Every time I hear about the GOP whining about “unity” and “bipartisanship” I think about the scene where the martians are killing everyone while carrying around the mechanical translator saying something like “we come in peace”, “we are your friends”. All the while disintegrating people.
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because they’d already done the “let’s pretend to be moved by calls for peace and then murder everyone” thing several times already
That was part of the joke. We kept falling for it over and over despite repeated evidence to the contrary, kind of like the Republicans saying they want to work with the Democrats on compromise this time, not like during Obama or Clinton.
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I left Butthole Surfers once.
I got the joke. I just felt that were trying to get too much mileage out of it. Mars Attacks was fun, but in my opinion it felt like 30 minutes’ worth of fun stretched out to almost two hours of running time.
Know what might have made the part with the President pack a better punch? If his emotional plea for peace actually WORKED, and the Martian leadership really WAS convinced to lay down their weapons to seek a peaceful coexistence…
…only to then reveal that the President was just tricking the Martians into letting their guard down so the humans could launch their own genocidal counter-offensive killing every man, woman and child in Martian society. Even the ones who weren’t part of the invasion (use a big satellite dish to broadcast the lethal frequency all the way to Mars).
BAM! You get the same ultimate resolution, but instead of that scene getting its humor from using the same joke over and over, you get the humor from upending the audience’s expectations. “Surprise! The humans are even bigger assholes than the Martians!”
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The Police were labeled Punk on the UK top charts 1978 cause ‘they’, didnt really know how or where to place them. Just saying. Plus Sting was in the ‘film’
Quadrophenia.
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Absolutely. Jones leaned into the role and had a ton of fun with it. “I can fly a plane” remains in constant rotation in our house when showcasing a surprise skill. Thanks to the comment from @Franko above, I know I’m not alone in quoting the film.
“He made the international sign of the donut” is another favorite. Now I want donuts…
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I left Violent Femmes once? Most robotic concert ever.
That’s where the term “New Wave” came from. Just as with the “alternative” music of the 90s, it was hard for them to reconcile raw talent with the way they commercialize and co-opt musical subcultures, so they relabel it, package up lesser look-alike acts (STP?) and sell a million records.
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That sax player they toured with kicked a guy with his heal
right in the jaw as he tried to climb on stage.
He landed flat on his back on the floor.
That part was exciting.
In retrospect, I think “went on too long” is a valid criticism. Knocking 20 minutes off would have done it no harm whatsoever.
Still love it, though.
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PeeWee’s Big Adventure is “bad comedy?!” Tim Burton, you’re dead to me.
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I guess the most charitable possible interpretation of that comment would be “After Pee-wee the only offers I got for a while were bad comedies, which I didn’t want to do because if I did one of those then I’d get stuck doing bad comedies forever.”
In any case Burton apparently had a good enough time making that movie to give Paul Reubens a cameo as the Penguin’s socialite father in Batman Returns (alongside Pee-wee costar Diane Salinger as the Penguin’s mother).
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For a while people used the term interchangeably in many cases. The term New Wave really took off, though, because when Sire started to pick up some of the CBGBs bands, they didn’t want to use “punk” because they saw it as tainted and alienating, so they went with New Wave. Their advertising campaign included the line “Don’t Call it Punk, Call it New Wave” or something similar.
And of course the origins of punk as a musical genre began with music critics (the folks at Creem, Lester Bangs, Greg Shaw) and they used to term to describe a wide variety of bands before bands in various scenes picked upon the term, ran with it, and built a subculture around it.
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Maybe because there’s people out there that think it’s a terrible film. (Like me.)
FWIW I never realized it was a Tim Burton film. Probably explains why I hate it so much.
Yes, there’s a ton of details in that film that make it delightful. The bit where Lukas Haas suggests living in tipis as “it’s better in many ways” makes me giggle whenever I think of it, and I routinely use that phrase even though no one ever gets what I’m referring to.
I’ll readily admit, though, that as a movie, it makes a good collection of humorous trading cards. The overarching structure is, well, n’t.
And honestly, it’d work better without all the big stars. Jack Nicholson, in particular, feels like hiring a symphony tuba player to do fart noises, when some enthusiast with an armpit could do it funnier.
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This is like 90% of every movie for me. It might be a me problem though.
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Interestingly enough, it had a mixed reaction on Siskel & Ebert when it came out but the response was unexpected – Siskel, who usually was the over-serious one, liked it, but Ebert, who usually liked fun movies didn’t.
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Advertisers and labels may have had definite notions there that weren’t shared by the common folk. In my tangential association with some in the scene, it was as important a distinction as the one between Hippies and Freaks was when I was entering high school, or between Hippies and Teeny Boppers four years before that. (And if that distinction also escapes everyone more than a few months younger than I, it only improves the vigor of the comparison.)
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I’m sure I know jack shit after more than a decade of research.
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Oh my god, that is my staple reference to hairshirter environmentalists who think that all our problems will be solved by seven billion people somehow all going off to live in a cabin in the woods, ideally somewhere in New England close to a locally owned bookshop and a Starbucks.
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