I had genuine, serious, grownup responsibilities to meet yesterday.
And I was up sleepless at 2:21 AM the prior evening pondering what would happen if a group of Terminators fought John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
I am 47 years old, people.
And I’ve got two more for you:
What would happen if The Blob fought The Thing? I suppose it all boils down to which has the fastest, most successful cellular-level method of attack. What about the baddie from Dean Koontz’ “Phantoms?”
And what would happen if the vampires from “30 Days of Night” fought the infected from “28 Days Later?” Sort of a … “30 Days of Night Later” kinda scenario?
There needs to be a name for this disorder I have. There needs to be hope for a treatment.
There are few movies more quintessentially 80’s than “Gremlins” (1984). To this day, I still think it was a strange movie because of its successful juxtaposition of elements.
On the one hand, it was a family film with a sense of wonder and the kind of wholesome sentiments about the American family that you would associate with Steven Spielberg. (I was surprised to discover that though he was executive producer here, “Gremlins” was written by Chris Columbus and directed by Joe Dante.) It takes place in a small town on Christmas, and follows a Spielberg-esque, young, good-natured, male protagonist.
On the other hand, the violence and black humor were pretty unexpected for a mainstream blockbuster feature film. (If you’ve seen the movie, you can vividly remember the titular monsters being dispatched by the blender and the microwave, for example — and the murder of an elderly disabled woman is maybe the film’s biggest sight gag.) Even the monsters themselves (which were skillfully rendered in this era of pre-CGI practical effects) were a little too scary for younger kids. It was this movie, along with 1984’s “Indianan Jones and the Temple of Doom,” that led to the MPAA to establish its “PG-13” rating — for films that didn’t quite merit a hard “R,” but were still more intense than a mere “PG rating.”
What’s remarkable to me, though, is that these disparate elements were woven together more or less seamlessly. “Gremlins” isn’t “Casablanca” (1942), but it’s a fairly decent goofball movie that kinda works.
A little trivia — the department store where the heroic Gizmo finally dispatches the villainous Stripe is a Montgomery Ward, which modern audiences would not recognize. The chain went out of business in 2001. (The eponymous online retailer has no relationship to the old brick-and-mortar stores.) I last remember being at a “Ward’s” at Spotsylvania Mall in Virginia in the 1990’s.
Stepping out in a Christmas present that was handmade for me by a writer friend. (I love it.) I told her that it was a very homespun, writerly thing for me to wear — a homemade cap knit by a friend, and she laughed at that.
Based on what I can see, the look and the lifestyle seem pretty neat to me. You get to wear really inexpensive clothes without being judged. You ride around town on a cheap bike, which is healthy for you — and again, there’s no judgment, because that’s normal for your peer group. It’s like being a Marxist, without the terrible economic theory.
You listen to alternative music. Awesome. Social mores call for you to be “authentic” and creative, and there seems to be an emphasis on progressive politics.
Doesn’t this all dovetail nicely with people whose personalities lean toward arts or academics? Is it really all so bad?
Maybe there’s something I’m missing. If you know me at all, you can guess that everything I know about hipsters comes from a Google search I did five minutes ago. One of my college classmates is a sublimely intelligent man whose opinion I trust … he is now living on the West Coast, and he hates hipsters. And I do mean that he HATES hipsters.
Please, don’t do the obvious and suggest that I become a hipster. I’m too old. The only new subculture that’s appropriate for me to join right now is AARP.
(Hey, I need to make at least one “Wizard of Oz” reference per year. It’s required by the Weirdo Writers Union.)
By the way, that’s Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. There’s a depressing article over at The Daily Beast today about Russian state media describing Trump as their country’s “agent.” You can find it right here.
I’m very happy to share here that The Piker Press published another one of my poems today. Its title is “As Silver as the Stars You Tried to Rival,” and you can find it right here.
The Piker Press community is a terrific place for storytellers, poets and artists. As always, I’m grateful to Editor Sand Pilarski for allowing me to share there.
“Independence Day” was THE move that everyone was talking about in the summer of 1996. It was the year’s highest-grossing film and it dominated the box office for three weeks straight. It was an event. It was a lot like “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (1991) or “Jurassic Park” (1993) before it — it was a sci-fi spectacle with special effects that were so groundbreaking at the time that it was a topic for conversation at parties. Did you see it? Did you see it? (The internet wasn’t quite a thing yet in 1996 for the average person; not a single person I knew chatted about movies online.)
I think it’s held up really well after 23 years, and this movie still has a dedicated fanbase. Even it special effects are still decent by modern standards. Sure, it feels a little corny. But the climactic aerial dogfight at the end still looks great and it really works for me.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 