For Your Pleasure

"Heart and Soul"

We’ll start with one of my childhood favorites: “Heart and Soul.” As a five year old fascinated with books, the one thing I really appreciated about the News was their uncanny ability to tell me a story. Huey Lewis and the News’ videos always begin like a great B-rated comedy. Mr. Lewis enters the scene a little too cocksure, his hair a little too in place, his strut a little too affected. And since we know that Huey is really just like us, we know that, at some point, he’s going to have to surmount some sort of silly obstacle while ultimately winning out in the end. Winning out usually involves some blonde babe with a coy smile and serious puff sleeve action.

This video is no different except it takes place at a Halloween party! Genius! Huey moves through the crowd, which in itself is amusing because the audience gets the pleasure of discerning who’s wearing an actual costume and who’s just dressed circa 1983. But Huey doesn’t just want you to be a voyeur of this shindig; he soon breaks the fourth wall by directly addressing the camera with a goofy intensity that informs you, the viewer, are no longer allowed to watch the party events unfold from a comfortable distance. Huey wants you as his wingman while he seduces Puff Mania from across a crowded dancefloor. The tactic that succeeds? Awkwardly skulking around her under a strobelight.

The story ends on a quirky, meta-ish note with Huey and babe attempting to leave the party and opening up a few different doors that lead to strange and spooky realms, including one of Huey Lewis and the News live footage and the party itself. And then there’s what’s behind door number three that haunted my dreams as a kiddie: bassist Mario Cipollina wearing vampire drag caught in fragrante delicto. Now, this incorporation of the supernatural seems more camp than creepy but this is just in keeping with the overall News aesthetic.

Still, I am a bit disappointed: This video is nowhere near as ridiculously over-the-top as I remember it. In fact, it’s rather tame for a video of its time. The News possess the gift of transforming the fairly unremarkable into the stuff that (bad) dreams are made of.

The Heart of Rock-n-Roll Is Still Beating: A Huey Lewis and the News Video Retrospective

While in Florida, I had my own personal soundtrack to accompany my sun-drenched revelry: none other than the Bay Area’s hippest squares, Huey Lewis and the News. Really, no other band is more appropriate to capture the innocuous, serene and happy-go-lucky tone of southern peninsula living. Their party-ready rock/pop/blues is so smooth and sweet, so mildly but pleasantly intoxicating; it’s the aural equivalent of the world’s best Piña Colada.

And seriously, who doesn’t like Piña Coladas? Sure, it’s difficult to fess up to liking something that connotes a predilection for the cheesy and predictable, but that doesn’t stop one from sneaking a refreshing gulp of the cheesy and predictable every now and then.

As I roamed the palm tree-lined thoroughfares beckoning one with their salmon and lime green stucco tourist traps that promised Paradise and sand dollars and plastic gators trapped inside mini snow-globes and big, fat pink conch shells that offer the infinite aural beauty of the ocean, “If This Is It” ‘s breezy chorus would sound from the car radio and I would answer Huey’s plea that he meant for someone else. Yes, this was it. This was Paradise albeit of the Florida variety—a lazy, half-hearted attempt at offering life’s hackneyed pleasures through artifice. But Huey and the News reassured me that pleasure is pleasure no matter how contrived.

No one would ever dare argue that Huey Lewis was an authentic voice of the 80s. But then again, who was? Huey was just Huey and the News were just five semi-geeky dudes who wanted to play music, sing fantastic harmonies and make sly, comedic turns in most of the band’s videos. Huey made us believe that he serendipitously ended up a pop star. He made us believe that any average white dude could be destined for greatness; sing simple and earnest songs about love, conformity and Michael J. Fox; and play Gwenyth Paltrow’s father on film. Huey was essentially a caricature, a composite of one’s favorite goofy uncle—you know the black sheep that gets blitzed at weddings but still makes all the old biddies laugh—and the oddly charismatic bar singer who’s generic presence is the key to winning the crowd over.

The News promised ephemeral pleasure with no strings attached. They were superficial without being vapid. Bland without being boring. Huey Lewis and the News were rock-n-roll fantasy lite: no gratuitous sex, no drugs, and just enough rock-n-roll to ensure mass appeal.

Indeed, the heart of rock-n-roll is still beating and the News is apparently still part of its lifeblood. Not only did I hear “If This Is It” on Orlando radio but I heard “Do You Believe in Love?” and “Power of Love” as well. More than once. Additionally, Adam Brody recently jogged while listening to Huey on his iPod in that one movie where he makes out with Meg Ryan’s massive lips. I saw this horror flick while comatose on a couch in Florida after a night of carefree imbibing at a monstrous entity that contained a 48 lane bowling alley, two arcades, four bars and a pub/restaurant with unbelievably decadent cheese fries they called Irish Nachos. But perhaps the largest piece of evidence that Huey Lewis and the News had arisen like a phoenix from the ashes of Baby Boom hell was their collaboration with the Apatow brethren. As the credits for Pineapple Express rolled, I found myself shocked to hear the other soothing paternal voice from my childhood.

What explained the ubiquity of the News on my Florida vacation? Was it just sheer coincidence? Or was it something else—were greater forces at work here that far exceeded the pedestrian ideas that comprised my lousy fruity cocktail metaphor?

And then it occurred to me: It was time for a Huey Lewis and the News video retrospective! I must unearth the genius of the greatest bar band that ever was and reveal what made them so goddamn endearing, not to mention relevant. So, stay tuned.

This film should be called...

Why the Original Buffy Still Slays

Pike: You know…You’re not like other girls, Buffy.
Buffy: Yes, I am.

Buffy: “All I wanna do is graduate from high school, move to Europe, marry Christian Slater, and die. Now, that may not sound too exciting to a stone-head like you, but I think it’s swell. And then you come along and, and tell me I’m a member of the hairy mole club so you can throw things at me? I don’t THINK so!”

So while on hiatus for a long, long while this summer (that’s right, I’m back!), I made it down to Florida to visit with my bestest friend in the whole world for her obligatory pre-wedding festivities. We laughed, cried, confided, but mostly lay in a post-bridal shower stupor eating reheated artichoke dip and watching cable movies starring Ryan Reynolds. Once we had run through that idiot’s repertoire, we gleefully settled halfway into Buffy the Vampire Slayer and immediately DVRed the rest of its airtimes for later—you know in an hour or two, when we might still be on the couch, our bodies feeling deep remorse from the effects of Jack Daniels consumption coupled with our more recent snack binges.

The BFF and I always shared an intense fondness for the O.B. (Original Buffy). What had made us faithful and unquestioning champions of Joss Whedon’s very rough first draft of his cult masterpiece? And why was it that nearly twenty years later, we couldn’t detect a single flaw? The film is perfection immortal, an ode to early 90’s ennui dressed up in crayola hues and muted plaids serving as a precursor to not only Gellar’s kickass, more brooding Buffy 2.0 but to other comely high school heroines with “keen fashion sense” and an even keener ability to find their inner altruist and help the world (i.e, Clueless’s Cher Horowitz, Veronica Mars).

Sadly, the “Buffy” archetype has been replaced by the “Anti-Buffy”: she’s just as hot and popular as her predecessor but she’s self-serving, manipulative, overly serious, and often only notable for her stupendous vapidity. Examples of the “Anti-Buffy” include Blair Waldorf, Meredith Grey, Marissa Cooper, and anyone on The Hills. I realize I am making a lot of gross oversimplifications here but these notions were formed on a totally gut level on my most recent and rather bleary-eyed viewing of this film.

I define the Buffy archetype at its most basic level as a girl who could clearly get by on her looks alone but, for whatever reason, decides to take the hard road and fight the forces of evil and injustice that, until now, have never infringed on her pretty much “perfect” existence. Most of the aforementioned “Anti-Buffy” characters have the potential to attain Buffydom but willfully reject it in favor of power, pity or a life of abject nothingness. Initially, even the film’s Buffy Summers makes a breezy descent into Anti-Buffy territory before Donald Sutherland confirms that her bizarre dreams about slayerdom are a reality. At first, she’s all “As if!” about her new calling; it’ll interfere with her extracurriculars. Then the undead start encroaching not only on Buffy’s shopping excursions but on her previous myopic worldview and her former dismissive “As if” transforms into a “What if…?” What if I am the world’s only hope? What if I should care about the world? What if I am supposed to care even if nobody else does? What if I can be both a happy teenage girl and a lone, fearless vampire killer?

I don’t intend to make the case that the cinematic Buffy is a superior incarnation but I do wish to explore the merits of this depiction. Kristy Swanson’s Buffy deftly moves from one social sphere to the next: the superficial, the real and the unreal. The movie shows this by juxtaposing the the neon-lit Galleria world that Buffy inhabits with her two-faced friends with the dark graveyard setting that she roams alone in pre-menstrual agony. When first awakened to her new role as vampire killer, Buffy attempts to keep the public world separate from her private world. Once they begin to overlap and old friends reveal themselves as literal bloodsuckers, Buffy sees things as they really are: bleak, hopeless and incredibly inane. Ah yes, the typical high school experience…and yet, not so typical.

Yes, the movie, as a whole, is nothing more than horror camp and not what Whedon had envisioned. But he does manage to convey Buffy’s transition from flaky cheerleader to angsty chick to full-on empowered slayer woman fairly well. For me, this female adolescence allegory never gets mired by the corny comedic turns of Rutger Hauer or Paul Reubens or even Luke Perry’s pronounced widow’s peak. When you strip away the Valley Girl colloquialisms and the often tired parody, you’re left with a rather sheltered and naïve girl confronting that her world is total bullshit and not only doing what she can to cope with that but trying to rid the world of this bullshit as much as she can. She’s both an optimist and a cynic, a cheerleader in the halls and the party’s buzzkill. The movie Buffy is powerful and astute but still lusts after a pair of shoes and reads US Weekly. I appreciate this paradox because, heck, I like to think I embody it.

The wardrobe choices, the soundtrack (The Divinyls, anyone?) and dated pop culture icons hamming it up all seems rather “5 minutes ago”. And yet the idea of a heroine who never has to sacrifice any part of herself—especially those charming, buoyant parts—is worth making “retro.”

Zombie Nation

bg5000:

So in the comments of the last zombie post (where you pick one weapon, song, and famous ally to fight zombies with), Than and Rawb decided to flip the script and come up with the worst combination, which is actually a far more interesting question. Here’s Than’s:

1. A discrete shiv fashioned from a toothbrush, prison-style
2. “You’re Beautiful” - James Blunt
3. That guy from What The Buck

And here’s Rawb’s:

1. Whatever the type of laser is that removes tattoos over a number of sittings.
2. “La Isla Bonita”- Madonna
3. David Spade

Great selections across the board, both providing unique nightmare scenarios. It was tough, but i think i’ve come up with one that’s just as terrible as either one of those two:

1. The sock Homey the Clown hit people with
2. “Waiting on the World to Change” - John Mayer
3. Abigail Breslin

Let’s see if you can top that.

For the best combination, I would go with a Sam Elliott/Scott Glenn duo or amalgam using gigantic bowling balls capable of mowing over all the zombies and squishing their noggins to bloody bits. We’d high five each other in victory while Gregg Allman’s “I’m No Angel” plays in the background. Really, this fantasy is not germane to fighting zombies but so be it.

In the worst-case scenario, my partner would be Diablo Cody. She’d be too busy rattling off all the Romero references she could think of and then devising appropriate puns to sass off to each brain-mauling member of the undead, that we would be killed instaneously. Although hopefully it would be her first. Our weapon would be one cane toad ( I am deathly afraid of them) and that terrible Moldy Peaches song would be our lullaby into the afterlife. Or that “Zombie Nation” dance anthem.

Why M. Night Shyamalan Is Better Than You and You Deserve to Die

He alone is aware of our insignificance:

“Where did the idea for movie come from?
“I was driving to New York and going down a country road with a lot of trees and fields, and it occurred to me that we are totally outnumbered, like a million to one, by plants and trees. Its so funny—we think we’re all that, and really we’re just this little scar on the land.”

Wow, if Mr. Shyamalan had never pointed this out, I would have continued to think I was all that. Now I know that I am ugly scar and need Mr. Shyamalan to bandage me with his soothing, cinematic panacea, The Happening.

He likes fucking with you and he’s good at it:

What is the message of the film? Did you mean it to serve as some sort of cautionary tale, or is it simply a thriller with an environmental bent to it?
Probably the latter. It’s like in the classic B movies: you take the paranoia of the time and morph it into an almost silly, dismissible thing. But then it sticks with you in a way that taps into your original paranoia. For that to work, you need to have this angle to the movie: “I’m not serious … or am I?” It ends up being a nightmare sort of scenario.

Well, I agree with one part of this statement. The Happening is definitely a nightmare.

The world wants you to die and you’re responsible because he says so:

The story never touches on why exactly the trees and plants are so upset with us, what triggers “The Happening.” Why did you leave that out?
That was always the intention of the movie—to have this open-ended quality—I wanted it to bleed out into the real world a little. For me, one of the great things about “The Birds” was that you never knew why it happened. By leaving it out you force the audience to consider what their own culpability is, to ask, “Are we blameless?” Because, of course, we aren’t.

And by “we”, he most certainly means “YOU.”

You can learn more from Mr. Shyamalan’s sermon by going here.

But if you want to know what’s really happening in The Happening, read this:

Without any redeeming characters, without any message beyond the obvious, The Happening is another step in the complete irrelevance of a filmmaker a lot of people, himself included, were calling the new Hitchcock. It’s pathetic (never scary, never particularly tense, never poignant), but it’s interesting as hell if, for no other reason, than that it’s unusual to see a picture that’s this much of an asshole, making no attempt whatsoever to simulate a single human emotion. Shyamalan’s essentially made a sociopathic movie.

Walter Chaw’s analysis of this film is dead-on. Strangely enough, most of the other reviews chose not to address Shyamalan’s creepy, sanctimonious and misanthropic vision that teems with such hatred for humanity, that the only indelible image is that of the director’s invisible, smug and ghoulish visage gleefully presiding over this shitstorm of a cautionary tale.

The Ubiquity of Nuno Bettencourt

Extreme heartthrob Nuno Bettencourt epitomized male beauty for a brief moment in 1991 when my nascent desires were darting so fast in all directions, chaotically racing onward before my body ever had a chance of catching up. Upon first viewing of the “More Than Words” video, Nuno became the target of my fickle schoolgirl affections, probably replacing that pretty dude from Jesus Jones.

And even though Nuno and I’s ephemeral fling only lasted as long as my fifth grade year, he perfectly embodied the physical type that I would continue to appreciate throughout my post-adolescent life. It was those long, dark tresses worthy of a purebred steed, those dark eyes that smoldered with adult secrets that I’m sure I could understand (I was mature for all of my eleven years), and how he gracefully stood in Gary Cherone’s shadow, humble yet handsome, secure in his role as background vocalist and eye (rock) candy. I’ve always liked the silent types. I was convinced that Nuno wasn’t quiet and aloof because he was simple but because he was so incredibly astute and profound—no amount of words could convey his worldly wisdom. He would communicate with the world solely through luxuriant hair tosses, and gentle strummings on his acoustic guitar. Nothing more was required.

It must have been last summer when I fondly recalled my Nuno. I was still in the process of working out my complicated feelings of shameful gratification regarding Criss Angel. What was it about this hideous Long Island pseudogothmusicianmagician that appealed to me? I knew that somewhere in Angel’s “Henry Houdini of cheesy Greek lotharios” charade, I could discern the dark, mysterious, dangerous, shamanistic potency of Nuno Bettencourt. To find even the poseurs desirable was so ingrained in my childhood; I was completely defenseless. And truthfully, this love of long-haired, dark-eyed, slightly oily gypsy types began before the advent of Extreme. This predilection has its origins in Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Mad Martigan in Willow. But that’s a whole other post…

So, yes it’s been nearly two decades and I still can’t escape my past with this Portugeuse rock god. His name is like an incantation that brings him forth into every facet of my daily life. For instance, he even has previously appeared on this blog because I discovered that he was responsible for the score for this worthless film.

Then, just yesterday I came across this seemingly random post on Stereogum (!!!) and this discovery was right after seeing an appearance of Nuno on VH1’s Soft Rock countdown the previous evening. This was all too much. And then there’s this quote in the Stereogum post from a 1991 Rolling Stone issue:

“There are lines you draw, Paul, no matter what you do,” Bettencourt is saying. “We could sell a million records, but if it’s all twelve-year-old girls who think that one of us is pretty, what the fuck kind of audience is that to have? Of course you want to be rich, but how far would you go, you know? Would you suck dick to do it?”

Yeah, that’s the love of my prepubescent life pretty much spitting on my
innocent infatuation. And he follows this up with showing himself to be a homophobe. Awesome.

This information coupled with the uncanny discovery that Criss Angel and Nuno actually know each other !?!!? makes me want to exorcise this hard rock incubus from my life. And then I find out THIS and wonder just who’s side he’s really on. I begin to have second thoughts. Anyone who is a friend of God is a friend of mine. Perhaps Nuno’s overwhelming presence in my life can be explained as his role as my guardian angel. That’s no so far-fetched, or dare I say it, “EXTREME.”

Addendum