We're still talking our personal canon, and SimonUK brings a favorite from the UK - and one hell of a film. We talk amazing performances, tight stories, and the real world of late-70's England that informed one of the hallmark films of the gangster genre. Join us for a long chat on a good movie.
Arguably *the* game changer for the entire comic book movie and TV genre - from goofy b-movies with occasional hits to the world we're in today with Justice Leagues, WandaVisions and whatnot everywhere you look, X-Men (2000) arrived on the scene to an excited fanbase who saw a trailer that kinda/ sorta looked like an X-Men comics and seemed to treat the concept of X-Men with some faint degree of dignity.
Now, many will argue that Blade was the kickstarter, and they're right! But the thing about Blade was that it operated way more like a horror movie/ action adventure and less like a superhero flick - and there were maybe a couple thousand people walking around in 1998 who knew anything about Blade. To this day, I have no idea if Blade has any real relation to the comics (and don't care. Blade kicks ass.).
From the late 1970's to the late 1990's, X-Men was a powerhouse franchise all its own, even within the Marvel line of comics. It was more or less like the Game of Thrones of comics - even if you didn't read it, you knew about it, and the gravity well of the comic was massive. In the mid-90's, I guess it was outperforming literally every other thing Marvel comics put out, so they rebooted their entire universe for about - I dunno - 6 months? minus X-Men. Because X-Men was too big, baby!
Gee, why don't the young people want to stay in small towns? How did we get to this divide between rural America and urban America?
I mean, Footloose (1984) is a story that seems ridiculous, about a town where "dancing" was made illegal (something that seems so slippery and un-First Amendment-y that it's breathtaking) and one not-even-rebellious teen who's mere existence as an "outsider" is so problematic adults are out to literally destroy him, that all of this seems absurd. Except that this stuff was very real and happened. Baylor University in Waco, 90 minutes up the road from my house, didn't allow dancing until the late 90's.
So, yeah, small towns where no one was going to do much but stop to fill up with gas actually would and did have goofy rules. This was Satanic Panic time that would culminate in the PMRC and Dee Snider of all people taking down a bunch of crusty representatives looking into literally regulating the music industry. It was also the time of MTV, and I can just see a movie studio exec looking for a story that will appeal to a wide audience - but bring in those kids who like the MTV, and be very music-video-friendly.
Until Lower Decks and a few one-off episodes, one of the few attempts at light comedy/action in the Trek franchise, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1987) caps off the trilogy that started in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, bringing our crew finally back to Earth after giving us the thrill of seeing them wandering the streets of 1986 San Franciso as a slightly disheveled away team.
I am 85% sure I've written this one up before, so I won't do it again. It's the one with the whales.
A Mighty Wind (2003) is not the same, tight-knit ensemble film we got in Waiting for Guffman, and doesn't have quite the laugh-per-minute ratio or Best in Show, but, man, is it watchable and weirdly moving. Which, in itself is a trick.
This one centers on a rush to put on a memorial show for a former producer and promoter of folk acts from the 1960's - and thus jumps the awkward bridge of time a lot of us saw on PBS in the 1990's as concerts of folk favorites like Peter, Paul and Mary became staples of fund-raising weekends - an attempt to appeal to the nostalgia of the boomers and their wallets.
We assemble the finest trio possible to take on the third in the Salkind's Superman franchise - this one inexplicably very heavy on very adult comedian Richard Pryor. It's a future-shock story of the magic of computers and how they can make a Superman a grumpy gus. Join SimonUK, Stuart and Ryan as they get super excited over the sharp turn the franchise took into goofiness.
Viewing: I dunno. First? I don't remember 95% of this if I saw it.
Decade: 1980's
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Staying Alive (1983) is the un-asked-for sequel to the 70's cultural phenomenon, Saturday Night Fever. If you've not seen Saturday Night Fever in a bit, it's not all about Travolta as king of the disco, it's also a story about directionless young people, misdirected energy, and generational schizms in a traditional family.
Staying Alive picks up six years later and is terrible.
Look, the point of the first movie was realizing the world was bigger and better than a disco on a Saturday night, but six years later, Tony has made maybe incremental progress and danced his way to a 0% bodyfat physique. Stephanie from the first film is just... gone. She has a surrogate character in Jackie, who is doing her best to look like a JJazzercised Anne Murray. Jackie is Tony's friend with benefits. I thought she was supposed to be the female lead from the first movie, but she is not. So, we basically know nothing about her aside from the fact that she's a doormat who Tony steps out on and then TELLS HER ABOUT IT.
A year ago today marks the day the pandemic toppled our lives. In the morning, I saw a message that my employing institution was closed and we were to not come to campus. We spent the day scrambling, setting up impromptu work stations with our laptops we'd been instructed to take home nightly for weeks at that point.
By late in the evening, Jamie had gone to bed and I was left with myself, sorting through the erupting confusion and fear, and then I saw the video of famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing the familiar tune by Dvořák. I won't lie - I sat here in this same spot on my sofa watching the recording on this same laptop and I sobbed.
Exhaustion, crippling uncertainty... After a day of scrolling endlessly through stories of what was coming, what we didn't know, and the posts and communications between friends and family offering what we could in support and all feeling the same darkness closing in, Ma reached for kindness - a prescient kindness - with his simple recording.
In a year that has seen horror and cruelty, that seemed to set the world ablaze over again each morning, I'm still stunned by how he seemed to know and know what to do.
"Goin' Home" is a sentimental song even without lyrics - it had some retroactively applied years after the song was originally penned. And even with all of us stuck in our houses, "Goin' Home" - returning to a place of comfort, to a time when we can see our parents without masks, share a meal with friends - is something that made sense then as we peered into the unknown, and all the more a year later.
At the outset of the pandemic, celebrities tried to read stories or write poems and stay in touch with their audience. Patrick Stewart gamely read Sonnets. Ma partnered with painist Kathryn Stott and put out an album - the proceeds of which will support musicians struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic.
