PODCAST: Dead White Girls in the Water - "Twin Peaks: Pilot" (1990) and "The River's Edge" (1986) - High School Movies with Laura and Ryan

Twin Peaks: Pilot
Watched:  10/12/2018
Format:  Amazon Prime Streaming
Viewing:  Unknown.  5th or so.
Decade:  1990's

River's Edge
Watched:  10/24/2018
Format:  Amazon Streaming
Viewing:  5th or so
Decade:  1980's

Laura and Ryan's exploration of High School Movies takes a turn for the grim when they pick the topic of "Dead White Girls in the Water".  Join us as we talk the pilot to Twin Peaks (1990) and seminal 80's flick River's Edge (1986).  It's a look at two pieces of media where the death of a young woman means very different things, but maybe under the plastic, how and why they work means they have more in common than we think at first glance.





Music
Here Come the Warm Jets - Brian Eno
River's Edge Theme - Jürgen Knieper - River's Edge Original Soundtrack
Laura Palmer's Theme - Angela Badalamenti - Twin Peaks Original Soundtrack
On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno


For more from the Signal Watch PodCast, including playlists, where to listen, etc...  Click Here



High School Movies w/ Maxwell and Ryan Playlist

Halloween Watch: Scream (1996)

Watched:  10/30/2018
Format:  Amazon Streaming
Viewing:  third or fourth
Decade:  Oh, so 90's

Ah, the 1990's.  A time when we were all intensely media saturated thanks to home video, cable and plenty of multiplexes, but had a minimum of internet.  At the time, we were all very concerned with whether things were postmodern and metatextual, and, really, Scream (1996) may be the ideal example of what we were all on about.  Can you tell a story by deconstructing the very genre you're working within?

"Why, yes!  You can!" said Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson.

Halloween Watch: Hocus Pocus (1993)

Watched:  10/03/2018
Format:  Amazon Streaming
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1990's

Millennials, I feel like we need to have a talk.  I understand that you were mostly raised by distracted parents who left you with a VCR or DVD player and no limit on the number of viewings you could take in of any movie, so long as you didn't interrupt whatever your parents were up to.  And, believe me, I understand the power of nostalgia and re-enjoying a movie that takes you back to your past, when things were simpler and life was all Capri Sun pouches and sugar cereals.  But right now, the two movies I keep seeing you defend - arguably unironically - are Space Jam and Hocus Pocus. 

In 1993 I was 18, adjusting to college, trying to land a date with the girl in the Italian class I was busy failing, and didn't make time to leave campus to see Hocus Pocus. The movie has appeared as a streaming option every year, and I've considered it.  Lately - as noted above - the kids have rallied around this movie, naming it a Halloween holiday classic.

The thing, tho, is that Hocus Pocus (1993), sux.

Today is the 30th Anniversary of Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Peepshow"

According to Slicing Up Eyeballs, today marks the 30th Anniversary of the release of Peepshow by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Siouxsie and the Banshees | 'Peepshow' | Released 30 years ago today | @satb_official pic.twitter.com/FB48GBnqxQ

— Slicing Up Eyeballs (@slicingeyeballs) September 5, 2018

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.

90's Watch: The Brady Bunch Movie (1995)

Watched:  06/23/2018
Format:  Amazon Prime
Viewing:  I dunno.  4th?
Decade:  1990's

Huh.  So, the original Brady Bunch ran from 1969 - 1974 and then endlessly in reruns.

Here's the math:

• End of show to release of the movie - 21 years
• Release of the movie to now - 23 years

Yeah, Gen-X'ers, I know.

Lynch Watch: Wild at Heart (1990)

Watched:  06/17/2018
Format:  Shout Factory BluRay
Viewing:  Not sure.  At least a fourth viewing.  But it's been at least 15 years.
Decade:  1990's

"Jurassic Park" at 25

Shortly after I graduated from high school, the first Jurassic Park movie hit theaters.  As a bonafide blockbuster hit, it made everyone a pseudo-dino expert (there are worse things), packed folks into theaters, made Sam Neill a bankable actor who sort of shrugged that off and went off to be Sam Neill, taught us that young girls imprinted on Jeff Goldbum as a sex symbol, made us all wonder where cliffs begin and end in dinosaur paddocks, and convinced me khaki shorts were an excellent look on paleontologists.

It's now 25 years on.  Yesterday, June 11, marked the release of Jurassic Park in the U.S.

Rifftrax Watch: Honor & Glory (1993)

Watched:  05/11/2018
Format:  Rifftrax on Amazon Prime Streaming
Viewing:  First
Decade:  1990's

It's possible that Cynthia Rothrock movies aren't as good as I remember finding them in high school.

Regret Watch: The Hard Way (1991)

Watched:  05/07/2018
Viewing:  First
Format:  DVD sent by JimD
Decade:  1990's.  So very early 1990's.


The trend so far for 2018 is me watching movies other people put in front of me.  Whether it's watching whatever is served up on TCM's "Noir Alley" by Eddie Muller, what my collaborators want to watch for a podcast, or - in this case - The Hard Way from 1991.

A couple of weeks back I watched a movie from 1943 called The Hard Way, a backstage melodrama featuring Signal Watch favorite Ida Lupino.  More than one of you asked me if I'd seen the 1991 Michael J Fox starring feature of the same name, and, no... I had not.  I did look it up, and remembered the film from the posters and commercials and it wasn't too hard to pin down why I didn't see it back then.  And before you ask - there is no connection whatsoever between the Lupino film and this thing.

Flashforward about a week and I get a package at my door, open it, and sure enough... once again Jim D has sent me a movie I had absolutely no intention of watching and told him several times I did not want to see.  So, I'm now the proud owner of a copy of The Hard Way starring James Woods and Michael J. Fox.

So, let's talk about the movie, 1991, and why I didn't see it.  Because I did watch this dumb movie and I have opinions.

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.

Arnie Watch: The Last Action Hero (1993)

Watched:  02/12/2018
Format:  Alamo Drafthouse Ritz
Viewing:  Second
Decade:  1990's

Coen Watch: Miller's Crossing (1990)

Watched:  02/03/2018
Format:  Google Play Streaming
Viewing:  Unknown, but somewhere over 25th
Decade:  1990's

First Amazon Order

Seems this is a thing we're all doing, so here goes.

I very much remember placing this order (or these orders).  Half of my friends were totally excited about this new Amazon thing, and half of them were convinced Amazon would just take my credit card and drain me of money.  Both were right, as it turns out.

90's History Watch: I, Tonya (2017)

Watched:  01/07/2018
Format:  Alamo Drafthouse, South Lamar
Viewing:  First
Decade:  2010's/ (actual history:  1990's)

Uncovered 90's! Pics of My High School Years Bedroom

Let it be known - I was remarkably square in high school.  I don't want to over or undersell anything here.

But a kid's room is a timecapsule - not just of a time, but of what was going on and how things intersect.  As near as I can tell from other pics in the stack, these are from some point between Christmas and Prom of 1993.  If the other pics in the pack were taken at the same time, I have reason to think it's Christmas break of 1992.

My folks were incredibly lax about what I did with my room, which was on the second story of our house.  It was in the front, had a big window I never opened, and had a vaulted ceiling, which was kind of nuts.

At some point I just started tacking and stapling stuff to my walls, and by the time I graduated, one wall was pretty well covered and the opposite was getting there.

All this was taken down unceremoniously circa 1995 when I'd left for college and my parents had some visitors with a kid who "couldn't sleep in my room".  Apparently they found it "scary".

In theory some of the contents were preserved during the re-do of my room, but they didn't survive the purging of my old stuff pending the sale of my folks' house before they moved to Austin.

most of high school I was riddled with acne, so I don't know how I look so fresh-faced here

The 90's Return! Taste Test: Celis White

BEHOLD..!

this post can be accompanied with any of the following tracks: 

• Hootie
• Deep Blue Something
• Chumbawumba
• The Cranberries
• TLC

In the 1990's, Austin was home to the Celis Brewery.  I don't think their distribution reached far outside of Central Texas, but they were much beloved here in The City with the Violet Crown.  Prior to the arrival of Celis, local favorites were more or less Shiner Bock and, while we had Lone Star, it was sort of reserved for "we're cooking burgers and it's 100 degrees out and no one cares" drinking.

I wasn't much of a beer snob (I still definitely am not), but I knows what I likes.  And I was a fan of Celis, particularly Celis White.  Also, Celis Pale Rider, but we're not here to talk about that one today.  If you read the picture above you'll note that Celis was brewed in the Belgian style.  I didn't know much about that then or now, but in our poor college and post college days, it was a bit of a premium beer that folks agreed upon, and if someone brought it over, it was like a sign of respect.

Eventually, as happened with many fine beers of the 90's, the brand was purchased by a larger company, they attempted wider geographic distribution but it didn't take.  So, instead of just giving it back and letting us live our lives, they shut it down.  Why?  Why do that?  Just let us have the beer.

Anyway, flashforward to 2016 and it became clear Celis was coming back.  The family had re-obtained all the legal necessaries, they got a brewery going again, and last week when I was walking through HEB (the Texas-based grocery store chain that is to Texas what Publix is to our friends in The Sunshine State) and one of those PR folks was handing out samples.  I mean, I didn't need a sample if I properly remembered the '90's, but it was a happy exchange and I walked away with a six-pack of Celis White, what I consider (and I assume they do, too) the flagship of Celis.

This week was bananas.  I could have just popped a beer, but JimD, also a product of 90's Austin, suggested an old-school Taste Test (this was something we did from time to time at the League of Melbotis blog).  So, here we are.

Lucy, underage, will not be participating in this nonsense

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.

Re-Reading "Preacher"/ Quitting "Preacher"

note:  Preacher, both TV series and the comics series upon which the show is based, contain graphic violence, deeply mature themes, deeply immature themes, sexual frankness and deviation and no small amount of content of a religious nature which many-a-good folks would reasonably find offensive.  You can read this post, watch the TV show, or read the comics, but you've been forewarned, you're on your own, and your mileage will vary.   

Last year, Preacher came to television via AMC - arriving as a sort of high octane dramedy and a loose adaptation of the original comics which ran from 1995-2000 under DC's Vertigo imprint.  The second season is now underway, but I only made it fifteen minutes into the first episode of this year's offering before saying "You know, I'm good.  Let's not watch this."

You can do well with a superhero comics adaptation so long as you remain basically true to the intention of the authors, or - in the case of serial comics - find that core to the characters and concepts that have brought readers back, year after year, outlasting almost all other forms of long-time serial publications in the states.

TL;DR: We Discuss Our Love of Wonder Woman as Character, Icon and Hero

This isn't a review of the movie, which I'm slated to see in a few hours.  But with the arrival of Wonder Woman in cinemas, I wanted to reflect on Wonder Woman as a character and my road with Diana.

Like most kids of my generation, I grew up with Wonder Woman as the default "superhero for girls".  Sure, DC had a wide array of female characters, but a lot of "team" concepts aimed at boys included 1 or maybe 2 girls on the team no matter how big the roster got (see: GI Joe).  And on Super Friends, Wonder Woman was the all-purpose female character who was not Jayna of The Wonder Twins of Wendy of Super Marv and Wendy (ahhh, the 70's).

but at least they gave WW two villains from her rogues gallery