves to be his undoing. Ellen comes to Dallas for the first national show but ends up “calling in” to the show using the pseudonym “Cheryl Anne” the way she used to in Barry’s starting days and Barry ends up ripping her to shreds on the air…just because it makes for good radio. His national deal gets delayed and he flies into a monologuish rage in which he finally explains to his audience that “I come in every night, I tear it to you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more. What’s wrong with you? Why do you keep calling? I don’t want to hear anymore, STOP TALKING! GO AWAY!” But in the end, it’s not the audience who needs Barry…but Barry who needs them. He’s a creature of late night radio and he’s just as lonely and sad as the people he mocks night in and night out. The movie ends with a bit of a shock as Barry’s killed by a deranged fan and eulogized by his callers over the closing credits. In the end, Bogosian and Stone are trying to warn us about the disconnected nature of the world of talk radio. In Ghostbusters 2 terms, it’s the river of evil energy slime running beneath American pop culture.

Why is it a PCBS? You could make the case for lots of Stone’s movies being important landmarks in Pop Culture. I’ll cop to a bit of an obsession with “JFK” in the early 2000′s the culminated with a trip to a certain book depository in Dallas and the purchase of a worn out book-on-tape version of “On the Trail of the Assassins.” But this movie slipped through my fingers when it first came out…most likely because I was 8. I’ve always had a bit of a weird relationship with talk radio. At my first high school job, I was talking politics with my boss and he asked if I’d ever listened to Rush Limbaugh. “No” I said, rather shocked since both he and I knew that we were both liberals. “You have to listen to the other side or you don’t really know what you’re disagreeing with.” That’s a sentiment that struck home with me then and still pulls me to talk radio today. I spent summers at the park and at the beach listening to some truly insane talk radio hosts. If you’ve never spent any real time with folks like G. Gordon Liddy and the Rushman, you don’t really know what you’re missing. I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to come into those programs at the height of right-wing Clinton paranoia. It’s funny to think back on the rhetoric from those days as it’s basically the same stuff that’s being parroted across the airwaves today. For me, it’s always seemed like talk radio is a way to whip people into a frenzy about something that otherwise might only get play in the back pages of a daily newspaper. They take a small piece of any story and blow it as far out of proportion as possible. It’s the same echo chamber technique that Fox News uses on a daily basis…but I don’t want to get off on a rant about Fox News. Stone’s movie and Bogosian’s play are really about that echo chamber cycle between audience and host. How the ideas and energy put out by the host feed the audience who then feed it back to the host in a weird negativity circle of life. It’s hard to see “Talk Radio” as a cautionary tale as these problems were happening long before the movie premiered. In fact, the play is based loosely on the life Alan Berg (a shock jock who was killed by a deranged listener in 1984). Instead, “Talk Radio” holds a mirror up to a part of society that doesn’t get a lot of scrutiny. Even today, as the country fragments into the Huffington Post and Drudge Report crowds, we still don’t have a grasp on the seething anger that seems to propagate itself on the nations airwaves each day.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? “Talk Radio”‘s message of hateful speech on the air begetting hateful actions in the real world is something that’s been explored many times since 1988 (Stone himself revisited the idea in  1994′s  ”Natural Born Killers”). In the battle for ratings, the discourse has only gotten more vitriolic in the 22 years since the movie debuted which only adds depth to the message. As psychotic and sociopathic as Barry’s callers were,  they pale in comparison to the nut jobs that call into some of today’s most popular shows…and those people are quite sane compared to their internet cousins. Some of the worst ideas from the past few years have either started (or gotten daily fertilization) from the upper ends of your AM dial (both “Obama’s a Muslim” and “Obama’s not a US citizen” got heavy play from the lone wolves with microphones). A quick glance at WorldNetDaily (which I’m purposely not linking to) gives you headlines like “How to survive the coming martial law in America” and “Boehner to McCartney: ‘Apologize to American people’”. Micheal Savage recently referred to the President as “Obama the destroyer.” Ideas like those start out in the fringe of talk radio and work their way towards legitimacy with a heavy dose of daily affirmation (Fox News asks the question today “Is the Government Taking Over the News?”). Every day, the Barry Champlains of our country spew out whatever they think will get them the highest ratings and thus the most money in return and every night thousands of callers across the country dial in to yell crazy down the phone and have it pop out their radios on the other end. There’s one part of the movie that deserves a special mention though. Towards the end of the movie, Barry gets into a heated argument with “Chet” (voiced by “Home Improvement” actor Earl Hindman) over “The Turner Diaries”, a book detailing a (then) future war between a white supremacist militia and the “new world order” government that’s taken over the United States…in 1991. Chet’s adamantly defending the book to Barry who calls it out for the racist, inflammatory, hate filled piece of garbage that it is. Why is this so important? In 1995, Timothy McVeigh would channel the rage he felt toward the US government into a truck bomb that he parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When asked later about his motivation, McVeigh would specifically name “The Turner Diaries,” which he had helped to promote. The book also served as motivation for “The Order” (who took their name from the book itself) in their 1984 murder of radio talk show host Alan Berg. It’s not like “Back to the Future 2″ predicting the future winner of a World Series, but it’s good to see that people were calling out this hateful book before Oklahoma City.

Final Thoughts: At some point, it becomes preaching to the choir. We all know that talk radio only serves to preach to an already converted choir. We all know that some people are more impressionable by the media than others. We all can see that things in America are getting out of hand…we just don’t all agree on which 50% of the country is wrong. Today’s talk radio gives us things like Sarah Palin and the manufactured rage of the Tea Party. “Talk Radio” is the movie equivalent of “see, I told you so.” It’s a warning to the future of a situation that we’ve already gotten so bogged down in that it’s hard to see how we’ll get out. Watching Bogosian tell his wife “Fuck our marrige!” you realize just how far he’s fallen. He needs his audience more than he needs her (or at least he thinks that he does) and he’s willing to sacrifice her in order to get more. It’s that attitude that drive both host and audience off the cliff (both in the movie and in real life). The cycle must continue at all costs even as the price of poker goes higher and higher. It’s outrage simply for the sake of outrage.

Sadly, no matter how outrageous it all seemed in 1988, in 2010 it seems almost pedestrian. Q: Just how far off the cliff have we gone? A: Glenn Beck. The inmates have taken over the asylum.

Professor Plum, in the study, with the cook.

So far, I’ve spent most of my time talking about things that are Pop Culture Blind Spots for me. But sometimes, it turns out that Pop Culture things that I love are blind spots for other people. One of those things, for one reason or another, is the movie “Clue”.

If “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” was the first movie that I ever loved, then “Clue” was the second. It’s fast, fun and immediately re-quotable. Plus, unlike most movies, it has three possible endings…and Howard Nessman…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Brief Synopsis of “Clue”: Based on the board game, “Clue” is the story of six strangers who are summoned to a mysterious house for a dinner party one dark and stormy night. As Wadsworth, the butler of the house, quickly explains, each of the guests is being blackmailed by Mr. Body (a shady guy played by the awesomely named Lee Ving). When Wadsworth begins to expose the indiscretions that each of the six are being blackmailed for, Mr. Body hands out weapons and suggests that the easiest way to avoid being exposed is for one of them to kill Wadsworth. And so begins a string of murders and mayhem that can only be explained in a third act that has Tim Curry running around the house trying to recreate the events of the night for the group of potential killers (and the audience). The movie is best described as “Noises Off” with six homicides. The cast is a who’s who of funny people from the 80′s (Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Brennan, Madeline Kahn, Martin Mull, Lesley Ann Warren, and Micheal McKean) and they’re allowed to basically run buckshot over a story that’s ridiculous at best. Add in secret passages, “Murder She Wrote”-style death scenes and some of the best circular logic in modern comedy and you get one of my favorite movies of all time. If all that isn’t enough to convince you that “Clue” is an awesome movie…it’s got three endings. Three! Everyone gets the answer that they thought was true by the end of the movie. Who could ask for anything more?

Why is it a Pop Culture Defense? It would be easy to say that I defend this movie because it’s the first of many that my sister introduced me to that we would share quotes from for years to come. But that’s not it. “Clue” is a movie that deserves a Pop Culture Defense because it’s everything that a zany comedy should be. It’s got great actors running nuts through a script that barely stands up to scrutiny but that is pulled off because of fabulously insane acting. I first saw “Clue” when I was 8 years old and it wasn’t until years later when I would see “Rocky Horror Picture Show” that I could see Tim Curry as anyone but Wadsworth. “Clue” is also basically a cheat sheet of funny actors from the 1980′s. If it’s a great movie in the late 70′s or 80′s, its probably got one of these actors in it. “Young Frankenstein” has Madelin Khan. “Back to the Future” has Christopher Lloyd. “Head of the Class” has Howard Nessman. It’s a virtual who’s who of comedy actors from that time. But in the end, this movie turns on the re-enactment of the first two thirds that occurs in the last reel of the movie. No matter which ending you prefer, they all start with Tim Curry’s brilliant re-telling of the events of the evening in a frantic monologue that’s half Shakespearian finale and half, well, Don Knotts. It’s an insane recap of the evening’s events that makes for the movie’s best moments. Add in the fact that “Clue” is one of the most quotable movies of all time (“Let us in, let us in! Let us out Let us out!” or “I thought men like you were called a fruit.” or “Flames….flames….from the side of my face.” or “Gentlemen turn out your pockets, ladies empty your purses. Whoever’s got the gun shot the girl.” or “What do you mean…murder?” or…you get the point). “Clue” was the basis for many a Pop Culture joke throughout high school and college. It’s a brilliant movie that just can’t get enough praise.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well, for me it looks like brilliance on toast…but for others it may come across a bit dated. It’s easy to see how “Clue” could strike you as either antiquated story telling or a campy mess…both of which are understatements to say the least. It’s a movie that revels in it’s ridiculousness (for God’s sake, they serve monkey’s brains at dinner as a plot point) but still feels grounded in some sort of fabulously ridiculous reality. “Clue” finds it’s voice in the simple fact that given the right circumstances anyone would kill anyone else if they absolutely had to. The string of murders that pepper the first two acts of the movie serve as a reminder that, in the end, humans have a tendency to resort to their absolute basest urges when threatened. The movie poses the theory that (literally almost) everyone would kill in the right circumstances if it meant their own survival. Throw in the fact that it’s based on a board game and you begin to realize just how brilliant this movie is.

Final Thoughts: Finally, if you haven’t seen “Clue” stop reading this right now and go get copy of this movie right now. Most likely you’ll get a DVD copy and you’ll have the option to randomly have the player chose an ending for you just like the original theatrical audiences did. Don’t do it. The movie’s true brilliance is only evident when all three endings are played back to back to back (with the snarky title cards taunting you between endings until you get to the “But this is how it really happened…” card before the third ending). When you’re done with this, take a moment and realize how deep Tim Curry’s talent goes. Rent “The Hunt for Red October” and “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, watch them back to back and realize that it’s the same guy. That’s the beauty of “Clue”. As frivolously fluffy as it seems, it’s really an actor’s playground where a bunch of talented folks get the chance to go nuts for 90 minutes.

Sometimes we’re all the singing telegram.

Mick Fleetwood and the dangerously introverted Stevie Nicks

First and foremost, in the interest of full disclosure, it’s not like I’d never heard any of “Rumours” before. In fact, as I mentioned in my “Exile on Main St.” post, I went through a bit of a Fleetwood Mac phase thanks to my Dad’s Eagles album in high school. But, because of my age, my exposure to the hard-charging drums of Mick Fleetwood and the absolutely bat-shit crazy antics of Stevie Nicks were thanks to their big comeback album “The Dance” in 1997. That means that while I’d become familiar with their hits, I’d never really heard “Rumours” straight through.

A Brief Synopsis of “Rumours”: “Rumours”, the eleventh studio album from Fleetwood Mac is basically the result of all the turmoil that any group of people could feel in such a confined amount of space/time. 100% of the women that I’ve dated have ended up hating me on some level so I can completely relate to the lyrics/tone of the drama filled “Rumours” at any given time. I’m pretty sure that the comments for this post will fill up with former flames agreeing to the tone of this album with no hesitations. It’s all lust and drama before it fades off into disgust and rage. But ignore those John-centric emotions for a bit and focus on the feelings that the actual members of Fleetwood Mac were feeling during the recording of “Rumors.” They were making up, breaking up and trying to deal with life cramped inside a tiny studio in a tiny port town, all while trying to record an album. The album contains some of FM’s biggest hits and even Mick Fleetwood admitted that the commercial success of the album allowed the band to continue for years to come. It’s half sell out and half masterpiece. Or 3/4 masterpiece and 1/4 sellout depending on how you calculate the averages.

Why is it a PCBS? Seriously? You’ve never heard of “Rumours”? Well, to be fair, I hadn’t always known that this was Fleetwood Mac’s definitive album (and one of the best selling albums of all time) until one soul sax playing presidential candidate decided to make track #4 famous during his 1992 campaign. When I first heard “Don’t Stop I was 11, stuck in a middle school that knew me only for my George Bush impersonation and ready for the big move to high school in 1993. But for some reason “Don’t Stop” with it’s pounding drums and call to arms lead guitar spoke to me in a way that apparently En Vogue and Red Hot Chili Peppers were speaking to everyone else my age. Fast forward a few years and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Dance” came out on CD with the “Don’t Stop” track backed by the USC marching band. It was the rousing close to a concert that I realize now meant virtually nothing to me as compared to people my parents’ age but that I still loved. I wore groves in my copy of the CD the summer after my senior year of high school (including the song “Temporary One” that I included on more than one mix tape trying to convince my friends that even though I was going far away for college, the sea that divided us was just a temporary boundary before we would all be together again). But even through all this, I never picked up a copy of “Rumours.” I was in a serious “best of” phase with CD’s covering the “best of” bands like Steve Miller Band, The Eagles and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. For me, the mysterious pull of “Rumours” as an album never kicked in…until now.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Asking how “Rumours” stands up to the test of time is a bit like asking if the Great Wall of China is still standing (yep, it’s still there). “Rumours” really does feel like a therapy session where five people are talking and no one’s listening. Even though she’s become a bit of a parody of herself (or Steven Tyler) in recent years, Stevie Nicks (it’s funny ’cause she has a boy’s name) belts out songs like “Dreams” in such a way that you really feel just how anguished she is. Lindsay Buckingham (it’s funny ’cause he has a girl’s name) plays his guitar on songs like “Go Your Own Way” in ways that make you believe that he’s absolutely furious with it. I once heard Mick Fleetwood and John McVie described as the best rhythm section in rock and while I can’t agree with that (what up, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen!) I can say that their driving beats do well to represent the heart of a band that seems like it was ready to beat out of their chests. Also, Christie McVie is there (sorry, never been a fan…could totally do without her). For me, listening to “Rumours” for the last month or two has been a walk down the memory lane of all the relationships I’ve had that have gone south in one way or another. It’s musical bourbon…ready to inflame the worst anger in your heart while also making you remember the good times that got you in those situations to begin with.

Final Thoughts: What else is there to say about an album that so many people have called brilliant, timeless or genre defining? How about this: It’s good as an album. Christie McVie included, it’s one of the few albums that I’ve heard that is solid gold from beginning to end. Even “Exile on Main Street” which I reviewed a while back has some songs that could just be considered filler but “Rumours” feels like 11 songs that 5 people fought to get on the final album. In the years since, there have been bonus tracks and “never before heard specials” added to the mix but for me the 11 original songs from “Rumours” represent one of the great albums of our time. Will this be what the aliens listen to when they’re trying to piece together what kind of civilization could have lived on this planet so many years ago? No. But will this be an album that scorned wives and jilted husbands find solace in for years to come? Most definitely.

Everyone should get a few months of studio time instead of therapy at least once in their lives.

Working on music without any pants...

I can’t say that I’ve always been a huge fan of the Rolling Stones. On the contrary, I’ve fallen in and out of love with them at different points in my life. As a kid, songs like “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” were in constant rotation on the Oldies stations that always seemed to be playing in my parents cars. As a teenager, I fell in love with “Paint it Black” (thanks, “The Devil’s Advocate”!) and “Start Me Up” (thanks for ruining it, Windows commercials!). In more recent years, I’ve found myself drawn to the more melancholy “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Gimme Shelter”, the latter of which can probably be attributed to the Rock Band explosion a few years back. I marveled at the video for “Love is Strong,” where 100 ft. versions of super models threaten to crush Manhattan and I laughed when Mike Meyers did his spot on impression of Mick on SNL. But I can’t ever really say that I went through a Rolling Stones “phase” like I did with other artists like the Beatles, the Who and even U2. The Stones were always sort of the “also ran” band in my mind. The second place team behind their Liverpool brothers who’d never made as big a splash. So it’s through that lens that I approached my latest assignment “Exile on Main St.” Now I’ll be honest, if it weren’t for Jimmy Fallon and his Rolling Stones Week, I’d still have never even thought to listen to this album straight through. But thanks to a little repetition, I downloaded a copy and listened to it straight through in one sitting, something that I can’t say I’ve done with any album in years.

A Brief Synopsis of “Exile on Main St.”: But before we get to what I thought, let’s quickly review the somewhat nutty circumstances surrounding the recording of the Rolling Stones tenth studio album. A quick search of Wikipedia reveals that “Exile on Main St.” was released in May 1972 but was recorded over a four year span with two main sessions: one in Los Angeles, CA (home of Beach Boys and asphalt) the other in Nellcôte, France. Why were the English rockers in France, you ask? Because they owed more taxes to the crown than they were able to pay. So Keith and the boys headed to France where smacked out Keith Richards had rented a former Nazi headquarters…you know, as you’ll do. So the Stones, in the throws of Keith’s love affair with heroin and Mick’s first marriage, apparently spent nights recording what would later become “Exile on Main St.” Jagger and Co. would later add to the tracks in LA including some influences from a local gospel church they attended. With all that going into one album, it’s really no surprise that it sounds like a mix of rock, blues, soul and whining about drugs and booze.

Why is it a PCBS? With classic songs like “Tumbling Dice”, “Happy”, “Shine a Light” and “All Down the Line” you can see why this album was panned by Rolling Stone when it was released. (Let’s just take a minute to realize that professional music critics are generally asshats. Seriously.) Of course, with the benefit of hindsight and time to realize that they were generally asshats, most music critics now proclaim that it’s one of the greatest albums of all time ever. It’s on multiple “Greatest Album Ever” lists and was the inspiration for a bunch of other artists including, most famously to my generation, Liz Phair’s album “Exile in Guyville” (another album that I should probably get my hands on at some point in the future). Even Matchbox 20 felt the need to reference it in one of their so-called “songs” so it must be important, right?

For me, it’s a bit more personal than that. <tangent> My music collection has always been heavily influenced by what the influential people around me were listening to at the time. It’s easy to wheel through my iPod at any given moment, stop on a random artist and immediately know exactly who got me into that kind of music or started me listening to a particular artist. I’ve loved everyone from Abba to Zappa all because someone around me was listening to them at the time. A few big examples:

• Bruce Springsteen: I love the Boss. I’ve always loved the Boss…except that I haven’t. I came to the church of Springsteen quite late in life (around 14 or 15) when my friend Mike introduced me to his “Greatest Hits” album. But once I got a little taste of Bruce, I was a fan for life. I bounced from that compilation of singles all the way back to “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ” almost immediately. Because of Mike I have seen the Ghost of Tom Joad, travelled to Nebraska and discovered the most perfect album ever recorded. He’s also to blame for Billy Joel and my obsession with obscure musicals.
• Me First and the Gimme Gimmes: This one’s all the fault of Tracy. For some reason, I got to hang out with rocker chick Tracy and her friends around the turn of the century and was introduced to a local cover band called “Frontbutt” (I’d Google them to see if they’re still around and link to their site, but I’m not Googling that word). One night while waiting to see the band go on, the bar was playing one of the “Me First and the Gimme Gimmes” albums. I had to know who it was and how I could get their music immediately. I’ve always been a sucker for covers but any band that can do a punk cover of “Nobody Does it Better” just plain kicks ass (almost makes me feel sad for the rest).
• Eagles: 150% my dad’s fault. My father owned one of those huge 5-disc changer CD players when they first came out and he started replacing lost LPs with CDs. One of those CDs was this one and once I found it, it was basically on a loop in my head. I imagined driving down the highway with the windows down in a pickup truck listening to “Take it to the Limit,” wrote angsty teenage stories to “Already Gone” and didn’t understand what “Tequila Sunrise: was until many years later. This little gem can also be blamed for my love of the Steve Miller Band and Fleetwood Mac.

The point is, the reason I never really got into the Rolling Stones is because, well, no one around me was really into the Rolling Stones. </tanget> Unlike others people around my age, I didn’t go and see the giant inflatable people they had during the Wheels of Steel tour and wasn’t really impressed by their “Voodoo Lounge” album. So this PCBS was more about trying to discover some music on my own than trying to catch up with something that everyone else my age already loved. Hopefully years from now when I hear “Sweet Virginia” I’ll think of me instead of someone else.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? It’s not really fair for me to criticize an album that’s beloved by many and revered by more. As I was listening to “Exile”, I was suddenly struck by the fear that if I didn’t like it then my ear was more tin than I’d ever imagined. I truly believe the “you are what you like“ philosophy of Nick Hornby, so the idea that I’d not like something so close to my wheelhouse was a bit intimidating (not something I’d felt with things like “Nightmare on Elm St.” or “thirtysomething”). Luckily, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it. In a world where there’s really no such thing as albums anymore (everything’s a single…except for musicals because they have a throughline of plot, but that’s a whole other post), it’s really nice to find something that feels like it was meant to be heard in the order it’s laid out (and not in a crazy way like “Dark Side of the Moon”).

That being said, I know that only a few of the songs will make it into regular rotation on my iPod. “Tumbling Dice” and “Loving Cup” both hit me in that rock/soul sweet spot that I’ve developed around things like Van Morrison and the Stones own “Gimme Shelter” but it was really “Sweet Virginia” that I know I’ll hang on to. Yes, I’m from the commonwealth of Virginia and yes, I’ve recently traveled there and become somewhat sentimental about the state made for lovers, but neither of those are reasons for loving this song. For me, it’s the Johnny Cash/Marvin Gaye/Steve Bassett sound that immediately makes me think of nights that were hotter than the days that preceded them. I’m reminded of standing in line for ice cream that melts as soon as you get it and driving fast with the windows down to try and stay ahead of the mosquitoes. It’s Southern Rock-blues-a-billy music at it’s finest and for me, it’s the anchor for my respect for this album.  Also, it’s better than 99.9% of the crap that’s released these days (suck it, Bieber) so, you know, get off my lawn you crazy kids with you rap music and low rise pants.

Final Thoughts: Since I’ve rambled on for almost 1600 words, I’ll keep my final thoughts brief: I’m glad I gave this album a chance because it’s something that I should have been listening to all along. Hopefully, some of you will give it a chance and when it comes up on shuffle on you iPods…you’ll think of me.

The newly re-mastered anniversary super pack edition of the album comes out in a few weeks. Give it a chance and let me know what you think about the album when you do.  Oh and watch the Rolling Stones week on Fallon. He’s a funny guy.

Yes, that's Christina Applegate...and yes, that's Matthew Perry. But no, neither of them are good in this movie.

Back when movies first started, when you thought of success as an actor you always thought of getting signed to a multi-picture deal with one of the big studios. The goal was to become one of the many stars in the MGM or Paramount galaxy. By the time the 80′s rolled around, the big studio system was gone from movies…but not TV. And that brings us to the wonder that is NBC’s “Dance til Dawn”. While it was originally on my list, one of my most pop culture savvy friends basically demanded that I see it and I can honestly say that I’m glad she did. “Dance til Dawn” is a holdover from those big studio days when unlikely stars would team up for pictures just because they all were under contract at the same studio. You see in the 80s and 90s, NBC created a series of family friendly made for TV movies by basically taking all the TV stars they could get their hands on, putting them into a blender and serving up whatever insane smoothie of B-list stars came out. For the actors it was a chance to show audiences a different side of themselves. For audiences it was a chance to see some familiar faces doing unfamiliar things. For the studio, it was a chance to fill 2 hours of prime-time programming with mind numbing awesome TV movie goodness. It’s everything that’s wrong with Hollywood…but it’s just oh so right.

A Brief Synopsis of “Dance til Dawn”: Here comes a mish mash of every 80′s teen movie plot you’ve ever seen. It’s that prom-tacular time of year for the kids at Hoover High (alliteration is fun!) and almost everyone’s set with a date for the big night. Well, when I say “almost everyone” I mean “basically no one.” Super popular Shelley (Alyssa Milano) has recently split with huskie-eyed, mullet wearing Kevin (Brian Bloom) and has to convince her parents that she’s still going with him while secretly sneaking to the movies…where she runs in to Dan who’s hiding out at the movies so he doesn’t disappoint his dad (Alan Thicke) a bachelor/playboy/Lothario who can’t believe his son could possibly be dateless on Prom Night. Meanwhile, Angela (Tracy Gold) is shopping in what looks like the world’s crappiest Sam Goody’s with her quirky best friend Margaret (Tempestt Bledsoe in the role she was born to play) when Kevin (he of the creepy huskie eyes) quickly spies her and tells his boys that he’s taking her to the prom. Also at the mall, Patrice (hammily played by Christina Applegate) and her boyfriend/man-servant Roger (played by a seemingly mute Matthew Perry a mere 6 years before his big break on “Friends”) are plotting to become the prom king and queen. What Patrice doesn’t know is that her parents hate each other and are totally going to split up…but only after they chaperone the prom. Prom night comes and while Shelley and Dan find love at the movies, driving around town and eventually at the world’s most insanely lit makeshift mountaintop star gazing spot, Kevin and Angela find love at a “fancy” Italian restaurant, the prom and an after party all while avoiding Angela’s overbearingly religious parents (played by an off-the-rails Kelsey Grammar and curler wearing Edie McClurg). Because she’s taken her glasses off and put on a dress instead of terrible unpopular girl clothes, Angela is named the prom queen even though Patrice had designed the prom to match her dress (because that’s not crazy) and Roger eventually stands up to Patrice after she finds out that the pre-engagement ring he gave her is one step above gumball machine (because that’s not crazy either). In the end though, new couples are formed, old couples are reunited (that’s right! Patrice’s parents stay together because they once again find love at the prom just like they did all those years ago! squeal!) and Alan Thicke somehow finds it in his heart to forgive his son for not being the same kind of swingin’ cat that his old man is. It’s ridiculous, over the top and flat out hilarious without trying to be.

Why is it a PCBS? Back when I was a kid, the TV movie starring all the teen stars of the day was a bit of a phenomenon but “Dance til Dawn” is really the crowning achievement in the genre. While other TV movies had a tendency to be filled with terrible writing, terrible plots and actors shoe horned into roles they never should have played, “Dance til Dawn” did all that while simultaneously ripping off everything they could possibly think to rip off from all the teen movies that came before it.

• Crazy teen party scene from “Sixteen Candles”? Check (even used the same house for the exteriors as pointed out by an eagle-eyed viewer during our screening of this awesome flick a few weeks back).
• Teens aimlessly driving all over town in an up-all-night “License to Drive”-like scenario? That’s not Heather Graham in the passenger’s seat but they still used it (and why was it so smoky outside the car whenever we got an interior shot of Dan and Shelley?).
• “Oh Yeah” music from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”? OH NO THEY STOLE IT! Chicka-chicka, bow bow. (I mean they also stole Edie McClurg from that movie, but who’s counting?)
• Wallflower turned pretty girl simply by getting the attention of the popular guy from “Pretty in Pink”? Blatantly stole it.
• Overly religious dad trying to keep his daughter from the evils of dancing like “Footloose”? Kelsey Grammar is no John Lithgow, but yes he’s in there.
• And many, many more!

But even with all it’s thievery, the movie is still a touchstone for the stars of the time. You know that Alan Thicke fought to get that role so he’d have a chance to play someone other than the square Dr. Jason Seaver on “Growing Pains.” Tempestt Bledsoe thought she’d be able to jumpstart a movie career with her tour de force turn as best friend Margret…even though she might as well have been playing best friend Vanessa (she’s got range!). And of course, it was a chance for three of the biggest leading ladies of 80′s sitcoms to square off and once and for all decide who’d reign supreme on the cover of Tiger Beat. Sadly, when Christina Applegate, Alyssa Milano and Tracey Gold fight…we all lose.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? If time heals all wounds, then hopefully most of the people attached to this project have long since blanked it out of their memories. Unfortunately for some, this might actually be the high water mark of their careers. The movie’s got lots of charm and tons of heart…just not a whole lot of talent to back it up. The real question is: why did the networks stop doing these sorts of cross-promotional “events” at all? Sure there were a few more teen star mash-up movies (including 1996′s “Kidz in the Woods” starring Candice Cameron and Tatyana Ali) but as a whole this sort of thing is now lost to the sands of TV history. You’d never see a made for TV movie starring all of the biggest stars from Nickelodeon and Disney Channel. I mean something like that would crush in the ratings and be a huge boon for whoever could actually organize it but no one studio has enough power to bring all the biggest stars together for any one single project (no matter how many times you get Alan Thicke to commit to being the dad or the teacher or the slightly wonky uncle who lives in the basement and collects old couches). It’s just not something we’re likely to ever see again. And maybe that’s part of the appeal of “Dance til Dawn.” It’s like seeing the stars align…it’s like seeing the B-list stars align to do one special project that was probably hyped like the opening of Capone’s vault when it first aired.

Final Thoughts: If you haven’t seen “Dance til Dawn” and you’re even remotely a fan of late 80′s TV, you should. It’s one last chance to see Kelsey Grammar before the drug problems, Tracey Gold before the eating disorder problems and Chris Young before people started asking him which isle paper towels are on. It’s worth mentioning that this movie is best enjoyed with a big group of friends who are all just as into it as you are. There’s nothing quite like giving a movie like this the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment in a room full of people you know. The movie is awash in bad 80′s fashion, knock off music and the delightful squeaking of Edie McClurg. It’s a light-hearted teen romp that shamelessly stole everything that belongs to 80′s teen movies…including my heart.

So THAT'S why riding my bike by her house never worked!

Isn’t she? That’s really the question that “Pretty in Pink” asks over and over again. Andie is just odd enough to not fit in with the cool kids, isn’t she? Andie’s worth leaving Steff and the other Richies behind, isn’t she? Andie is worth obsessing over even though you know it’s never going to go anywhere, isn’t she? Isn’t she pretty in pink? The answer, over and over, is yes. Andie is THE girl next door who you just know is going to grow up and be the happiest among all the people who survive high school. She’s in control of her life in ways that her father, her “best friend” Duckie and her boss Iona just plain aren’t. But before I get ahead of myself…

A Brief Synopsis of “Pretty in Pink”: I’m actually willing to wager that I might be one of the only people left in America who are my age who didn’t know the plot of “Pretty in Pink” before today, but here goes. Andie is a high school senior who’s mom has left her and her father behind. They live in lower middle class poverty but she’s still the ideal girl next door. She works at TRAX where her boss, Iona, tries to lead her on the right path to eternal happiness, even as she struggles with her own. She’s in love with Blane, a guy with all the money in the world and the asshole friends to match. Miraculously, this isn’t the story of a girl pining for the boy she knows she’ll never have. It’s the story of two people who are struggling to be together in an world that doesn’t approve. Call it “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” in the world of an 80′s high school, but “Pretty in Pink” is all about figuring out where you fit into the high school ecosystem…and then figuring out that the high school ecosystem means nothing. As with all great teen movies, it all comes down to Prom as Andie has to use it as a vehicle to figure out how her relationship with Blane can grow, her relationship with Duckie can change and her relationship with her father can move on as his relationship with her mom comes to an end. Basically, it’s a relationship movie with high school as the backdrop and the best of 80′s music as the soundtrack. In the end, Blane tells of Steff (nice name, asshat), Duckie comes to grips with his burning love of Andie, Andie’s dad finally puts her mom behind him, Iona finds true love with the guy from the Pet Store and Andie and Blane share one final kiss as the music swells and the credits roll. It’s perfection in celluloid and I’m sad that I didn’t see it until now.

Why is it a PCBS? “Pretty in Pink” is part of the pantheon of John Hughes films (which are actually being honored on the Oscars as I type this) that are seen as the best of what teen films can be. But for me, it’s much more about the Duckman. Sufficed to say, I was a slightly awkward kid in middle and high school. To say that I can relate to Duckie is a bit of an understatement. A couple of touchstones to get my point across: When I was in middle school, I had a huge crush on a girl that was nice enough to pretend that she knew that I existed. I went through all the regular middle school nerd machinations to try and get her attention (mix tape, carnation delivery, etc.) but one day, for some reason, I thought that the thing that would impress her was a picnic with glass bottle cokes (stay with me). Unfortunately, when you’re 12 you don’t really have a lot of chances to get a girl alone to have a picnic…so you eventually convince yourself that it would be cool to do it in the 5 minutes between 6th and 7th period on her way into the one class that you have together. I showed up with a picnic basket (plastic) with croissants (from Sam’s Club wrapped in wax paper) and two bottled Cokes. I thought it would be the epitome of classy…it was instead the equivalent of Duckie waiting outside of the club for Andie knowing full well that he’d never get in (thanks to Andrew Dice Clay…who invited that guy?). A second example is actually even more painful: One of the most life changing nights of my young life was actually cut short-ish…by model UN. I thought I needed to get at least some sleep but I still ended up falling asleep more than my fair share of times the next day during Model UN (more like Robert’s Rules of Sleeping Disorder…amiright?). My UN partner wasn’t impressed (sorry, Nicki) and my coach was even less so  (sorry, DeCarli). But still, it all helped me be all that much more the Duckie. While the Duckman chose to express his feelings through Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”, I chose to express myself through the intricate lyrics of Bob Seger and Tom Cochrane. If Cusak’s character in “High Fidelity” was torn between which songs best represented his love for his women, Duckie and I were willing to latch on to the first pop track we found that basically expressed our feelings and desires. In essence, it was/is everything terrible that Duckie represents.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly, it sparkles. Whether it the highlight of everything that’s wrong with the clique system or the spotlight on the awkwardness of teenage flirting (remember that Blane creates a computer program to initially reveal himself to Andie), “Pretty in Pink” is a fabulous representation of everything that’s weird about high school. I wish I’d seen this when I was 16 so I could do two things:

1. Learn all the words and dance moves to “Try a little Tenderness” to impress all the girls in my high school
2. Embarrass myself by going through a pork pie hat phase.

“Pretty in Pink” serves as both a blueprint for and cautionary tale against the way that I acted in high school. I’m sure there are more than a few Andie’s out there who would have loved if I hadn’t ridden by their house all the time on my bike (or in other forms of transportation). I left more than my fair share of Duckie voice mail messages on machines and with little brothers. I also didn’t know a good thing when I had it, like Blane. “Pretty in Pink” does a great job of highlighting everything that’s wrong about high school…as well as everything that seems oh so right.

Final Thoughts: It’s not like it’s any secret that I think “Pretty in Pink” was a great movie. It’s a study in high school inequities as well as a chance for James Spader to flex his crazy muscles and Gina Gershon to randomly show up in the back ground of a scenes for no particular reason. It’s everything that I want from a teen movie with Annie Potts to boot. For me, it shines a light on everything that was wrong with me in high school…except for a pork-pie hat. It’s heartfelt, reluctantly romantic and strikingly different for 1986.

Which brings me to a rebuke of sorts: shame on you, “Summer Catch.” You basically fooled me into believing that you were a good movie about someone from the poor side of town rising above the town-instituted class system to be in a meaningful relationship with someone from the rich side of town. Shame on you for ripping off “Pretty in Pink.” Same goes for you, “Dirty Dancing.” I’m putting baby in the corner for ripping off the basic premise of this movie. At least Andie was her own person. She didn’t even flinch when one of the club’s regular dance partners got preggers and she had to fill in….I may be mixing my metaphors.

Regardless of how many times it’s been ripped off (cough…”She’s All That”), “Pretty in Pink” is still the first and best in it’s class.

One kiss that's greater than all the shoplifting charges in the world

“Arthur” makes the list of movies that I should have seen the first time around (even though I was about a year old when it was released) because it’s sort of representative of a whole sub-set of movies that I seem to have missed that can all be categorized as “schmaltzy drunken Dudley Moore movies.” It’s safe to say that I never really understood why Dudley Moore was so famous or why this movie was so popular. Honestly, “Arthur” is best remembered not for the Oscar that it garnered Sir John Gielgud nor for the fact that it’s Liza Minnelli at probably her most understated but for “Arthur’s Theme” sung by the unsinkable Christopher Cross. Yes, the whole idea of getting caught between the moon and New York City (that’s one) is what keeps “Arthur” in the zeitgeist and that’s maybe a little unfair.

A Brief Synopsis of “Arthur”: Arthur Bach, a drunken playboy drunken drunky drinker, is being forced by his father to marry Susan or risk losing access to his $750 million dollar fortune. Up to this point, Arthur’s been using his access to said money to pick up hookers, get loaded and take them back to his bed…which is surrounded by model trains. One day while shopping with his faithful butler/man-servant/father figure Hobson, Arthur meets Linda, a down on her luck actress/waitress who he immediately falls in love with when he sees her shoplift a tie (as you’ll do). In the end, Arthur must choose between his drunken, cash flow life with Susan or his drunken, poor house life with Linda. Hobson dies (but not before letting Arthur know that he’s always been proud of him?) and Arthur grows up, choosing to give up his money for the sticky-fingered Linda. Oh, but in the very, very end he gets to keep Linda and the cash…and keep boozing it up. So over the course of 90 minutes Arthur learns absolutely nothing. Well done.

Why is it a PCBS? “Arthur” is listed in both the Bravo’s Top 10 Comedies of All-Time and the AFI Top 100 Comedies of All-Time so apparently it’s safe to say that this movie is both “well loved” and “critically-acclaimed.” But for me, “Arthur” is the quintessential example of “The FOX 5 Effect.” Growing up in Virginia, we got most of our TV stations from the nearby Washington, D.C. market including WTTG FOX 5. When I was first becoming pop culture aware, Fox was just starting out as a network which meant that they didn’t exactly have 7-nights-a-week-worth of programming. How do you fill crazy programming gaps in the era before insane amounts of syndication? Movies. FOX 5 had a stable of movies that were basically running on a three month loop. Movies like “Any Which Way But Loose”, “Clue”, “Superman the Movie” and “Trading Places” were constantly in prime time rotation when I was a kid. Unfortunately, I was a bit too young to enjoy (or even understand most of these movies) and my parents did a good job of shielding us from most controversial movie content until we were a bit older (Exhibit A: they sent us out of the room when Elizabeth Perkins showed her bra in “Big”) so although I often saw commercials for “Arthur” I was never really allowed to see it. By the time I was of “Arthur”-age, it had faded into that space between the moon and New York city (that’s two) so I had no interest in it. But all of those movies still remind me of a specific point in time when I was just starting to get to see “adult” (PG) movies and would every so often run into one that was supposed to be funny but that wasn’t funny at all. Those movies represent my first glimpse of grown-up movies and grown-up comedy…even if most of them are terrible in one way or another. Thus, they’re all a part of the FOX 5 Effect and the greater world of PCBSs.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Honestly, not great. “Arthur” feels dated for 1981, much less for 2010. Dudley Moore’s Peter O’Toole impression is literally funny for the first 5 minutes of the movie and then just gets old…fast. He’s got no redeeming qualities, treats everyone he meets as a punchline and then does a 180 in the last reel that is then undone by his grandmother’s insistence that it’s better for him to be rich and married to Linda than have any member of the Bach family as a member of the working class. Let’s talk about the punchlines as well…Minnelli clumsily lands each and every one of her funny lines like she’s waiting for the rim shot to immediately follow the period in her sentence. She’s hammy (at best) and just a bad actress (at worst). It’s like a 90 minute episode of “Perfect Strangers” with Dudley Moore as Balki and Liza Minnelli as Cousin Larry. That sounds like a recipe for disaster because it is. This is a great example of how a movie that lots and lots of people find funny (like say “Old Dogs”) can actually be something that I think is a crime against comedy (like say “Old Dogs”).

Final Thoughts: Based on the basic mechanics of the plot “British boozehound finds true love in unlikely American girl” you’d think that I would love “Arthur”. Hell, take the word “boozehound” out of that sentence and you’ve got the plot to at least three other movies that I do like (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”, “Notting Hill” and “Music & Lyrics”, well done Hugh Grant). Unfortunately, “Arthur” just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t funny, he wasn’t charming and she’s no catch. So I guess I’m saying that the movie didn’t work for me at all. Strangely enough, it spawned a sequel “Arthur Too: On the Rocks” that is apparently so bad that Dudley Moore renounced it completely. Maybe he saw in the sequel the same level of slapstick hackery that I saw in the original. It’s a fine line between bawdy, drunken humor and flat out stupid…a line so thin that it can often get lost between the moon and New York City (and that’s three).

Paging Mr. Herman. Mr. Herman you have a call in the lobby...

Somewhere, 12 year-old me is really pissed at 29 year-old me right now. While I’d been a fan of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and the live show that HBO shows from time to time, somehow I’ve never seen “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and now that I have, I’m kicking myself over it.

I don’t know if you do it alot, but watching a movie at home by yourself is a little odd. In a big theater, you’re surrounded by other people so when something’s funny lots of people in the room are laughing. Other people laughing makes it seem more ok to laugh, somehow. At home alone, sometimes I feel like a complete idiot laughing by myself while watching a movie. Even though there’s no one in the room, I get strangely self-aware and it seems to take more to make me laugh than it usually would. This was not the case with “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” It made me laugh…alot. And that right there is really all I’d need to say about the movie to let you know what I thought if I had any care about the rambling length of my posts. Luckily, I don’t.

A Brief Synopsis of “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”: Pee-Wee’s bike gets stolen. Shit goes absolutely sideways. Seriously, that’s the entire plot of this movie. It’s a classic “road” picture with Pee-wee’s bike serving as the MacGuffin. Here’s the interesting thing though: basically it’s a movie of sight-gags. Think about it…there’s really not a lot of dialogue  in the movie at all. It’s a lot of Pee-wee exploring people and places on his own and then having short conversations with them along the way. It’s unapologetically batshit crazy and never makes any attempt to explain much of the how’s and why’s. (How does Pee-wee get from a hospital room in Texas to the Warner Brothers studio lot in California? Don’t care. Why are there ducks and a monkey in a pet store? Don’t care. Why does no one seem to question the fact that Pee-wee owns a home that’s looks like it’s been decorated by a group of deranged 9 year olds? Don’t care.) It’s basically funny sketch after funny sketch with the general search for his bike as the only link between them. And that’s why I loved it. It’s a movie that manages to create an entire bizarre world without using exposition. That’s just impressive writing, directing and acting on the part of everyone involved. (Why is there a permanent shrine to a dead trucker in a truck stop diner? Don’t care. Why does Simone’s boyfriend Andy never actually speak any words? Don’t care. How does Dottie have the expertise to construct a bike that has jets, smoke machines and an ejector seat? Don’t care. Why are there two real elephants painted blue and pink around a random corner on the WB lot? Don’t care.) It’s a movie that just wanted to be funny. There’s no lesson learned and no great change in character either. By the end of the movie Pee-wee’s still not in love with Dottie and Francis is still not nice to Pee-wee. Everything is basically reset back to the start…except now Pee-wee’s been portrayed by James Brolin in a movie about the movie we just watched. You know…as you’ll do.

Why is it a PCBS? Because I had no in the movie are iconic moments in cinema that I’ve seen referenced in other places. Seriously. I mean, I knew that the Tequila dance was there…but I didn’t realize how much of the rest of the movie is floating around in my head from other places in the zeitgeist. For example, when Pee-wee pulled up to the pet store that was on fire (Why is the pet store on fire during the middle of the day with no one around it? Don’t care.) I already knew that he was going to run out at the end of the sequence holding the snakes and faint. But I didn’t realize how funny the build up to that moment was. Every time he went back into the fire to rescue more animals and stopped to make a face at the snakes, I laughed. Literally every time. You knew he wouldn’t let them burn, but he was determined to leave them until the very end and it just plays out like comedy gold. I also already had in my head the image of Francis in the bathtub from flipping past the movie some day on cable years ago. But I didn’t know just how funny it is to see Pee-wee go all Nurse Wratchet on Francis (“Go ahead and scream. We’re miles from where anyone can hear you!”) And the look on Pee-wee’s face when he jumped straight into the tub in his suit (which never comes off…ever) was hilarious. Ruebens is just so committed to that character, so confident in everything that is Pee-wee, that the slightest things seem brilliant (hissing at people as he’s walking in the rain, giggling to himself as Mickey has him steer the car while he lights a cigarette, being pleased with himself because he thinks his “rebel” speech has in any way deterred Dottie). It’s the fully realized Pee-wee character and slightly off kilter world that just make the movie such a classic.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well if my glowing words above don’t fully convey the message I’ll say it again: I loved this movie in 2010. It’s 25 years old this year and it feels like something that could easily have just come out. People still really love this movie too and that’s always a good sign that something’s stood the test of time (but not always…because some people still love “Titanic” and those people are wrong…stupid and wrong). I also feel like this movie is a bit of lightning in a bottle. When I told a friend that I’d also never seen “Big Top Pee-wee” she quickly informed me that apparently “no one has.” I can imagine that they tried to make another movie with this kind of super loose plot used as a framework to support a series of sketch-like ideas and that it just wasn’t as good. Making a movie like this is extremely difficult as you’re always one or two bad ideas away from making something that resembles the last half hour of any given “Saturday Night Live.” Also, and completely unrelated, how meta is the kid from “The Wonder Years” in this movie? In another example of a movie within the movie, he’s a kid actor who’s a terror on set but not in the normal “oh this child star is annoying to work with” way. He’s obviously hip to the business, puts down his co-star for constantly missing her queues and keeps referring to the director by his first name in a way that just screams “over-indulged douche bag actor.” It’s maybe 5 minutes of the movie, but it’s absolutely pitch perfect and hilariously inside the industry humor.

Final Thoughts: Has this changed the way that I think about Pee-wee Herman? Hell yes. I also wasn’t surprised to see that Phil Hartman was one of the writers on this movie. He was a funny guy…that you may remember from such things as “News Radio”, “Saturday Night Live” and “The Greatest Story Ever Hula’ed.” ”Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes on it perfectly. It pulls off a hilarious series of endlessly watchable and quotable scenes (“Tell ‘em Large Marge sent ya”, “You don’t want to get mixed up with the likes of me”, and “I’m in Texas. Here I’ll prove it” to name a few). It’s a great movie and the first to get my “WWCD”  (Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner) tag for something that I’ve crossed off the list that I can’t believe I missed out on the first time around. I’d like to formally apologize to Past John for not seeing it before now. Sorry man, my bad.

"Houses with kids are always sticky."

(Since there are only so many hours in a day and I have only so much patience, there’s no way I could sit through full series of shows that I might not like. So I’ll be tackling television series in a few different ways. Sometimes I’ll just watch a pilot or specific episode of a show that’s noteworthy for one reason or another. In all cases, I won’t in any way try to be fair to the show and will make hyperbolic generalizations about it. Sorry if you love a certain show that I give this treatment to, if Emmy voters can do it so can I.)

Pilots really are tricky business. On the one hand, your pilot has to set up characters, situations and themes that your series will explore throughout its run. That means a lot of exposition which, as a rule, doesn’t make for the best television. If you don’t set up enough of the story, people will walk away from your pilot wondering what the hell they’ve just seen. On the other hand, pilots have to be engaging enough to entice viewers to watch episodes two through one hundred (the magic syndication number). Pilots really are a tricky thing.

The problem is you can have a great pilot for a series that turns out to be crap in the long run (e.g. “Heroes”) or a crap pilot that turns out to be a great series in the long run (e.g. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). It’s a balancing act and a crap shoot all at once and it’s with that in mind that I sat down to watch the pilot of late 80′s early nineties Emmy-darling “thirtysomething”. I was 7 when “thirtysomething” premiered, which is probably why I missed it the first time around. Turns out, it’s full of award-winning performances, writing and directing so I felt sorta bad that I’d ignored it for so long…a feeling that I can’t say I still have.

A Brief Synopsis of the pilot of “thirtysomething”: It’s important that I say that I didn’t hate it. Far from it. For 1987, it’s pretty edgy stuff. I mean in the pilot episode they explore the changing relationship of a couple after their first child, the dark corners of the male mind that lead to infidelity (however unsatisfying) and side-boob. That’s a lot to deal with in the first 49 minutes of a show’s life. The pilot introduces us to all of the central characters…and since it was just the pilot it would be cheating to pretend that I now know all their names. With the help of Wikipedia, I can tell you that we meet:

• Michael and Hope: a couple struggling to maintain the “themness” of their relationship now that their first child has arrived. Hope is a former career go-getter who’s wrestling with her choice to stay home (for now) with Baby Janey. Michael is running his own advertising agency with his friend Elliot.
• Elliot and Nancy: slightlty further into the abyss of their thirties, Elliot and Nancy are a married couple with two kids. While Elliot is working at the ad agency with Michael, Nancy apparently does nothing other than scold their son for tormenting his sister. While walking down the street, Elliot confesses an affair (because that’s where dudes talk about stuff like that) to Michael who’s recently begun to notice other women now that Hope has gone all stay-at-home-momish.
• Melissa: Apparently she’s Michael’s cousin (although that’s never actually communicated during the pilot) she’s the typical Cathy-reading 30 year old woman who’s trying to define herself via a relationship with a man. Seriously, she could have just walked into the room and said “Argh!” and it would have been equally effective. We also learn that she used to date Gary who really just wants to go backpacking.
• Gary: He’s got long hair! He’s got glasses on a string a lanyard! He likes backpacking! Gary’s the walking talking embodiment of the 80′s version of a guy struggling to balance his 60′s roots with his 80′s lust for a Volvo. Gary who alternates between getting touchy feely with Hope on the couch and chiding Michael for not wanting to go backpacking, is apparently an English professor at Haverford College (take that Harvard residuals committee). In the pilot he’s smarmy in a way that’s literally one step above Andrew McCarthy. If Zack Morris had aged to 32 and taken a time machine back to 1987, he would be Gary.
• Ellyn: While Hope’s been busy making a baby and leaving her job, Ellyn’s been at home with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a worn out VHS copy of “Working Girl”. While having lunch with Hope and the baby, Ellyn does everything but punch the kid in the face in an effort to quiet her. Ellyn’s gone all Jan Brady since the baby took Hope’s focus away from her and it shows when she tries to convince Hope that the best way to get over being so tired with the new baby is to go back to work. Nice try, second-wave feminist Ellyn, Hope’s too smart for that little ploy. I’m guessing that later in the series Ellyn begins acting out to get Hope’s attention by dating guys in leather jackets with motorcycles.

Why is it a PCBS? “thirtysomething” won a slew of Emmy awards during its four years on the air. It’s a touchstone for that generation of Boomers who had to deal with the fact that they were selling out as they got paid buckets and buckets of money to sell out. And while I was originally going to say that it launched the career of Timothy Busfield while simultaneously burying the careers of 6 other actors, I was proven wrong. Basically half the cast went on to be a part of either “Alias” or “Brothers & Sisters” or both. The style of “thirtysomething” also influenced shows for years to come. Watching the pilot I couldn’t help but think of shows like “Sisters” (Swoozy Kurtz, FTW), “Once & Again” and all the other “adults dealing with real problems” shows that came in the 90′s and early 00′s. “thirtysomething” also pushed boundaries of what was acceptable to talk about and show on prime time network television. So if you can’t sleep at night because the image of Dennis Franz’s ass is burned into your memory, thank “thirtysomething”.
How does it look in the rear view mirror? These 7 people make up the world that we’re introduced to in the “thirtysomething” pilot and while I can relate to the ideas behind the struggles of the transition from 20′s to 30′s (although I’m still in my 20′s, for now), I felt that it was all come through in a very Lifetime movie of the week kind of way. The struggles of men and women to deal with life, children and each others is something that TV’s tread and retread over the years and while I can appreciate the fact that “thirtysomething” gets to yell “FIRST!” on a lot of these issues, the fact that they bit off so much in the pilot was a bit off-putting. Showing me that Elliot and Nancy and broken in episode one isn’t as strong a choice as making me fall in love with Elliot and Nancy and then stabbing me in the heart with the revelation of his infidelity. I feel like I’ll start to see a pattern as I get through more and more 80′s dramatic television of shows that go for the cheap shock over the longform character development. Of course, developing a character in one direction and then breaking that convention with a shocking event totally goes against my description of a successful pilot at the top of this post but whatever, it’s my stream of consciousness, suck it. “thirtysomething” feels like it’s trying too hard to say something about the people, places and things that it portrays. While 80′s audiences might have gasped and tuned in for more at the first signs of taboo subjects (like adultery and side-boob), I tend to prefer my dramas a bit more subtle than that. Think about the pilot for “Mad Men”. It spend the first 55 minutes convincing you that Don Draper is a hard working ad man with a penchant for the ladies and booze…only to turn around in the last 5 minutes and turn that notion completely on it’s head. (and I’ve already contradicted myself, awesome) But you know what I mean. It’s the choice between Crock Pot and Flash Fry drama. With Crock Pot, you get the slow simmer of characters who have time to develop flavor and idiosyncracies. They’re always more complex than you first think and constantly suprise you with their subtle flavors. Flash Fry, on the other hand, takes characters and immediately introduces them to heat at level 11. Yes, the sizzle and pop is there in the beginning, but over time the characters get burned to an unrecognizable crisp. (+1 for the meat analogy).

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day, the pilot for “thirtysomething” is exactly what it promised to be: the story of people struggling to find an identity in that gray area past your twenties and before your fourties. I think today’s thirtysomething’s would make for a somewhat more interesting show (what with 30 being the new 18 and all). will I watch another episode of “thirtysomething”? Maybe. After I post this, I’ll bring up the series with friends and see what people remember about it. Does it stand the test of time in their minds or was it just the “Gray’s Anatomy” of 1987-1991? Part of me thinks that people will remember it fondly. Like the Happy Hour at your favorite bar way back when. You always knew who would be there, what they were serving and how the evening would end. That’s just not quite the way I want to spend the last few months of my twentysomethings.

Does anything about this picture strike you as odd?

First off, since this is my first post about a video game, let me start off by saying: I really love video games. Some people read books, some people make ships in a bottle, I play games. That little number in the title of this post is my current total number of Xbox Live points. To give you a point of comparison, none of my friends have yet to break 15,000…and they like games a lot too. So, it’s sort of an oddity that I’ve never really played a Tomb Raider game. Tomb Raider’s Laura Croft has been prancing around in exotic places and tiny shorts since 1996 but our paths have never really crossed for any meaningful amount of time. I tried playing “Tomb Raider: Legend” a few years ago but found it painfully bad, so when it came to attempting “Tomb Raider Anniversary” I didn’t have high hopes.

A Brief Synopsis of “Tomb Raider Anniversary”: Laura Croft, the archeologist/hot girl is whisked away in search of the thing that her dad had been trying to find but never could…blah blah blah exotic locations…blah blah blah…increasingly tiny outfits…blah blah blah…”witty dialogue.” Seriously, nobody cares about the plot of a Tomb Raider game. In fact, I’d bet dollars to donuts that they could copy the exact plot of “Romancing the Stone” but replace everything that Micheal Douglas says with a shot of Laura’s cleavage and everything Danny DeVito says with a shot of Laura’s ass and absolutely none of the hardcore Tomb Raider fans would complain. It’s the “What’s Happenin’” of video game writing.

Why is it a PCBS? Ever since Laura Croft sauntered onto the original PlayStation, she’s been synonymous with the video game culture. She was the poster child for the industry for years and was carted out by every religious nut job trying to prove that video games were rotting the brains of America’s youth. She’s all boobs and bravado and even made the always successful transition from game to movie not once but twice. But here’s the thing: I don’t get it. I mean, I do get the fact that she’s super popular because she’s a strong female lead character who’s not afraid to be sexy while kicking some ass and I’ve got no problem with that (see: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Samus Aran and Wonder Woman). I just don’t understand how this was the character that crossed over from gaming to the pop culture zeitgeist so easily.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? It’s not that I don’t see how the Tomb Raider has led us to some of the best games of the current console generation (most notably the “Uncharted” and “Assassin’s Creed” series) but what I don’t get is why Tomb Raider is held in such high esteem. From what I can tell, the Tomb Raider series commits the cardinal sin of games: it’s just not fun. There are only so many times I can enter a room in a video game to be shown a short cut-scene-esque video of the level/box/artifact/monkey’s paw that I’m supposed to get to using a series of platforms/pulleys/other levers/double-jumps. It’s derivative gameplay that only shines a light on just how mediocre the rest of the game is. At least in “Assassin’s Creed II” (which I recently completed), you’re rewarded for your efforts with increasingly diabolical ways to assassinate your foes for your trouble in these contrived puzzle rooms. But with Tomb Raider, the ridiculous puzzle room is the whole game. Yes, there are extras to be found and Indiana Jones-style traps to be avoided in the ancient ruins you’re exploring, but frankly, I just don’t care. In three hours of gameplay, I must have imagined 30 different hilarious scenarios that would have made the game more interesting (Laura pulls a lever and is instantly attacked by killer bees; Laura enters the next room only to find it full of monkeys with guns [Although that would also be derivative]; Laura unlocks the tomb to find her dad and Johnny Lee Miller there for a weird intervention; etc.) I can forgive applaud ridiculous amounts  of boobage in games if the game is fun to play (“Dante’s Inferno”, “Bayonetta”, anything with “Dead of Alive” in the title, etc.). But I can’t forgive swapping in titillation for fun gameplay.

Final Thoughts: The Tomb Raider games just aren’t my cup of tea. They’re a great example of style over substance. I’m all for having a character who’s special moves include things usually reserved for a pole and high heels, but the fun of a game can’t be the fact that the main character seems to have daddy issues. Next time, I’ll just play more “Dante’s Inferno” instead, at least it’s fun even if it has boobs on the loading screens. A new low, EA. Way to drop that bar.

It's a great way to say "I love you" and yet, it doesn't work.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought there were only two great Cusack movies. Now, it’s safe to say that I think there’s a third. How late to the party am I on that revelation? 21 years. But hey, better late than never. Right?

A Brief Synopsis of “Say Anything..”: Boy and Girl graduate from high school. Eric Stoltz throws a party. Jeremy Piven acts like an asshat while hiding his receding hair line. Fraiser’s dad totally screws over some old people. Pens become important. Boy and Girl make it through the first 5 minutes of a flight. Roll credits. Oh, and in the middle of all of this, Joan Cusack gets like 10 lines and a paycheck.

What makes “Say Anything…” a PCBS? At some point in your life, you or someone you know has held a boom box, speaker, ipod or other music producing item up in the air in homage to this movie. People still love to quote this movie and until now, I have to admit that I didn’t quite get what “I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen” quite meant (but I still laughed politely). Part of me thinks that this movie informed teenage relationships throughout the late 80′s and 90′s. Everyone knew a Diane, wanted to be Lloyd and totally tried to avoid all the Corey’s in the world (seriously, she’s a poster child for everything wrong with allowing teenagers to think for themselves).

How does it look in the rear view mirror? For me, “Say Anything…” informs two other movies that have always had a special place in my pop culture heart: “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “High Fidelity.” Those two movies are basically two alternate universes where Lloyd and Diane never lasted. I get that at the end of “Say Anything…” Cameron Crowe is trying to tell us that everything will work out for Lloyd and Diane, but what if it hadn’t?

Option 1: Lloyd goes into the military, tests off the charts for his ability to separate his emotions from his ability to kill and becomes a CIA hitman…only to go very successfully pro in the assassin business but ultimately lose his taste for it and long to return to his high school days and the original girl of his dreams (here played by Minnie Driver). With “Grosse Pointe Blank”, we’re get a glimpse of just how far down that kickboxing rabbit hole Lloyd could have gone. Ultimately, he’s a still a smart, funny, charismatic guy…but he’s a killer, conflicted by his choices and still yearning for his Diane…or in this case, Debbie.

Option 2: Lloyd and Diane don’t work out in the long run and he engages in a series of ever stranger monogamous relationship. When we catch up with him, it’s 15 years later, his latest flame is leaving him for the 2nd time and he’s stuck in the navel gazing, self-monologuing spiral he started when he was driving around town talking about the 7-11 where he and Diane had their first date and the street where they had their first kiss. Still obsessed with music (although not with Peter Gabriel), he tries to go back and figure out how it all went wrong with all the women he’s ever driven away…a road that could easily track all the way back to Diane.

And so in my mind, seeing “Say Anything…” creates an even broader Cusack Multiverse. Demonstrating the origin story of characters like Martin Blank and Rob Gordon through the eyes of Lloyd Dobler and just what could have made them into the men (or manchilds) that they become. But don’t ask me to explain how U.S. Marshall Vince Larkin fits in to all this…because fuck if I know.

Final Thoughts: “Say Anything…” is definitely the first thing that I’ve encountered in this experiment that I might actually hang on to for a while (Sorry Tomb Raider and Use Your Illusion, but more on those later). “Grosse Pointe Blank” was one of the first movies that really spoke to me on a personal level. I saw it with a good friend the summer after I graduated high school and it was just the right combination of message, moments and timing to really stick with me after all these years(…and it’s about a contract killer, which is probably a bad sign). “High Fidelity” has always been my downer go to movie. I mean, I understand that it’s a comedy at heart, but it’s got some really sad moments and always has a way of making me feel better when I’m feeling down. I give all the credit to “I Stole My Mom’s Wheelchair” and Joan Cusack really enjoying her job.

“Say Anything…” isn’t the movie I always thought it was. And Lloyd’s iconic pose with the boom box didn’t work the way I always thought it did. But I’m ok with that. I am not, however, ok with 65 songs about one guy. Seriously Corey, get over it.

If Nancy doesn't wake up screaming, it's because she hasn't read the last 10 pages of the script yet...

Let me start off by saying that I think it’s hard to watch any movie made over 20 years ago and not laugh at what passed for special effects back then. That being said, I wish I had been in the room when somebody pitched the “Johnny Depp gets sucked into the bed and then a fountain geyser of blood comes shooting out of it” scene. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

A Brief Synopsis of “A Nightmare on Elm Street”: Small town USA is tormented by the random deaths of four teenagers at the hands of Freddie Kruger, a child murderer that was killed by an angry mob of PTA parents in the past. Freddie is killing the teenagers one by one in the one place their parents can’t protect them: their dreams. Nancy and her gang of motley stereo-types (“I’m the rebel without a cause!” “I’m the girl who loves the bad boy even though he’s always putting me down and using me for sex!” “I’m Johnny Depp and I’m laying the ground work for Skeet Ulrich’s future career!”) In the end, Nancy tries to confront Kruger with Johnny Depp somehow watching over her as she dreams. She fails, Depps gets sucked into the afore mentioned plasma gusher in his bed and Nancy ends up dreaming her way into a convertible with the rest of her dead friends that we’re left to believe was actually Freddie Kruger…as a car…because he can totally turn himself into a convertible.

What makes “A Nightmare on Elm Street” a PCBS? It was pretty obvious to me that this was a big time blind spot in my pop culture knowledge when I read that they were rebooting the series with all new actors and hopefully an all new script. If something is big enough to get the reboot and I’ve not even seen the original, that’s a blind spot. It’s also of note that going into this, my only real detailed knowledge of the “Nightmare on Elm Street” cannon came from “Treehouse of Horror VI” where Groundskeeper Willie steps into the Krueger role and begins murdering the students of Springfield Elementary. Again, if it’s big enough for Groundskeeper Willie to get involved with then I should at least know what it was.

How does it look in the rear view mirror? Well, I’m sorry to say that “A Nightmare on Elm Street” didn’t give me nightmares. It didn’t even give me trouble sleeping (which is amazing as a mis-guided and pre-spoiled viewing of “Paranormal Activity” last fall had me sleeping with the lights on for weeks). In fact, the movie made me laugh…alot. And here are some of the reasons why:

• When confronted with her daughter’s inability to sleep after having a nightmare (that somehow resulted in four slash marks across the front of her nightgown that had to have been caused by her daughter clawing at herself in her sleep) Tina’s mom suggests that her daughter “better stop that kinda dreamin.” Thanks, Matlock.
• The use of the term “Finger Knives!” to describe the razor glove that Kruger wears is just too close to “Finger Lasers!” to not be funny
• Knowing that there’s a killer on the loose that’s hunting down teenagers in their sleep because she and some other PTA zealots formed a posse and killed him, Nancy’s mom not only has her in a hot bath but then decides to bring her a glass of warm milk. That’s just straight up terrible parenting. I get that Nancy’s mom, wracked by the guilt of all the unlawful revenge murdering in her past, has become a bit of a booze hound but still, trying to get your kid to sleep when the thing that’s trying to kill them can do just that only when Nancy is sleeping is just plain stupid.
• Speaking of that bath, what the hell is Nancy thinking? She’s been pulling a Jessie Spano for days trying to stay awake but now she suddenly thinks that a nice, warm bath is the answer to her problems? “Calgon, take me a–oh shit, there’s no bottom on this bathtub!” (Classy points to Wes Craven for not one but two awkward shots of Freddie’s finger knives coming up between Nancy’s legs in the tub. That’s just master film making.)
• At the time, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But since I have the benefit of 26 years of hindsight I can officially say that it’s impossible to take the guy who played the voice of Roger Rabbit seriously as any sort of medical professional. Charles Fleischer shows up as “Dr. King” (again, classy) the lead physician studying Nancy’s sleep patterns. He’s the guy who does goofy voices, not the guy who analyzes brain wave read outs.
• Johnny Depp’s big line of the movie “Morality sucks.” Doesn’t he know that the virginal kids live in horror movies while the slutty ones die? Except in this movie they all died in the end. So…yeah…he should have hit that.

Final Thoughts: No, it’s not a particularly great movie but “A Nightmare on Elm Street” is still an important part of our pop culture heritage. Freddie’s gone on to appear in a bazillion sequels, he’s fought Jason, Will Smith rapped about him and he’s even getting the big reboot treatment later this year. I feel a little bit better now that I know where it all started. Plus, I now know that Johnny Depp’s body contains 18x more fluid than any other person on the planet. Now that should help us all sleep a little bit better. Sweet Dreams!