Christmas Classic Watch: White Christmas (1954)

Watched:  12/09/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Michael Curtiz

I always wonder how contemporary audiences received the Michael Curtiz movie, White Christmas (1954), when it came out.  It's not exactly The Best Years of Our Lives, but does speak to the post-war era as people moved on with their lives, from enlisted soldiers to retired Generals.  But also is aware of the camaraderie forged among pairs of men in war, as well as that of whole battalions.  And, the people who waited at home and their relation to the fighting men and women.  

People may not be nostalgic for getting shot at constantly, but they do miss the people they knew who got them through.

The movie opens on the last December of the war as Bing Crosby - playing an analog of himself - performs alongside Danny Kaye, who is not famous back home.  They' salute their outgoing General Waverly, knowing he actually cared about all of them.  

Hallmark Christmas Miscellanea Watch: A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025) and Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025)

Watched:  11/30 and 12/1/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First for both

Director:  AGOOC - Clare Niederpruem / CatCC - Lucie Guest

Sunday we decided to lean into the Hallmark Season with their big dollar movie, A Grand Ole Opry Christmas (2025).  Monday I was doing other things and we let play Christmas at the Catnip Cafe (2025).  And it was a study in where Hallmark is going in 2025 with a more ambitious, less-boilerplate film versus classic Hallmark formula.

A Grand Ole Opry Christmas was a sincere time-travel movie about a woman (Nikki Deloach) whose father was a 90's country star in a Brooks and Dunn model, but he threw in the towel and quit making music.  A few years later he died, and she doesn't know why he quit making music.  She, and her best friend (Kristoffer Polaha), are transported to the mid-90's via Christmas/ Grand Ole Opry magic to learn what happened.  

Mean, Christmas at the Catnip Cafe is about a big city marketing exec (Erin Cahill) who inherits half of a cat cafe in small town upstate New York.  The other half is owned by an overworked veterinarian (Paul Campbell).  She wants to sell to buy a condo in LA.  He wants to keep his cafe open.  But they mutually wish to get to business time.

Happy Birthday, Tina Turner

 

Today marks the birthday of Tina Turner, one of the greats of R&B and rock.  

Y'all put on her Simply the Best collection and thank me later.

Rockettes at 100

1925 marks the founding of what was then the "Missouri Rockets", in St. Louis, who would swiftly move to New York City and become The Rockettes.  

The Rockets were a Midwestern response to someone seeing a Ziegfeld Follies show and saying "I could maybe do that".  And, indeed, Russell Markert brought his vision to the stage in the Midwest and a sensation was born.

If you've never checked out the remarkable history of the Ziegfeld Follies, it is weird, wild stuff.  There's nothing like it in 2025 (and who can say if we're better or worse for it).  But suffice to say, Florenz Ziegfeld made an impression that echoes through to today in more ways than we can count.  

Circa 1932, the Missouri Rockets moved to New York's Radio City Music Hall, renamed themselves The Rockettes, and by 1933, they put on their first Christmas Spectacular, which dazzles to this day.

"Hallmark Channel's Christmas Concert" (2019) might be the Hallmark Channel's Star Wars Holiday Special

This item does not appear on the IMDB for Ms. Lacey Chabert under "actor", but under "self" so I'd initially missed it.  But it popped up on Hallmark as an option, and I wasn't going to not watch it.  

So, what is it?

It's a bizarre artifact of where Hallmark was in 2019, I guess.  And the watchword for the whole show is "awkward".  There clearly was a lack of rehearsal time, and a spirit of "we're pros, we'll wing it" that doesn't play particularly well.  No one here is Bob Hope and keeping this on the rails.

The show is *not* exactly a concert, but kinda, sorta framed like one of those old-school Christmas specials where a celebrity pretends they're in their house.  Lacey Chabert is throwing a party where other Hallmark stars are her guests, but she's also acknowledging the camera (and sometimes awkwardly looking at it).  

One-by-one, a series of Hallmark stars come in, and then they each sing a Christmas standard in what I assume is not actually Chabert's livingroom and kitchen.  But it's not a set - I'm pretty sure that's a real house.  No set would be this poorly designed for television coverage.

DePalma Watch: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Watched:  11/16/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Brian DePalma

There's a lot going on in Phantom of the Paradise (1974).  

Here's a pie-chart as shared by The Dug about half-way through the movie (we'd thrown together a last-minute watch party).

And then without about ten minutes left:

TL;DR: MTV Ends (channels in the UK)

 

MTV, Music Television, is shutting down music operations.  Specifically in England.  Likely soon to be the rest of Europe.  I assume the US will happen without so much as a whimper.

But it's been dead for a while now, hasn't it?

Complaining about MTV had been old since the mid-00's.  Even Gen-X, who lived off of MTV for a decade and a half, had drifted away from the music network before YouTube arrived and made MTV's music programming redundant.  

Launched in 1981, MTV immediately became the default channel the latchkey kids of Gen X came home and put on instead of clicking on their radios (I am often reminded that Jamie did not have MTV, as she was raised in a town that might as well have had John Lithgow forbidding her to dance).  Whether we're discussing elder Gen X or us on the trailing side of the generation, it was a true culture shift our parents would not enjoy until VH1 ushered Whitney Houston and Phil Collins safely into our homes.  

But for a while, the cable channel became like a singular radio station shared by a huge swath of America, contributing to the 1980's monoculture, and ending the ability of musicians to be non-telegenic and still make it.  

For the telegenic, it could mean a young The League would find himself watching the video for Lucky Star intently in 1984, and in the 1990's maybe watch En Vogue videos with piqued interest when he was more likely to listen to Jane's Addiction on his tape deck driving around North Houston.

Upon its debut, MTV was mostly rock and pop.  My memory of the pre-1985 MTV is of a lot of Human League, John Cougar Mellencamp, Styx, Billy Idol, and whatever else was going on.  Very early MTV included Joan Jett and J. Geils Band videos.  My understanding is that MTV just didn't have many videos at launch unless it was from a European act who needed videos for Top of the Pops.  

Between videos, VJ's (Video Jockeys), would drop fun tidbits and make it feel like a cool hang, I guess.  Ask anyone into girls between 50 and 65 about Martha Quinn sometime and see them light up like a Christmas tree.  I liked the VJ's until I didn't.  Or when the VJ bit became the bit with things like Total Request Live (utterly unwatchable unless you were a 13 year old).  

Seeing the immediate ability to get national exposure, bands rushed out to make videos, grabbing whatever they could in way of equipment and lighting.  And the crazier or wilder your look, the better.  Which became it's own thing as hair got bigger, pants got tighter, and pretty soon we had Van Halen's Hot for Teacher, after which we might as well have hung it up, because that was the zenith of early music videos.  

Doc Watch: Lilith Fair - Building a Mystery (2025)

Watched:  09/28/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Ally Pankiw

First - it's remarkable how messed up the music industry was in the 1990's that I realize I kind of disliked some of the music from the artists in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (2025) not because of the music, but because if a song was any good in the 1990's, you kind of couldn't escape it for months at a time.  I think half of why I got weird about music in college and decided "I'm gonna go listen to Cole Porter standards" was because if I heard Hootie and the Blowfish one more time, I was going to shove pencils through my ear drums.  On the whole, radio, Muzak and MTV had a real "you like ice cream?  Great.  We're force feeding you a gallon of mint chocolate chip every hour for the next two months" sort of vibe.

It did not help that I was working in a Camelot Records during the period when the artists who would become the headliners at Lilith Fair in the first years were releasing their music.  (So tired were we of Paula Cole's  "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" that, behind the counter we would whisper to each other in response to Cole's query, "Up my butt".  But almost 30 years later, that song is a-ok, Paula Cole.)  

The documentary of Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery charts the origins, rise, challenges to, and eventual final wrap-up of the initial go at Lilith Fair, and its place in culture in the 1990's.  It shows how the very suddenly popular Sarah McLachlan parlayed both her position and organization into recruiting other female artists and playing multiple summers of tours from the mid-90's to 1999.  Along the way, luminaries like Patti Smith, Bonnie Raitt, Erykah Badu, Emmylou Harris, Suzanne Vega and countless others joined McLachlan on the road to help change perceptions of how women fit into the music industry.  

And, it's impressive who was willing to show up and speak on camera about the festival.  All of the women listed above, minus Smith.  Jewel.  Joan Osborne.  Cole.  Natalie Merchant.  Liz Phair.  Sheryl Crow.  Indigo Girls.  And plenty more.  

35th Anniversary Watch: Pump Up the Volume (1990)

Watched:  09/01/2025

Format:  Criterion Channel

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Allan Moyle

Well.  It turns out I'm old.  

Pump Up the Volume (1990) was released August 22nd, 1990.  I'd intended to watch it for the anniversary a week and a half ago, and forgot.  So here we are.

It's funny - I watched 1955's Rebel Without a Cause in 1989, which was *less time* between release and viewing than when I saw Pump Up the Volume opening day in the theater in August of 1990 and today.  

Time is a slippery mistress.

I will never get over the fact this movie is named "Pump Up the Volume" which was the name of the wildly popular dance tune from 1987.  And, of course, 1989 brought us Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam".  In this era, anything could be pumped up.  

A quick recap so you don't need to re-read my post from 2008 or listen to podcasts on the topic:

In 1990, my folks moved from North Austin to North Houston/ Spring/ Klein.  Within days of moving, I watched a movie about a similarly grumpy teen moved from, in his case, "the East Coast" to a Phoenix suburban analog.  The teen starts a pirate radio station where he performs crude and shocking bits - largely around masturbation - while also waxing philosophic about the state of the world, how the parents of Gen-X'ers (this is a movie about the last wave of Gen-X'ers) failed their own youth movement by "selling out", the world ain't what it should be/ used to be, and that conformity is bad.

If Gen-X sought anything, it was "authenticity", and when you live in the suburbs and can't drive, this means "I reject the notion that Bobby Brown is the best musician or our era, and girls should be allowed to have brown hair".  And this movie is about that.

But, also... if there is a movie that has caused a generation collective Space Jam Fallacy, it's Pump Up The Volume. 

Cindyana Santangelo Merges With the Infinite

Actor, model and 90's cult icon Cindyana Santangelo passed earlier this year, but I just found out about it via user Flabbergast.

She never reached Hollywood levels of fame in a direct way, but made appearances on television shows and in small parts in movies.  Her relevance here at The Signal Watch is that Santangelo is the subject of what is perennially and by far my most popular post on this site, "Whatever Happened to the Girl in the Stop Sign Shorts?"

We sought her out as the dancer and lip-syncher in the video for Young MC's "Bust a Move" and learned she was also the voice and face at the start of Jane's Addiction's single "Stop".  

Santangelo passed at her Malibu home in March at the age of 58.

In whatever odd parasocial way I was aware of Santangelo, I am very sorry to hear she's passed.  If my site's numbers are any indication, she certainly had her fans, and I hope she knew that.

  

Happy Birthday, Darlene Love

Happy 84th birthday to Ms. Darlene Love - one of the greatest vocalists of the past 84 years.

Ms. Love was maybe *the* voice that came out of Phil Spector's studio/ Philles Records - and a colossal force in American music, often when people had no idea whose voice that was on a record.  She performed her own solo work, that of The Crystals, the Blossoms, The Ronettes, and performed with everyone from Elvis to Boris Pickett on The Monster Mash.  

She's been in movies - she's Glover's wife in Lethal Weapon - and been on Broadway.  Every year since the mid 1980's on Letterman she's been on TV singing Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) and it's a highlight of the holidays.

Personally, I saw her Christmas show at Austin's Paramount Theater - and it was the greatest concert I've ever been to, and I'll stand by that one.

Happy birthday, Ms. Love.  

So, here she is singing a favorite version of a favorite song

Ozzy Merges With The Infinite

Ozzy Osbourne, musician, occasional provocateur and Gen-X's metal-dad, has passed at 76.

Osbourne has been ailing for years, and only a few weeks ago played his final show, which was widely watched and discussed.  The line-up was full of star power, and the concert was scheduled to be Osbourne's final show before retreating from the public.

Osbourne's work with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist was enough to make him a major figure in rock, but he also was prone to outlandish antics, all of which will be rehashed over the next few days.  And, then, he and his family were early Reality TV pioneers with The Osbournes on MTV. which recast the prince of darkness as a fun, befuddled dad.

But, man, Ozzy could sing.  Everyone else is still playing catch up.  

You'll be missed, Ozzy.

Rock Watch: This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

Watched:  07/06/2025

Format:  Alamo

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Rob Reiner/ Marti DiBergi

SimonUK and I took in the re-release of This is Spinal Tap (1984) at the Alamo on Sunday evening.  

I don't need to tell you what This Is Spinal Tap is, I hope.  Apparently, The Drafthouse has signed up to host Fathom events, and this included the viewing of the new 4K restoration of the movie, but it's sort of America's original faux-documentary.  It led directly to Christopher Guest's brilliant mockumentary* series and indirectly to the format of shows like The Office and Parks and Rec.  

I have lost track of when and how I saw this movie the first time.  I remember seeing it very young, and not really getting the jokes - minus the "it goes to 11" bit (I want to say as early as 1985 or 1986) but then seeing it again at the end of high school and absolutely getting it (maybe in 1992-93).  By then, I'd had a subscription to Rolling Stone, so some of the references and gags - like the cricket bat - made more sense.

Happy Birthday, Debbie Harry

Today marks the 80th birthday of music and arts icon, Deborah Harry.

We're big fans here at The Signal Watch, and have seen Blondie twice to date.  

Last week we were at my brother's house and my eight year old niece came out in a Blondie shirt, and I was like "hey, what?"  Apparently she heard Debbie's solo effort song "French Kissin' in the USA" and was spellbound.  The parents weren't thrilled with the content, but nonetheless, my niece knows a bop when she hears one.  And, thus, two days later my SIL was at Target, saw the shirt, and bought it for B.  

What a world when there's a kid's Blondie shirt at the Target.

I tried to school B on the superior drumming of Clem Burke via "Atomic", but I think she just wanted me to shut up.

Anyway, B and I have now bonded over Blondie.  Happy birthday, Debbie.  We hope you have a great one.

Musical Watch: Wicked (2024)

Watched:  06/26/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jon M. Chu

I am a huge fan of the OG Wizard of Oz.  My second biggest regret about ending the podcast was not covering that movie before we put away our mics.  In my opinion, Wizard of Oz is not just an important film, it's a key to American film and culture.  

That said - I am fine with derivative works.  Of course people want to explore this amazing world in which Wizard of Oz takes place, to consider and deconstruct and shuffle around the cultural icons of the movie, look into the characters, themes, etc...  It's a bubbling well for interpretation, commentary and America.

Wicked (2024) came in riding decades of popularity as a stage show and soundtrack.  Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenowith were launched to super stardom with the show and became fixtures.  People who don't care about Broadway probably already knew two of the songs by osmosis before ever buying a movie ticket.  It's one of the few 21st Century Broadway shows to break into the pop consciousness like 20th Century shows like Oklahoma!, Phantom, Cats or Les Mis.  

This film adaptation did great at the box office and was at least an American phenomenon.  It did fine overseas, but likely suffered from being an English-language musical about a play that probably hasn't been getting seen in Beijing, etc...  quite yet.  And who knows if they care about The Wizard of Oz in Lichtenstein?

But in the states, it made almost half-a-billion dollars.  As the movie was released in late Fall, Christmas season 2024 was pink and green with the movie's merchandise and imagery everywhere.  It was kind of neat.

Rebekah Del Rio Merges With The Infinite

Singer and performer Rebekah Del Rio has passed.

80's Watch: Flashdance (1983)

Watched:  06/22/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Second all the way through

Director:  Adrian Lyne

If you want an idea of what a different world I was in as a kid versus where we are 40 years on, I think Flashdance (1983) is a pretty interesting test. 

First, Flashdance was huge back in the day.  It was referenced in other movies, on TV and elsewhere.  The soundtrack had a couple of great songs (I still think Gloria by Laura Branigan is phenomenal). And though it was Rated-R, it wasn't unusual for my classmates to have seen it by 5th grade, thanks to HBO.  

It's also not a very good movie, but people loved it at the time.  And I don't mean the movie is problematic by 2025 standards (which it is), but because it just sort of wanders around for long stretches.  Like, nothing is happening.  People walk around.  They goof.  The plot refuses to move along.

Oddly, there's barely any conflict.  It's a movie that pitches that if you believe in yourself, sorta, and don't really do the work, your new, rich boyfriend will buy your way into a dance school.  Because nothing about Alex's path to an elite ballet school makes a lick of sense.

Brian Wilson Merges With The Infinite

Musician and legend, Brian Wilson, has passed.

I still remember my brother getting a Beach Boys record for his birthday when I was probably five.  It was a Greatest Hits, and the pop-surf classics that made oldies radio play.  And we dug it.  

But as a kid, I took the Beach Boys for granted.  Their music was everywhere - absolutely on the radio, at restaurants, and in every fifth commercial when summer rolled around. Like Elvis, they simply were.

It wasn't until college that two folks flipped me from "oldies station Beach Boys" vs Pet Sounds Beach Boys.  One was NathanC, and the other was a fellow named Robb, who was absolutely grooving out to Pet Sounds when I dropped in at his place one afternoon.  Robb was also my compatriot in discussing Phil Spector and The Wall of Sound, so this all lined up pretty neatly.

I'm absolutely one of those guys who thinks Brian Wilson was pretty great, but also one of the great American tragedies.  This is not an original insight, but I don't know how else we can discuss him.  He has a certain genius that was still very much in force when I picked up Smile several years ago, and you always wondered what could have been.  

But mental illness is a real sonuvabitch, and he struggled with his issues for so many years.  His family managed to keep him healthy and making music, and I can't imagine the love and care that took.

Still, what a legacy he left behind.

Go put on Pet Sounds and Smile today, if you can.  And here's the the Wilson family today. 

Happy Birthday, Kylie Minogue

Kylie's war room for when she plays "Risk"

Over COVID, my passing interest in the music of Kylie Minogue turned into a whole thing.  I wrote about it here after JAL, TreyMerica and I saw her in Austin in April.  Here's the photo album of us attending.  Rita Ora opened, and was great.

I am not an expert-level fan, but I am a fan!  And so it is that I wish Ms. Minogue the happiest of birthdays.

She's on tour now in England, so I hope it all goes swimmingly for her.

Here she is from Disco, performing Magic.

Happy Birthday, Siouxsie Sioux

 

Best wishes to Siouxsie Sioux on her birthday. 

With any luck, she's pondering new music.