Welcome, fans of the Vampire Diaries! In episode 3, the closing moments of the show featured a cover of the classic New Order song “Temptation,” as envisioned by Moby and vocalized by Laura Dawn. If you’re here, you probably enjoyed the cover version of the song quite a bit and might be surprised to find that it’s older than you think – it was originally released on Moby’s 2005 album Hotel. Anyhow, please stop by the main site (www.popdose.com) to see if we’ve written about any other subjects you might be interested in.
A couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a trip to Chicago for the weekend. The weather on Sunday was practically identical to that during Ferris Bueller’s legendary day off: mostly sunny with a high temperature of 69 degrees. It was the kind of weather that inspired Ferris (Matthew Broderick) to remark thoughtfully to the audience, “how could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” before taking off for a day of surprisingly wholesome adventures in downtown Chicago with his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) and his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara).
When it was released in 1988, Die Hard set a new standard for action movies. For a decade afterward, pretty much every single action movie was unable to avoid a comparison with John McTiernan’s film, which delivered such a memorable dose of pure entertainment on a number of different levels, including the use of every conceivable weapon outside of a genuine war zone. The writers of the film, Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza (adapting Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever), contrived plot elements that enabled the film’s characters to use pistols, machine guns, a sniper rifle, a missile launcher, and enough C-4 explosives to blow up several stories of a building. It wasn’t until 1999, when The Matrix came out, that the bar for action sequences was truly set at a higher level. While The Matrix didn’t use any of Die Hard’s trademark humor, it built an intriguing universe for its characters to inhabit that served as a suitable counterpoint to the film’s unforgettable action sequences.
Recently I’ve been gnawing away at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, a series of ruminations on the state of modern society (modern as in 1958, the year the book was published) and its relationship to the themes in his dystopian novel Brave New World, which had been published 26 years prior. One of the chapters, title “Chemical Persuasion,” addresses existing and newly invented psychotropic drugs and compares them to soma, the hypothetical substance used by the denizens of Huxley’s new world to medicate themselves, and more insidiously used by the scientific overlords of this world to maintain order and complacency within the population.
This past weekend I was the best man at my friend Rodger’s wedding. I spent a long time working on my toast, which went well, but there was something I was thinking about that I didn’t get to include in my speech.
I tend to make a lot of allowances for films that translate classic literature into high school settings.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, has demonstrated an ability to manipulate popular culture better than Quentin Tarantino. The pop-culture reference is a staple of modern entertainment. Television shows like The Simpsons take delight in finding ways to work a dozen clever references into each episode, and lesser shows like Family Guy owe their existence to pop culture cutaways. Two of the writers of Scary Movie (2000) have even managed to build an entire franchise of execrable films that consist of nothing but references to other films and stories. Tarantino is no stranger to this technique; his films are full of references and homages, even though they are often too obscure to be recognized by the average viewer. What truly sets Tarantino apart from the hordes of hacks who appropriate images and stories from other sources in order to stimulate an audience’s collective memory is that he has an unparalleled ability to weave these references (quotes, songs, even biblical verses) together in unique ways so that they instantly emerge as new memes in popular culture.
Like practically all Americans with (meager) holdings on the New York Stock Exchange, I watched in dismay as my stocks plummeted on Friday. Oil prices spiked, which caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plunge by almost 400 points, just more than 3% of its total value. The Nasdaq echoed the Dow’s performance, losing 3% of its value as well. The amount of trading was the heaviest the market has seen since March, and the bedlam on both the trading floor and in the offices of the brokerage houses must have been truly remarkable.
In Hollywood movies, surfing is basically dealt with in one of two ways. It can serve as the foundation for the film, as in movies like Blue Crush (2002) and In God’s Hands (1998), where trite and forgettable plots are simply window dressing to advance the bright blue visuals. Alternately, it can be used as a background vehicle, as in Big Wednesday (1978) and Point Break (1991), where the movie isn’t about surfing – it’s about surfers. The sport is used to explain an underlying connection between several of the characters, but it’s not really used to advance the plot in any particular way. I much prefer the latter method (Big Wednesday is a great film, and Point Break is harmless fun), but the best surfing you’ll ever see on film is when there’s no other point to the film than to show the surfing itself.