PARTY, PARTY, PARTY LIKE IT'S 2007 OR 1980
It's that time again for the second MOVIE MARATHON NEW YEARS DAY 2! Open House New Years Day! Come over and start the New Years right! Special movie viewing on New Years Day so those who want can come over at 12 for movies and every one else can come for food and drink at any time. If you have a favorite movie bring it to be voted on by the group
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The third... is part of the continuity... but is also widely seen as not very good (although, hey, I like it... it's got problems... but it works very well within the spirit of the original show)... and at any rate is not available on region 1 DVD. (I have it on a region 2 DVD.) Eric Roberts is the villain... and even though it was made in 1996 you really can't get much more 80s than that.
I think the next Doctor Who night is gonna be in February, after the second season of the new show is released. I have talked vaguely about it with blondibritecake, and asked Brian for his opinions on what to run, but no definite date yet. I'm overloading on it... what with the Torchwood spinoff... another spinoff on the horizon... and my fear is that I'm gonna be burnt out on it by the time season three of the Parent Show starts, presumably in spring. I'm having a hard time convincing people that I'm not only interested in Doctor Who. Did Buffy/Angel fans ever feel like this during the Glory Days, or is it just me?
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Um... 80s movies. There are movies from that era I like... mostly science fiction or horror. (But then again, I'm mostly interested in science fiction and horror period.)
The thing is about that era is that I didn't see a lot of the big must-see movies, the sorts of movies that all my friends told me I needed to see, at the time, for whatever reason. I watched what my parents watched... my father liked sci-fi and action, and my mom liked adult comedy and horror. Neither of them really went for the sort of thing that was pitched at kids... if I remember correctly it took some serious arm-twisting to get my dad to take me to see Explorers. And, for that matter, I had to get an uncle to take me to Return of the Jedi for some reason that escapes me now. So I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theater and Blade Runner before anyone else I knew, but there are a lot of things where I'll tell people I've never seen such-and-such a movie and get this blank look, like it's impossible for me to have got to the age of 33 without having seen Legend. It's weird.
I mean, just taking the fantasy and adventure movies... I didn't see Willow until 2000, The Dark Crystal until 2002, The Goonies until about last year or maybe the year before, and I've never seen The Princess Bride all the way through in one sitting (I've seen maybe 66%-75% of it... and I like it... but not enough to convince me that I really need to watch it all the way through).
But anyway... the only thing I ask is that I not have to sit through John Hughes sociopathy-celebrating teen angst flicks*.
*For that matter... I just watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles again... which I do every Thanksgiving... and I noticed that even in an adult-oriented film, John Hughes presents a film where the sociopath is portrayed as the most sympathetic character. John Candy's character is an insensitive, loutish swindler and possibly a thief, whereas Steve Martin's character is merely a tightass, but being a tightass is seen as the bigger crime here. Especially if the plot hole I think I've found is intentional and not a real plot hole-that is, the issue of why John Candy uses Steve Martin's "misplaced" credit card to rent a car when he theoretically still has "a hundred clams" he made selling shower-curtain rings to teenagers on the pretense that they're really high-fashion earrings.
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So my guess we'll definately have a split and be able to go to different rooms, depending. I wouldn't worry about it. I can't take 80s for the whole day there, anyway -- and I'm pretty tolerant about that sort of thing. Too much neon pink, no matter nostalgic, is bad for the soul.
Re: Planes, Trains...
I love that movie. It's messed up. But I've had to deal with people like that -- both Martin and Candy... so I can sympathize with both of them. But I'm totally inclined to agree with you. John Hughes' characters are psychotic and, in many ways, not the way I think HE sees them. What he may find endearing in Candy in Uncle Buck and Planes, I find obnoxious and unsettling. From that perspective, viewed as dark, REALLY DARK comedies, I think they work. The fact that Hughes probably didn't intend them that way disturbs me to no end. Most of his films I'm not all that fond of. His best work was National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation -- which he wrote -- and I traditionally put on every year, sometime after Thanksgiving.
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Same with Chevy Chase and the Vacation movies. (As a demonstration... even though Hughes wasn't writing them by that point... look what happened to that franchise after you take Chevy Chase out of them.)
The teen comedies... let's be honest here... some of the lead actors may be good actors now, but a lot of them weren't at the time. If a movie hinges on Molly Ringwald's character being sympathetic, it's not going to work, because Ringwald wasn't naturally sympathetic and she wasn't good enough an actress to pull it off. For that matter, even as an adult, she was one of the weaker links in the miniseries based on The Stand, because Frances (her character) is supposed to be an audience-identification character.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off... largely the same problem... even though Matthew Broderick is a gifted comic actor... the problem is that the character is a manipulative, selfish bastard and I don't think he makes it work. (Mind you... I seem to be in the minority in not liking that particular film. There's obviously something there that I'm not seeing. But that being said... FERRIS BUELLER IS A SELFISH, MANIPULATIVE BASTARD will definitely be my epitaph.)
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