AMAZING WATCH: Streets of Fire (1984)

Watched:  09/04/2018
Format:  Austin Film Society screening with PaulT
Viewing:  Fifth?
Decade:  1980's

I think it's fair to say that Streets of Fire (1984) is one of those movies you either get behind or you do not.  Like, I'm not sure there's a lot of gray area in how people react to whatever it is this movie is serving up - but despite the fact that I am well aware that Streets of Fire is not a very good movie, I am also of the opinion that Streets of Fire is an amazing movie.

PODCAST! DISNEY WATCH! The Black Cauldron (1985)

Watched:  08/19/2018
Format:  DVD from San Antonio Public Library
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1980's


NathanC returns to discuss Disney in the 1980's! Ryan is kinda sick and grumpy! We talk Disney's 1985 misfire that "almost took down the studio". It's high fantasy adventure for the kiddies, but Disney's first foray into PG territory, all while Disney underwent corporate reshuffling!




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Happy Birthday, Madonna!

editor's note:  I thought I lost this post, but found an open tab with a draft still available I was able to copy and add to.  This isn't the original post that went out, but I - for the first time in years - accidentally erased that post when I clicked the wrong button.  

Apparently yesterday was the 60th Birthday of Madonna.

Here at The Signal Watch, we salute Madonna as the person who told us it is 100% okay to like pop music.  You will not lose your edge by enjoying Madonna.

Late 80's Watch: Fletch Lives (1989)

Watched:  07/15/2018
Format:  HBO on DVR
Viewing:  Unknown.  At least the 3rd.
Decade:  1980's

Television Watch: GLOW - Season 2

With Emmy nominations now announced (GLOW received a few, including Best Comedy) and a few weeks passed since the second season arrived, it feels fair to talk a bit - but in no way comprehensively - about the show.

So...  Every once in a while when I'm watching GLOW, the fictionalized show about a real women's wrestling show that aired in the 1980's, I think about the Coen Bros. film, Barton Fink.

PODCAST: NathanC and Ryan talk Disney's curious 1980s - "The Black Hole", "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and "Never Cry Wolf"

Nathan Cone joins us to discuss what the heck was going on at Disney in the 1970's and 80's that led to The Black Hole, Something Wicked This Way Comes and Never Cry Wolf. It's a fun ride full of Disney history and rife with 80's-ness!




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On Google Play:

PODCAST: Ryan and SimonUK watch "License to Kill" (1989)!

Watched:  04/07/2018
Format:  BluRay
Viewing:  Second
Decade:  1980's (oh, so 1980's)


We all have our favorite Bond movie. SimonUK decides to die on the hill of "License to Kill" as Ryan hears him out. It's the 1989 "Bond goes rogue and goes after a Central American drug lord" Bond movie you've probably never seen and the second and final Timothy Dalton as our 00-agent.


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Disney Watch: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Watched:  04/05/2018
Format:  DVD
Viewing:  Fourth
Decade:  1980's

Saving this one for a podcast

Inexplicable Watch: Earth Girls Are Easy (1988)

Watched:  04/03/2018
Format:  Amazon Streaming (included in Prime)
Watched:  First
Decade:  1980's

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......................

Disney Watch: Never Cry Wolf (1983)

Watched:  04/02/2018
Viewing:  Second or third
Format:  Amazon streaming
Decade:  1980's

We're saving this one for a podcast

In 2018 I finally watched "Freaks and Geeks"

I work from home these days (yes, you are right, it is freakin' weird, man) and I generally take about 50 minutes for lunch each day.  That's, it turns out, enough time to catch part of two episodes of The Nanny* or the 12:00 news/ ambulance chaser commercials.

Over the years, few shows have been as consistently recommended to me by trusted sources as much as Freaks and Geeks.  The show was a primetime hour-long dramedy that aired for eighteen episodes around 99' - 00', which is why I didn't watch it at the time.  I was just very busy and not watching much primetime TV during that era.

Well, I have now spent my lunch hour and a few evenings watching it, so stop telling me what to do.

PODCAST: Simon and I talk "Big Trouble in Little China", "Buckaroo Banzai" and "War Games"

Buckaroo Banzai
Already covered

War Games
Watched:  03/17/2018
Viewing:  Fifth or Sixth
Format:  Alamo Drafthouse/ Village
Decade:  1980's

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Watched:  03/18/2018
Viewing:  Seventh or Eighth
Format:  Shout Factory BluRay
Decade:  1980's

Join SimonUK and I as we ponder some cult favorites of the 1980's!  And, boy howdy, do we go all over the map on this one.  But, mostly, we stay on task.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Watched:  02/27/2018
Format:  Alamo Ritz
Viewing:  Oh, probably the 12th or 13th, at least
Decade:  1980's

Oh, what to say about Big Trouble in Little China (1986)?

PODCAST with SimonUK: Bond Watch - A View to a Kill (1985)

Watched:  02/18/2018
Format:  DVD at my house
Viewing:  oh, probably the 7th or 8th
Decade:  1980's




(this one is Safe for Work!) SimonUK - a genuine British person - joins Ryan for a View to a Kill (1985), Moore's final Bond. It may not be the best Bond, or even a good Bond, but it's a fun Bond. We'd like to say we stick to the topic at hand, but we end up covering a wide range of all things Bond, and - at one point - diverge into Gremlins.

These things happen.

Western Watch: Silverado (1985)

Watched: 01/26/2018
Format: Home/ Amazon
Viewing: oh, who knows?
Decade: 1980's

Sci-Fi Watch: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Prior Blade Runner posts:
January 9, 2016 - film watch
September 16, 2016 - novel
January 6, 2008 - DITMTLOD



SOME SPOILERS BELOW:

Like a lot of people of my generation, Blade Runner is one of my favorite films.  To expect objectivity regarding the film at this point is a difficult request as I cannot separate the film's actual merits from the impact it had upon me when I first watched the film circa 1988 and deepening appreciation over time.

In a recent comment, Fantomenos asked what the last band was that I related to on a deeply personal level, where I felt they were speaking straight to me (I dodged the question), and I think movies operate much the same way.  I will simply never feel quite the same way about a movie now as I did in high school.  Whatever openness I had to experience during that period of development is a maze of decades of other movies, cynicism and life experience. 

At this point, I've watched Blade Runner dozens of times.  I know the beats, the characters, the dialog.  And so do you, most likely.  I can talk about things explicit and implicit to the film's story, talk about the production of the movie and tell you about seeing a Spinner and Rachael's dress in Seattle.  I'm aware it's likely part of how I became interested in cinema noir, film design, and remains the high water mark for movies about AI, in my opinion.

If Star Wars had created a totally immersive universe through design, sound, music, character and themes - a fairy tale universe in which I would have been happy to jump into, Blade Runner provided a similar experience with a dystopia in which everything seemed to fall out of the current culture, in which I could draw a line from our current lives to how we might reach this world of constant rain, stratified social classes, surreal landscapes of mega-structures and ubiquitous advertising (some of it beautiful). And, no, despite the Rachaels, I would not want to live in the world of Blade Runner.  The world of this movie is the world of the end of humanity.

Halloween Watch 2017: Theatre of Blood, Altered States, House of Dracula

Well, it's that time of the year, and we're watching movies about monsters and murders and transdimensional-psychotic states brought on by a rich cocktail of hallucinogens.

Happy 30th Anniversary to "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

Happy 30th Anniversary to Star Trek: The Next Generation!

First of all, I wasn't looking forward to a reboot of Star Trek when this show aired.  I sort of thought of Star Trek as Kirk and his pals cruising around space in their cool car, getting into scrapes.  This was not going to be that. 

Boy howdy, do I remember being 12 and showing up at school the next day and me and my fellow nerd friends standing around trying to make heads or tails of what we'd just watched.  We knew we liked Data, Riker, Tasha Yar and Geordi.  But what was up with that kid?  And why wasn't the Klingon phasering and stabbing everything in sight?  And, of course, the notion of Counselor Troi was a lot for a 12 year old to get their head around.  And why was the Captain not a brash, emotional young man?  He seemed so old...  (he was, of course, only about 47, just a few years older than I am now). 

But eventually I got sucked in, and by the time I got to college, one of the few posters I brought with me for my dorm room wall was a poster-sized portrait of Captain Picard that I woke up to every morning. 

Mostly I watched the show in nightly reruns in syndication, catching them out of order in a way that TV could never withstand today.  And, since I was living with other people during college, if I didn't catch a reference to something from a prior episode or Star Trek mythology, often someone could fill in a gap who had seen those episodes. 

Man, we *all* watched this show back then.  Where watching the original series still carried the whiff of nerdiness to it, the seeming omnipresence of ST:TNG made it kind of okay, and while not everyone was super into the mythology, people mostly knew who the cast were and whatnot.

The show can be intensely uneven, everyone has things they like about it and things they don't just because of the sheer sprawl of the cast and show (I have mixed feelings about the holodeck stuff).  But the good outweighed the bad to a massive degree. 

I can intellectualize issues with the show, and while I continue to watch the show from time to time, I've never returned to it in any systematic way.  Mostly I'll catch an episode or two on BBC or streaming.  But, yeah, I still enjoy it quite a bit, even if its a clunker of an episode (but what do you want?  They had around 180 episodes.  Not everything is going to be gold.). 

The show underwent a lot of changes over the years, with cast coming and going, plot threads and characters continuing, growing, changing, revealing themselves in episodic bits.  The Trek universe expanded into new edges of the universe and contracted (lots of guest appearances by TOS cast members). 

Some of you may have enjoyed Star Trek: The Experience in Vegas, and if you did not, I'm very sorry.  But in addition to a recreation of Quark's from DS9, the experience also included a recreation of the bridge of the NCC-1701D, down to the last detail.  And not a person who found themself on that bridge did get something of a shiver.

On the 30th Anniversary of Something to do with the band Whitesnake

Original Leaguer JimD challenged me to post something related to the 30th Anniversary of something to do with the band White Snake.  I don't know what it was.  I suppose probably the arrival of their big album, the name of which I cannot recall (I looked it up.  It's "Whitesnake".  Those clever bastards.).

But I owned the tape.

What the kids who think they know about the 1980's misunderstand is that in 1987, the music scene was not all Depeche Mode and LL Cool J.  It was lots and lots and lots of "hair bands", Phil Collins, Whitney Houston and Gloria Estefan.  But, wow, were there a lot of hair bands.  Like, all @#$%ing day long on the MTV, it was a bunch of guys with terrible, teased hair.

I was never much one for Motley Crue or whatever, and I really wasn't into:  White Lion, Great White, or even White Snake.

But in that Year of Our Lord, 1987, what White Snake had that nobody else had: Tawny Kitaen

Television Signal - Catching Up: GLOW

We watched a lot of television this year, and in our reduced content mode, we haven't talked about the usual favorites - so just assume we enjoyed both Fargo and The Americans.*

Way back in high school I recall coming home one afternoon and somewhere between TaleSpin and The KareBear rolling into the driveway/ me starting homework, I was flipping channels when I stumbled upon an edition of Family Feud in which the new-ish World Championship Wrestling league was squaring off against a league I'd never heard of - G.L.O.W., or, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.

As colorful as the fellows from the WCW were, I was shocked to find out that there was an all-women's wrestling league and I had never heard of it.

I was never *that* into wrestling.  As a very young kid I was part of the wave that saw Hulk Hogan and JYD and Jake "The Snake" Roberts rise to stardom on Saturday broadcasts, but I'd moved on fairly quickly, watching WWF only occasionally.  But when I was 14, for some reason Steanso, his pal Lee and myself jumped in Lee's car and drove downtown and watched the show - and, man, live - wrestling is @#$%ing bonkers.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  The next year we also attended a taping of an episode or two of regular WWF and NBC's Saturday Night's "Main Event", which was neat just because we saw all the flagship wrestlers of the era.  Yeah, I've seen Hulk Hogan from the 13th row.

But... that was kind of it.

Needless to say, by age 15 or so, the notion of lady wrestlers held some appeal.  And, as I watched what turned out to be a week's worth of episodes, the ladies of GLOW seemed way (waaaaaaay) crazier (and, honestly, smarter) than their male counterparts over the the WCW.

But I don't think GLOW ever aired anywhere I lived, either when I'd just previously lived in Austin, or when I moved to Houston between 9th and 10th grades.  Texas, especially before, say, 10 years ago, was a place where you find strip clubs the size of a warehouse, but there was also a church on every corner - the net result that TV stations probably decided it wasn't worth the letters and complaints from folks getting the vapors from witnessing ladies in high cut leotards jumping off turnstyles.  Believe me, I would have watched the living hell out of that show.  (edit:  Steven has written in to tell me he recalls seeing GLOW air in Houston circa 1987.  I was living in Austin at the time.)

Consequently, I've always had a deep-seeded curiosity about GLOW, but was unable to turn up much the few times I thought to Google it.

Of course, when Netflix announced it was putting out a show about GLOW featuring no less than Alison Brie, heck, yeah, I was in.