Crappy 80's Movies

I need to go to the video store more. It's 5:30 Sunday morning and once more I am watching crappy 80's movies on TBS. Last week it was "Maid To Order" with Ally Sheedy. This week it's "Some Kind of Woderful" with Eric Stoltz. I liked this one better when it was called "Pretty In Pink".

I'm noticing a trend in 80's movies, at least in the crappy ones. They seem to be about working class people, roofers and mechanics and welders. They all have dreams and are working to better themselves, and that usually involves music or dancing. And bandanas, and big hair.

Guess which movie this scene is from:

Main character appears, walking down train tracks. Acid-washed jeans, great big white high-tops, cheap plastic sunglasses. Face and hands smudged with grease. This is a working class hero.

If you guessed "Every crappy 80's movie made", you were right.

Now how come everyone talks about the Wall-Street insider-trading greed-is-good 80's? How come that doesn't show up in the crappy 80's movies? I don't think it was ever cool to be rich, even in the 80's, unless you're a rock star or an internet billionaire or win the lottery. It's not cool for some reason to work your ass off to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or especially not cool to inheirit your money.

When I was a kid, everyone talked about the 60's like it was a time you could just reach up and pick your dreams off dream-trees, and everyone loved each other and held hands and sang folk songs. It's hard to imagine anyone feeling that way about to 80's today, or seeing muppets on Sesame Street singing "Mexican Radio" while kids danced around them, or 30-somethings get nostalgic about "Saved By The Bell" or Lollapalooza. I suppose it could happen. I just hope I'm not around when it does.

I do kind of like these underdog movies, where the hero overcomes incredible odds, like in all the Karate Kid movies and in Rocky 2 through 5. These were also real big in the 80's. I also think 80's music was better than most of the stuff I hear today, but not all.

I don't miss the 80's. I don't wish it was the 80's. I don't have enough hair, anyway, and I've given away all my 80's clothes (homeless teenagers wear them now). If I get nostalgic I can still watch these movies.

I think if I could travel in time, I might hang out in the 80's for a while but I don't think I would settle there. I don't know, there's something about the big-hair glam-rock 80's thing that just annoys the crap out of me. But then again, the 60's were all about hippies and the 70's was disco, and that was worse.

I hate when you see a kid in an old movie like this and you know that you've seen them in later things when they're all grown-up but you can't quite place them.

I've run out of things to say. I'm going to bed.

Devil Snowman

Last week we got snow. I live in a big Southern city that hardly ever gets snow. It's ironic that all these rednecks drive around in big four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs, and yet we get so little snow. Anyway, the snow came and it stopped everything in the city for a good three days.

It all melted in three days, and then it rained and washed away the rest of it. All except one neighbor's snowman, which was there for a whole 'nother week. This was kind of creepy, like a Twilight Zone episode, and I didn't know what to make of it.

I like to think that I'm fairly tolerant and reasonable, but I couldn't explain this snowman. I talked to some neighbors and eventually we concluded that this particular neighbor was a master of the black arts and that the snowman was actually a totem embodying the earth-bound spirit of a hellspawn demon named Mephisto. So we took up our pitchforks and torches and stormed the unholy snowman shrine.

Then we noticed that the snowman was plastic. Boy was my face red.