Soundtrack Saturday turns two with a very special video retrospective. Join the celebration!
Monday, September 6th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
Can you believe this column is two years old? If you count its origins on my old blog, it’s actually older, but that doesn’t matter. TWO YEARS you people have been putting up with my ramblings on Popdose. Thanks for reading, kids — or at least pretending to.
In celebration, I thought I’d do something completely different. I’m not going to write a long post for you to read on a holiday weekend. I know you kids want to celebrate the end of summer liquored up and not laboring at all — and I know reading can be work.
So I thought I’d put together a big mix of some of my favorite videos for soundtrack songs. Some of these are videos that tie into the movies in which they are featured and some of them are official videos that have nothing to do with the movies in which they appear.
In any case, these songs represent some of my favorite soundtrack songs, as well as the good, the bad, the ridiculous and the stupid in soundtrack song videos. I hope you enjoy and continue to read this column when you’re not hungover from whatever shennanigans you were up to Friday night.
Also, as a special bonus treat, over the next few days I’ll be re-uploading five soundtracks from posts I’ve written over the past two years. Only, I’m not telling you which ones — you’ll have to find them on your own!
Thank you again to my readers and to the great Popdose staff. And a special thanks to Robert Cass for bringing me here in the first place — you’re the best.
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Tags: anniversary, Chaz Jankel, Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie, Divinyls, E.G. Daily, Honeymoon Suite, Howard Jones, Huey Lewis & The News, J. Geils Band, John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band, Kate Bush, Kelly Stitzel, Lindsey Buckingham, Madonna, Pat Benatar, Pretty Poison, Queen, Sheila E., Spandau Ballet, Suzanne Vega, The Plimsouls, Wang Chung
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Saturday, August 21st, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
Look, everyone! It’s another breakdance movie!
Well, maybe that’s not fair. Though Beat Street (1984) does feature breakdancing, it’s about ’80s hip-hop culture in New York City as a whole, which also included rapping, DJing, and grafitti art. And unlike, say, the Breakin’ films, Beat Street doesn’t lean as much toward the ridiculous.
The movie tells the story of a group of friends in the South Bronx who are part of the Big Apple’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. Kenny Kirkland (Guy Davis) is a DJ and MC; his younger brother Lee (Robert Taylor) is a B-boy who dances with the New York City Breakers; Ramon (Jon Chardiet), a.k.a. Ramo, is a graffiti artist; and Chollie (Leon W. Grant) is a manager and promoter. Beat Street also stars Rae Dawn Chong in one of her first film roles as Tracy, a college student and composer who takes an interest in Kenny and Lee’s talents.
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Tags: Breakdancing, DJing, graffiti, Harry Belafonte, hip hop culture, Kool Moe Dee, Puma, Rae Dawn Chong
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Saturday, August 7th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
“They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something, and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? ‘I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?’” —Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack), from Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
High school reunions. Some people live for them. Some don’t really care about them but will attend one just to see if the popular kids got fat/ugly/stupid/lost their hair. And some people would rather chew gum made of asbestos than reunite with anyone or anything associated with high school. I fall somewhere in between the latter two groups.
I attended my ten-year high school reunion four years ago, and I’ll admit I had a good time. Actually, the reunion itself was kind of lame, but what made the night great was that almost my entire group of friends showed up, so we made our own fun. It was good seeing some people, but I doubt if I’ll ever go to another reunion (unless there’s a lot more alcohol involved).
While my reunion had its moments, it was nowhere near as exciting as the ten-year reunion of the fictional Grosse Pointe High School class of 1986 that’s depicted in Grosse Pointe Blank. Their reunion included an alumnus turned hit man.
I suppose if you disappeared for ten years and became a hit man who needs therapy, you might not want to go to your high school reunion and deal with all the people you barely liked and all the questions they’ll inevitably ask. But Martin Blank (Cusack) sucks it up and heads home, since he has to be in town for a job anyway. He figures the visit will also give him the chance to see his old girlfriend, the lost love of his life, Debi (Minnie Driver) and try to make things right with her. Seems pretty simple, right? Well, not so much. Two other hitmen have followed Blank to Grosse Pointe to take him out, one being an assassin named Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), who’s been trying to form a hit man’s “union” with him. And there are two NSA operatives after him as well. The guy can’t catch a break.
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Tags: Dan Aykroyd, Faith No More, Grosse Pointe Blank, high school reunion, hit man, Joe Strummer, John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Pete Townshend, The Clash, the English Beat, The Jam, The Specials
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Saturday, July 24th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
One of the great things about art is that as you grow, a piece of art — whether it be a painting, a piece of music, a book, a film, or whatever — grows with you. How you interpret and relate to it can change as you get older and acquire more life experience.
I was 15 when I first saw Singles (1992). Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, and set in Seattle in the early ’90s, it was widely considered the movie that most accurately portrayed “the Seattle scene,” though it should be noted that the film was conceived, shot, and intended for release before said scene exploded all over the place.
Crowe’s movie has intersecting story lines that center on a group of single people who (mostly) live in the same Seattle apartment building, and their search for love and success. Its cast features some of the most talented young actors of the era, including Matt Dillon, Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott, Kyra Sedgwick, Sheila Kelley, and Bill Pullman.
I loved Singles when I first saw it, but I didn’t really relate to its characters or their problems that much — I was still in high school, still living with my parents, didn’t have a job, hadn’t started dating, and hadn’t fallen in love. That’s not to say I didn’t relate to it at all, though; there were aspects that resonated with me at the time, just not many.
But the fact that I couldn’t relate to Singles didn’t interfere with my enjoyment of it. I loved the cast, and I was obsessed with the idea of “the Seattle scene,” with its flannel shirts, Doc Martens boots, grunge music, and coffee shops. As a midwestern teenager, TV, radio, and magazines were the only connections I had to what’d become the center of the pop-culture universe.
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Tags: Alice In Chains, Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Cameron Crowe, Campbell Scott, Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, grunge, Jim True, Kyra Sedgwick, Matt Dillon, Mudhoney, Paul Westerberg, Pearl Jam, Seattle, Sheila Kelley, Soundgarden
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Saturday, July 10th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
OK, look — I know many of you haven’t seen this movie, so I’m being a little self-indulgent by writing about it. But I’ve been searching for this soundtrack far and wide for many, many years, and now that I’ve found (most of) it, I just had to share.
Now, you all know how much I love ’80s dance movies; I’ve written about a few of them and will no doubt write about many more. Fast Forward (1985) is a film I’d never even heard of until I caught it on cable a decade ago, but after one viewing I was hooked.
I’ve tried to catch it every time it’s aired, which isn’t very often, so I was delighted to find it on Netflix Instant last winter. I managed to DVR it when Encore aired it right after New Year’s, and I’m not ashamed to say I’ve watched it about ten times since.
If you’ve seen Fast Forward you probably (a) think I’m insane for loving it so much since it’s not that great, or (b) agree with me 100 percent on its ’80s-dance-movie brilliance. If you haven’t seen it, too bad — it’s not available on DVD, and it’s long out of print on VHS. Your best chance of seeing it is probably on cable, like I did, but as I said, it doesn’t air often.
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Tags: Brock Walsh, Dance Fights, Dance-Offs, Deco, John Scott Clough, Kelly Stitzel, Legwarmers, Mark Vieha, Narada Michael Walden, Sam McMurry, Sidney Poitier, Siedah Garrett
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Saturday, June 26th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
I have a thing for films about a woman’s journey of self-discovery that take place against the backdrop of scenic Italy.
There’s Under the Tuscan Sun, the 2003 film based on Frances Mayes’s memoir of the same name. Starring Diane Lane as Mayes, it follows the writer as she fixes up the Tuscan villa she purchased after a nasty divorce.
While on vacation in New York City this past week I had the pleasure of seeing Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, starring the incredible Tilda Swinton. It’s a wonderful film about the Russian immigrant wife of a rich Italian businessman and how, faced with an empty nest as her grown children move on with their lives, she searches for fulfillment outside of her cushy surroundings.
Then there’s Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996). Liv Tyler, in her first lead role, plays Lucy Harmon, a 19-year-old American girl who spends a summer at the Tuscan villa that belongs to friends of her mother, a poet who committed suicide. She claims to be there to get her portrait sculpted by her mother’s artist friend, but she has ulterior motives: to find out who her real father is, and to reconnect with the Italian boy she kissed during a visit five years earlier.
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Tags: Bernardo Bertolucci, Cocteau Twins, Hole, Hoover, jeremy irons, Liv Tyler, Liz Phair, Mazzy Star, Portishead, Sam Phillips
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Saturday, June 12th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a farm boy named Luke Skywalker had dreams of leaving his planet and doing something great with his life. He wound up saving a princess and helped to bring down an evil galactic empire.
Not so terribly long ago, not so far away, a boy named Alex Rogan had dreams of leaving his trailer-park home, going to college, and doing something great with his life. He wound up bringing down an evil galactic armada as well — by getting the highest score on a video game.
When I was a kid and would watch Star Wars (1977) and The Last Starfighter (1984) all the time on cable, I never really noticed their similarities. Looking at the two films now, I can’t see how I missed them.
Star Wars and Starfighter obviously have a lot of differences, too, but they share a basic theme: being a dreamer can really pay off, so if you want something badly enough, somehow you’ll make it happen, especially if what you want is to be the last hope of saving the universe.
Perhaps the reason why I took to The Last Starfighter so quickly when I first saw it as a kid is because of those underlying similarities I mentioned. Or perhaps it’s just because it’s a well-written, beautifully executed science fiction film. Most likely, it’s a little bit of both.
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Tags: Alec Guinness, Carrie Fisher, Catherine Mary Stewart, cgi, Clif Magness, Craig Safan, Darth Vader, Kelly Stitzel, Lance Guest, Robert Preston, Star Wars, Starfighter, Xur
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Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
It’s a tale as old as the hills: Leader of a gang of road pirates has the hots for the Girl Next Door, but she loves the Nice Guy. Road Pirate decides that Girl Next Door belongs to him, so he and his gang kill the Nice Guy and he scares Girl Next Door into being his girlfriend. Nice Guy then comes back as Supernatural Drag Racer with a badass car and terrorizes Road Pirate and his gang.
Wait, you mean that tale isn’t as old as the hills? Well, it’s at least the one that’s told in the 1986 sci-fi thriller The Wraith. My brother and I used to watch this movie on cable all the time when we were kids, but I haven’t seen it in years. I randomly thought about it the other day, and after discovering it had just the kind of song score that’s perfect for Soundtrack Saturday, I thought I’d give it a go.
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Tags: Charlie Sheen, Clint Howard, Kelly Stitzel, Nick Cassavetes, Soundtrack Saturday
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Saturday, May 8th, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
Well hello there. Long time, no see. Have you missed me? I know I kind of abruptly disappeared there for a while, but it couldn’t be helped — I’ve had a lot of crazy personal stuff to deal with over the past month. I hope my absence has made your heart grow fonder for my little column, though.
If you were dismayed at Soundtrack Saturday’s hiatus, I should tell you that its absence has been a good thing for you. Why? Because it’s helped prepare you for this piece of news: Soundtrack Saturday will be moving from a weekly schedule to biweekly, and sometimes monthly, depending on my life. If that disappoints you, I’m sorry. But I promise, it’s for the best. You’ll see.
Now that I’ve gotten that little announcement out of the way, on with the post …
I have a confession to make: I have a crush on Jeff Goldblum. I think I’ve had a crush on him since the first movie of his I saw — Transylvania 6-5000 (1985). (You totally thought I was going to say The Big Chill, didn’t you?) I can’t really explain why I like him so much other than it’s because he’s a little weird, and I like weird more often than not.
My crush on Golblum has waned in recent years, but was reignited when he became a regular cast member on Law & Order: Criminal Intent (yes, I actually watch that show); until this season, it starred one of my other offbeat celebrity crushes, Vincent D’Onofrio.
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Tags: Damon Wayans, Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, Julie Brown, Kelly Stitzel, Soundtrack Saturday
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Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 by Kelly Stitzel
The year 1985 was a pretty big one for Michael J. Fox. His hit TV series, Family Ties, was in the middle of its third season on NBC when he starred opposite Nancy McKeon in the network’s rom-com Poison Ivy. Come on, I know you remember this …
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Tags: Amy Holland, back to the future, James Hampton, Mark Safan, Mark Vieha, Michael J. Fox, Miles Goodman, Nancy McKeon, Pepsi, Popdose, Soundtrack Saturday, Teen Wolf
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