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Posted via email from tedmills’s posterous

I see a lot of movies, I make movies, I teach movie making, and I review movies. But there is a huge gap in my movie life which I realize makes me an exception to my contemporaries and to those younger than me: the 1980s.

I’ve included a list below if you want to see some of the Hollywood films I’ve never seen. You may be surprised. These are all very popular, sometimes cheesy, and most are high-grossing films of those years. But I’ve never bothered to see them.

Here’s a few reasons I think may explain why:

1) Money. I rarely could afford to go see movies, and so I only went to things I really really really wanted to see.
2) I didn’t have a VCR until 1989.
3) From 1984 to 1988 I lived in England, and that meant the cinema was even more inaccessible to me. In those four years I saw maybe three films in the cinema (True Stories (as a Talking Heads fan I took a train into London just to see it!), Crocodile Dundee, and Beetle Juice). Very few friends had VCRs either.
4) I wasn’t interested in a lot of these films to be honest. To me, a lot of these looked pretty stupid, and by the time I was 11 I was reading film and television critics, watching Siskel & Ebert, and learning what I should bother with. I also found very few of the Saturday Night Live people funny, except Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy. Can’t stand Dan Ackroyd, nor Chevy Chase, so you can guess I’ve never seen Vacation. (The same goes for now–I’ve never seen an Adam Sandler movie).

When I finally did get a VCR I didn’t go back and watch these–i went and rented all the famous old films I had been reading about. I watched a lot of Hitchcock, Godard, Lynch, etc. etc. I’m still catching up. I still haven’t seen all of Tarkovsky’s films, and he only made seven!

I’m generally distrustful of Hollywood. It’s movie making for the masses. And the masses like Transformers.

Here then is a list of popular movies of the 1980s I’ve never seen:

Revenge of the Nerds (or sequels)
Rambo (or sequels)
Friday 13th (or sequels)
All Nightmare on Elm St. sequels (except for the fifth self-referential one)
National Lampoon’s Vacation (or any sequel)
Fletch
Risky business
Scarface
Gremlins
Back to the Future (I can’t remember, maybe I have)
Sixteen Candles
Weird Science
Pretty in Pink
The Breakfast Club
The Goonies
Fatal Attraction
Moonstruck
Die Hard (or maybe I have, can’t remember)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Platoon
All Disney animations from The Little Mermaid onward. Actually, now I think about it, I haven’t seen the ones before them either, except for Fantasia and a few childhood memories of Peter Pan and Aristocats
St. Elmo’s Fire
Karate Kid
Police Academy (and sequels)
Star Trek II or III or IV
Commando
War Games
Conan the Barbarian
Mad Max 1 2 or 3
Labyrinth
Dark Crystal
Highlander
Predator
Robo-cop
Lethal Weapon
Honey I Shrunk the Kids

1980s films I’ve seen but probably only seen once and haven’t bothered with since:
Empire Strikes Back (once, maybe?)
Return of the Jedi (two times, I believe)
The Princess Bride (meh)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (once)

Goonies. Nope, never seen it.

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Jon Stewart again does what the others in the “media” can’t do. At the end, I don’t think Stewart is really laughing. Fuck you too, billionaires. In fact, the use of footage coupled with intertitles afterwards showing the fate of those banks and insurance companies is straight out of a serious doc, not a comedy show.

I was trying to explain to a friend the other day how important British DJ John Peel was to several generations of music fans, and how gutting it was when he died in 2004 of a heart attack. I recently discovered that there’s a still-growing, very rough John Peel Wiki that is eventually going to, I assume, list all his shows with track lists and corresponding mp3s. That’s sounds exactly like something the Internet is good for. I know I have a few cassettes myself that I could transfer and upload. But nothing like the 500 Box that the wiki talks about.
I was trying to explain to said friend that it was Peel’s in between song banter that made the show. You knew that no matter how out there the music got, Peel would come back in with a friendly chat. I can’t think of any other DJ who maintained such a conversational, humane tone behind the mic. I went looking on YouTube and found this audio (with user graphics) that gives one a good idea of the style.

And this is also funny, a compilation of John Peel’s appearances on BBC pop music shows. You can tell he loathed most of this music.

Is that Claire Grogan at the end of the clip?

Al-Jazeera had a segment on the fervent, intolerant racist followers of a popular poltical leader. You will be shocked how religious fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance have lead to this hate speech!!
Oh, and it takes place in Ohio. Psyche!!!

Has there ever been a pop song like “Our Lips Are Sealed”? Check the facts: Terry Hall (Specials, Fun Boy Three) was in a relationship with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Gos. They co-write this song about their love affair. Weidlin takes it back to her group and the Go-Gos have a huge hit with it. Wiedlin sings the bridge. Terry Hall then brings out his own version with Fun Boy Three and he also has a hit with it, just on the other side of the Atlantic. Compare and contrast the sunny California pop of the Go-Gos version with the pop-Goth Fun Boy Three version and you hear the two personalities behind the songwriting talking about the other.

So, in the annals of pop, is there a song that is written by two lovers about their own relationship that then goes on to be a hit for both parties in their respective groups? I doubt it. But if there is, let me know.
P.S. Whoever shot the bridge section of the GoGos video has complete FAIL in showing the person singing it. Jane, what happened??

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog and contributor DJ Trouble have a few suggestions for living under new economic conditions in these depressed times.

Start up a local food or drink club and take turns meeting at friends homes for an evening of fine eats and/or libations. The host offers up her house as part of the circle and everyone else brings a dish or bottle. Figure it out ahead of time for a thematic twist or let the randomness carry you away in DADA-ist revelry. For party favors that double as wall art play Exquisite Corpse and build an art collection as you tour this monthly soiree around the nabe.

Or

Why go out to a club when you know so many musicians? Start a local Hootenanny. Provided you live in a space that can handle the extra noise, do a regular jam session. Invite musicians of varying taste and ability and tackle songs by pulling titles from a jar; the novelty of the surprise works for Yo La Tengo when they play Gaylord’s show for the WFMU fund raising marathon!

I would like to think this all would lead to some great community building exercises instead of the inevitable ultra-violence and cannibalism.

Apparently, Oprah, ready to believe anything she reads on TEH INTERNETZ, read this shocking bit o’ news the other day on her program:

… if you still don’t understand what our children are up against, let me read you something that was posted on our message board, from someone who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network, it said this, ‘he does not forgive, he does not forget, his group has over 9000 penises, and they’re all raping children.’

If her researchers had done any work beyond shooting coffee out of their nose after reading that Cthulu-style quote, they would have found it was some sort of 4-Chan/Dragonball-Z/Intertubes humor meme. The rest, they say, is an Internet Remix (see above). The spirit of Chris Morris lives on!