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There are a lot of great songs, once well-kn0wn, that aren’t performed or listened to much anymore. Here are some that I especially like. Thine Alone. The beautiful song sounds like it might be a hymn, but it’s actually a love song, from the 1917 operetta Eileen. I only know it because it’s on a […]
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From what I can glean, A Christmas Story Christmas is not as hatefully cynical as A Christmas Story 2, the 2012 direct-to-video sequel it disregards. Peter Billingsley reprises his role as Ralphie Parker, now a father himself, returning to his childhood home after his old man passed away. The old man dying is more serious than anything that transpired in the first film. This can be justified as a natural progression of Ralphie’s character out of childhood innocence and into the world of bills, responsibilities, and mortality, but, let’s be honest, they knew no actor could replace the late Darren McGavin.
The latest season of Stranger Things introduces a new character, Eddie (Joseph Quinn), in a scene where he walks across a lunch table delivering a monologue to the whole high school cafeteria. People don’t do this. The scene is symptomatic of an ’80s nostalgia worse than the name-dropping variant this and other shows are infected with. It’s a nostalgia looking not just to reference ’80s teen movies but to replicate them down to their dumbest details. This is in the first episode.
Ghostbusters (1984) is not a kid’s movie. Or to the extent that it is it’s by happenstance. Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis weren’t thinking of toy lines and Saturday morning cartoons when they wrote a script about schlubby middle-aged men running a startup in pre-Giuliani New York. We loved it as kids because of Slimer, proton packs, Ecto-1, Zuul, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. We were oblivious to the jokes about mortgages and oral sex. It would take years before we appreciated Bill Murray’s charming indifference. Using “we” in this context might be presumptuous. As Ghostbusters: Afterlife shows, some people never moved beyond “proton packs are cool.”
Back in 2005, I was searching for a shoeshine box for my husband. I know that it’s a nutty gift, but I found all his shoe polish, old rags, and brush in a nasty, zip lock bag. He would get it out and polish and buff his shoes on occasion. He was taught to take care of his shoes, his car, his clothes, all his belongings.