In honor of Spiegelmama’s birthday, I am posting about one of her favorite movies and the best scene that has ever been in a movie ever. I will also give you the Top Ten Reasons why it is the best scene that has ever been in a movie ever…as if I even have to explain.
10. It features Morris Day in 1984. And in ’84, Morris Day was the hottest thing to swing a pimp cane.
9. What? Yes! The hottest! Why? Yeah, I know he had a pompadour and a mustache, and he occasionally wore a doo-rag with a zoot suit, but there was no one, I repeat NO ONE, hotter than Morris!
8. Okay, fine. You want to play it that way? Number 8 is: It features Morris Day in 1984. And in ’84, Morris Day was the hottest thing to swing a pimp cane. Don’t mess with me…
This is not a popular post. It never got one comment or one like. Understandable. I always assumed that I was the only early 80s PhD fan. Then, this morning,
Eric sent me this message.
“Comment: Who is the girl in the video?”
Which one? The icy blond walking the dog, or the catatonic blonde with the Ditch braids? I don’t know Eric, but I felt for his plight. There is just not enough information about PhD videos out there. My first instinct was to suggest that Eric ask Jim Diamond himself, but then I remembered. Jim Diamond died recently. I looked it up, to be sure, and yes. He died. ONE YEAR AGO TODAY! One of two things is happening, one…he is trending on some social media site somewhere….or two, my junior high crush is haunting me through my blog. Believe what you want, Lerlines.
Back when I was 11, I had a bit of a crush on Jim Diamond, lead singer of the Mtv rising stars, Ph. D. What? So he’s a little weird looking? I like weird looking.
Totes hot, am I right? Please say yes.
The problem with having a crush on Jim Diamond of PH. D. was that by the time I was 11 and a half, Mtv stopped playing their video, and never played them again. What’s that you say? Teen Beat?! Ha! Teen Beat would never publish a picture of Jim Diamond. They were too busy finding new un-airbrushed* photos of Ralph Macchio. No. For a 12 year old girl in America in 1982, Ph. D. were as unattainable as wine coolers and earth-tones.
Then, quite few years later, came YouTube. The first Ph. D. gem I dug up was Little Suzi’s on the Up. The video combines a…
In my 9th grade art class, I learned two things: how to draw a portrait using a grid, and that I sucked at art. I drew two portraits, one of Paul McCartney and one of David Bowie. I hated the McCartney one because I’d made one eye bigger than the other (a horrible premonition of my first passport photo?), but when I made a mistake on the Bowie one, I just just added a bunch of colorful abstract squiggles a la his Blue Jean makeup, and it came out looking cool. So cool I put it on my wall and kept it there until I felt silly for having one of my drawings up on the wall despite my suckiness as an artist.
When I first found out that David Bowie was not immortal, I thought of two things. The first was that drawing and the second was an article I’d read about the critical atmosphere around Bowie in the 80s. I can’t find the article, as it’s lost to the ephemera of the Internet, but the gist is as follows: In the 80s, music critics had accused, either outright or by insinuation, Bowie of being a sell-out, sold to the shallow materialism of the decade: his lemon-haired, slick-suited Modern Love persona held up as proof. However, the writer (whose name, publication and/or serial number is also lost to the ephemera) claimed that with hindsight, it could be said that the 80s hadn’t claimed Bowie; Bowie had claimed the 80s. He wasn’t changed by the decade; he had become the decade and thus changed it.
Now, thinking about the bizarre, deft way in which Bowie lived his entire life, including his untimely death, as both a life both well-lived and as one long piece of performance art, I get it. Bowie was, and still is art. Bowie the artist, Bowie the man, even Bowie the skewed image drawn by a 14 year old girl with public-school issued pencils and craypas: all of it IS art. And while I sympathize with critics of the 80s who were so ready to write Bowie off as a washed-up sell-out, I think they should have been more hip to the art he had become while critiquing the artist he was.
Take Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, the longform version of Bowie’s Blue Jean. It begins with Working-Class Bowie standing high above the street, putting up a poster of his alter-ego, Screamin Lord Byron, and ends inside a metal-screened elevator, rising ever higher above a broken-fourth-wall scene: higher and higher, but still caged, like Bowie’s career, caged in by the 80s even as it rose above it. Watch the video for yourself and pay close attention to the part where lovable loser, Working Class Bowie tries on a series of 80s fashions before finally settling on borrowing a slick suit from his well-dressed flatmate.
It’s Roy Batty’s incept day. You know what that means?
You remembered? I’m so happy I could headbutt you.
Well, yes, we all thought we’d have flying cars and eyeball salesmen by now, but we don’t do we? Let’s move on. No. Roy’s Incept Day means that it’s the perfect time to watch the Tears in Rain speech. Not to take anything away from January 8th, 2016, but there are many other perfect times to watch Batty’s Tears in Rain speech. Here are a few just of them off the top of my head and in no particular order:
-When some jerk fries your replicant. ( Those things aren’t cheap. )
-When you nearly choke on a Coco Puff and are forced to contemplate your mortality or when your best friend nearly dies from Fireball poisoning, and you’re forced to contemplate her mortality.
-When some random skin job gets hit by a bus, and it hits you….not the bus, but this thought: replicants don’t live forever.
-When you’re chilling at the Tannhauser Gate and you catch sight of a few rather sparkly C-Beams, and you think, “Oh! That’s what Roy was talking about.”
-Just a regular day, when you’ve already drunk all the spicy bourbon, and you’re looking for something to do before the paramedics arrive.
But today, we’re watching it for Roy because replicants don’t live forever, and Roy is at that big fiery, attack ship in the sky.
TMZ is reporting that Amanda Peterson died at the age of 43 of health problems (including sleep apnea and pneumonia) possibly caused by mold in her house. MOLD! Oh HELL NO, Lerlines. Cindy freaking Mancini did not go out like this. Did she? You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.
Cindy F#$king Mancini
Can we all just stop what we’re doing, put on some lace tights and dance…please? Dance, you zombies, dance!
1. Discover that Caveman is leaving Netflix and tell your husband. Be aghast when he says, “What’s that?” Remind him it was the Quest for Fire for stoners who liked jokes about Dinosaur hand jobs. After he shrugs and says, “Never heard of it.” Stare at him like you don’t even recognize the man you share a bed with. Finally manage to say, “So…if I say ‘zug zug’ to you, you have no idea what I’m talking about?” He’ll say, “No. Who’s that?” But you’ll already be lying in the closet. Stay in there until the world starts to make sense again.
Macha!
2. Oh come on! Get out of the closet. Maybe he just forgot. Remind him that it starred Ringo Starr in the first of the many barely-speaking roles we expected him to get as the 80s rolled on, but he never did. When that doesn’t ring any bells remind him that Dennis Quaid was also in it.
Bobo.
Nothing? What about Shelley Long? Huh? Remember her? Briefly discuss the fact that, although many people think that Long made a huge mistake quitting Cheers, considering the fact that the adorably sexy-yet-relatable blonde roles in movies like Night Shift and Caveman were setting her up to be a new, less-busty Goldie Hawn, maybe taking on Diane Chambers in the first pace was actually the huge mistake. Be reminded that Shelley Long played Carol Brady in the 90s Brady movies. Acquiesce. There were no mistakes in Shelley Long’s career.
Nya bobo.
3. Calm the hell down already! It’s not like you ever made any effort to watch Caveman while it was on Netflix. In fact, you actively ignored it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?! Wonder if it really even holds up after all these years. I mean, now that we’ve suddenly discovered feminism, can we really enjoy a movie that culminates in a scene where Ringo throws his future wife, Barbara Bach, into a pile of poop just because she was sexually fickle?
Caca.
4. Snap out of it! That’s how all movies in the 80s ended. Caveman was actually pretty progressive. The caveman were pretty darn multi-culti. They even had an oddly clean-shaven Asian caveman. He had a line in one of the movie’s many poo-poo jokes. Remember?
Shit.
Oh! And those gay cavemen (or gavemen)! They were cool, right? They were the only ones on the set who were styled by Vidal Sassoon.
Alunda?
Besides Ringo’s beard, of course.
Zug zug?
5. Say screw it, and decide that your husband doesn’t need to watch Caveman just because you watched it every time The Movie Channel showed it back in 1983 (about 3 or 4 times a day.) Not everyone had cable. … Or the ability to sit through 91 minutes of Ringo Starr not talking and stepping in hippo-sized piles of dino poop. Decide that he can just watch the trailer. Search for it on Youtube and discover that the entire damn movie is on there. Realize that you have plenty of time to not watch Caveman.
Yet another Goldblum alert, Lerlines! This one is for you music lovers. It seems an industrious Blumie* named Evan Kent has harnessed the musical power of Goldblum’s laugh into three bars of sublime notation.
Heh heh heh hrr__ rrrr!
Other man? Wait…who could that other man be? Ed? Andy? Laughing Squid’s Rollin Bishop suggests we use this 10 hour youtube video to solve that mystery:
10 FECKING HOURS! Holy crap! Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Blumies? We need to sample that growly giggle for the drop in our hip-hop and pop Goldblum Anthem. Just off the top of my head, some possible lyrics:
He’s gangly, he’s leg bald, he needs glasses to see, he looks left and points right. Man that Goldblum’s a sexy mother-fuh…SHUT YOUR MOUTH. I’m just talking about Goldblum.
Goldblum gams.
*We’ve got an appointment to rumble with The Beliebers in the vacant lot behind the Store 24 after school. … If those sticky-haired punks don’t chicken out.
Hell yeah, Lerlines. Goldblum is back and more Goldblumy than ever. This is worth a watch, but Goldblum purists will want to skip to the end, where Goldblum plays a cop on the edge willing to do anything, even steal a watch from a watch, to get his watch. Watch it.
slumber party movies 