Foster Dickson's Blog, page 31
December 30, 2019
The deadline is tomorrow.
December 28, 2019
10 More GenX Movies You’ve Probably Forgotten (Or Never Seen)
When the subject of Generation-X films comes up, everybody remembers the John Hughes classics The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything and Singles, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Chasing Amy. A more attentive movie buff might also remember Repo Man or Kids or Blue Velvet, or there’s even the possibility that a few of you wandered naively into The Crying Game or Paris is Burning and never have been able to forget what you saw. Or maybe you went out on a limb once or twice back in the ’80s and ’90s and tried to watch those cool new movies people were talking about, like Slacker or Wild At Heart. But there’s much more, so . . . in addition to the first ten I already offered, here are ten more that you might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
Went to Coney Island on Mission from God . . . Be Back by Five . . . (1998)
If you think of Jon Cryer as either teenage loverboy Ducky from Pretty in Pink or as the flunky chiropractor Allen in Two and a Half Men, you probably didn’t pay much attention to him in the years between. This late-’90s indie film, which followed the minor high-school comedy Hiding Out, had Cryer playing a young man who goes with his alcoholic best friend on a day-long quest to find a childhood friend who disappeared. This movie captures and uses the Generation X penchant for randomness and pseudo-intellectualism pretty well. The movie only gets a 5.8/10 rating on IMDb, but it’s a better movie than that.
Paris, Texas (1984)
Directed by Wim Wenders and with a storyline from Sam Shepard, this European movie features indie mainstay Harry Dean Stanton playing Travis Henderson, a man who remerges in his small town after he wandered off four years earlier. His young wife, played by model Natassja Kinski, has left, and his young son has been raised by his brother during that time. Travis wants to reunite his family, so his brother helps him, and it becomes a road movie. Some people say that the end of this film is the greatest movie ending ever.
Arizona Dream (1993)
After Edward Scissorhands and before Benny & Joon and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Johnny Depp starred in this film about a young man who goes to Arizona for his uncle’s wedding— but it won’t be that simple. This movie has a stellar cast: comedian Jerry Lewis, beauties Faye Dunaway and Paulina Porizkova, indie actors Lili Taylor and Vincent Gallo, and character actor Michael J. Pollard. If it’s possible to combine Gen-X floundering, unlikely romance, and the complexities of coming-of-age with halibut in the desert Southwest, this film does it.
Night on Earth (1991)
This movie is centered around taxi cab rides in five major cities around the world, and it tells its story in five vignettes about an array of characters. Back when Bravo! was an arts channel, they used to show movies like this one at random times, between Cirque de Soleil reruns and that documentary about Paganini. This was the first time I remember seeing Roberto Benigni, who seemed so wacky, and with her baseball cap on backwards, Winona Ryder was playing a distinctly different kind of role here. (This film came out in the year between Edward Scissorhands and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.) The movie is short on action, but it’s the conversations that carry it forward.
Stranger than Paradise (1984)
[image error]Set in New York City and starring musician John Lurie, who you’d recognize from Wild at Heart or Desperately Seeking Susan, and Richard Edson, who you’d recognize as the garage employee who joy-rides the Ferrari in Ferris Bueller, this is another distinctly Generation X road movie, as two Hungarian cousins leave New York City to visit their aunt in Cleveland. Of course, it goes further than that.
Living in Oblivion (1995)
Self-described as a “film about filmmaking,” this movie is a farce about the making of a low-budget movie. I remember reading about this in Village Voice when I subscribed in the mid-’90s but not actually seeing the movie until later. Of course, the cast is pure ’90s indie: Steve Buscemi, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, James LeGros . . . and even has Peter Dinklage who later became famous in Game of Thrones. If you find chaos funny, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t, you probably won’t.
Where the Day Takes You (1992)
Another one I saw back when Bravo! showed good movies, Where the Day Takes You tells the story of a group of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles led by a cool dude named King, played by Dermot Mulroney. The movie intersperses its main story with videotaped segments of King talking to a counselor about how he’d like to get off the street. Lara Flynn Boyle plays a new arrival on the scene who, of course, falls in love with King. It’s a pretty bleak movie, but not as bad as some on this list.
Near Dark (1987)
Like The Addiction, this is one of the lesser-known Generation X vampire movies. It is alternately slow-paced creepy and wildly violent. It lacks the Hollywood feel of Lost Boys, which came out the following year, but it’s better than a movie like 1985’s Fright Night, which was pretty hokey. This one has a small-town boy to fall in love with a sultry girl, played by Jenny Wright from The World According to Garp. But she turns out to be a vampire, and her homeless-punk-Winnebago family doesn’t like this new boy hanging around. Her father is played by Lance Henriksen, of Pumpkinhead fame, and her brother by Bill Paxton from Weird Science. The movie gets a little stupid and gory as it goes along, but hey, it’s a 1980s horror movie.
At Close Range (1986)
Set in the late ’70s in rural Pennsylvania, this film has Sean Penn playing Christopher Walken’s son in a crime thriller that is based on a true story. This was also a film that paired Penn on screen with Madonna, who did the movie’s main song, “Live to Tell.” At Close Range is gritty and tough in its portrayal of cold-blooded killers in a crime family that specializes in the theft of farm equipment, but Penn’s character Brad Whitewood, Jr. finds out that he’s in over his head when he and his friends try to get in the same racket.
Less Than Zero (1987)
I don’t know how I made my first list of ten Gen-X movies without mentioning this one, based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel. I remember seeing Less Than Zero when I was a teenager and thinking that LA looked so cool— until Robert Downey, Jr.’s character had to become a gay prostitute to work off his drug debt. Less Than Zero had Jami Gertz the year before she starred in Lost Boys and Andrew McCarthy the year after Pretty in Pink. It also has a killer soundtrack, wacky ’80s fashion, stacked TV sets, and a red 1959 Corvette convertible. It’s probably the most Hollywood of the movies I’ve listed, but because it’s also dark and dated, it doesn’t get as much play these days.
December 27, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “10 Gen-X Movies You’ve Probably Forgotten (or Never Seen)”
When the subject of Generation-X films comes up, everybody remembers the John Hughes classics The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, and Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything and Singles, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Chasing Amy. A more attentive movie buff might also remember Repo Man or Kids or Blue Velvet, or there’s even the possibility that a few of you wandered naively into The Crying Game or Paris is Burning and never have been able to forget what you saw. Or maybe you went out on a limb once or twice back in the ’80s and ’90s and tried to watch those cool new movies people were talking about, like Slacker. But there’s so much more . . . and these ten are ones you might have overlooked, or if you didn’t overlook them, you might have wished you had.
Bad Boys (1983)
This movie about life in a juvenile prison for boys is both dark and brutal. Sean Penn has the lead role, playing Mick O’Brien, who is incarcerated for killing his street rival’s brother. In prison, actors Esai Morales and Clancy Brown play two really scary teenagers who target Mick. Any male Gen-Xer who watched this one on cable TV from the comfort of his living room couch had only one thought, I don’t ever want to end up in prison.
December 26, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Old Agrarian-ness of a New Ethos”
[image error]In “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision,” originally published in 1980 in Virginia Quarterly Review and re-published online in 2003, the critic Lucinda H. Mackethan writes about “a group of Southern Americans profoundly disturbed by the lack of humane values operating in their world.” She was referring to the contributing authors in the Southern classic I’ll Take My Stand, a small group of perhaps overly nostalgic academics, poets, and critics who looked on a Northern-dominated, heavily industrial country with disdain. But in that phrase, she could have been writing about a lot of modern Southerners, from gun-loving ultra-conservative neophobes to the Gen-Xers who’ve started organic CSAs, letterpress shops, and microbreweries.
Though I had known about I’ll Take My Stand as one of the classics of Southern studies, I hadn’t taken the time to read it until recent years. A weathered copy of a 1977 edition with a preface by Louis D. Rubin, Jr. fell into my hands, and I admittedly let it sit a while before I took it on. This collection of Southern “agrarian” essays has been regarded by some readers as the quaint visions of some hopeless romantics and by other readers as a group of diatribes that are basically racist and elitist in their Depression-era conservatism. By picking and choosing passages, a critical reader could justify either those perspectives.
December 24, 2019
Dirty Boots: “Where there is no love, put love” no
[image error]Among the most popular posts on this blog, two that get read quite often are a pair from 2013 about reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography The Long Loneliness. Not long ago, I re-read those posts myself and was reminded of a passage that I quoted there, one I hadn’t thought of in some time: “where there is no love, put love and you will find love.”
When I read or hear sayings like that, I wonder why doing something so simple can be so difficult. I think that it’s because other responses, rooted in self-preservation, come more naturally when we find ourselves in situations where there is no love: walking away, pretending not to notice, blaming someone, acting ugly back, complaining later. I used to work for an old veterinarian who would say, “Foster, it’s easy to be nice to nice people.” But it’s hard to be nice to unfriendly, unpleasant, or problematic people, and before we can interject something positive — call it love, if you want — into a negative situation, we often consider our own feelings, our own fears, our own well-being first. Then, if those personal concerns seem satisfactory, we may allow ourselves to be a small light in the otherwise-darkness.
Here at Christmas, we have reminders about the power of light in the otherwise-darkness, about how we should put love where there is no love. We top our Christmas trees with a star to remind us of the star that the wise men followed to find Jesus, and we sing about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer making Santa’s delivery possible during a dark, winter storm. In both cases, there was darkness to be traversed on the way something worthwhile, something greater than the self.
[image error]I know that this is a hard thing to do, because I struggle with it, too. I think we all do. It’s easier to go about our business, worry about ourselves, be nice to nice people, and avoid the not-nice people. It’s hard to abide by Dorothy Day’s simple advice . . . But Day was a true Christian, a woman who turned away from a selfish life to create and lead a movement for Christian charity. Day provided light with her life and with her writings. She put love where there was no love. Notwithstanding her deep personal sacrifices, which few of us are willing to make, that, at least, seems worthy of emulation.
I hope that everyone has a Merry Christmas.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.
December 22, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Teach.”
On the evening that my students and I met the traveling students from Phillips Exeter Academy for the first time, their teacher Olutoyin Augustus-Ikwuakor had a sheet full of activities planned for our two-hour preliminary session. Mrs. Augustus-Ikwuakor and I had corresponded in the spring about their trip from New Hampshire to Alabama, where they would spend four days in late November learning about social justice and Civil Rights issues, and she wanted her students to meet and collaborate with some local students. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, we were gathered in their hotel’s conference room to eat dinner together, to get to know each other, and to do some educational groundwork. As we looked over her list of activities, I asked if I could have a few minutes to talk with them about Southern history, and she replied, a little surprised, “Oh, you want to teach?”
I did want to teach. The history of the Deep South, with respect to social justice issues, cannot be approached casually, for that can easily lead to something like shell-shock. The brutality of this history is evident immediately to anyone who comes to survey a broad spectrum of museum exhibits that include graphic images of the burnt and battered bodies of lynching victims and scenes of police-led mob violence. This would be a lot to digest for a group of teenagers from New England who had given up the latter half of their two-week Thanksgiving break, and for my students, some of whom had only encountered the sanitized overviews in social studies textbooks and school-lunchroom pow-wows that celebrate Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. No, this was the real stuff. What these 27 students would see and hear constitutes the reasons that the Civil Rights movement had to happen, and needs to continue.
December 21, 2019
Saturday Morning Reruns: “Field Trips to Nowhere”
[image error]As our bus rolled down rural Highway 14, which sprawls loosely between Selma, Alabama and the iconic Sprott Post Office, we passed the sign for Hamburg, the tiny farming community where Mary Ward Brown wrote her brilliant stories and memoir, and I tried to apprise the busload of students of it. The few who heard me over the roar of the charter bus turned their heads vaguely as we passed the inauspicious left turn. A few then looked back at me, waiting for more, while others told their classmates who hadn’t heard me what I’d just said. It was hard to teach in such a setting, but I tried anyway.
We had just visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where I had my students start on the downtown Selma side and walk the arc of the bridge so they could get a physical sense how the marchers in 1965 could not see the small army of state troopers on the other side until it was too late to turn back. After a brief stop in the visitors center, they also got to browse the low-slung lobby of the supposedly haunted St. James Hotel and peer into the lush, dark courtyard at the center of that pre-Civil War structure. Now, we were rolling down a two-lane back road, moving further northwest into Alabama’s Black Belt.
December 20, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Where did twenty years go?”
[image error]I graduated from college twenty years ago this month. I’d like to say that, back then, I was fresh-faced and optimistic, ready to take on the world, but that’s not true. I was twenty-two, heavy-bearded, skinny, generally pale, and still lived with my mother. I had a dead-end job at a veterinarian’s office and drove a 1983 Toyota Celica hatchback, which my insurance company regarded as a “sports car,” even though it had slung a rod during the only road trip I ever tried to take it on. (The seal on the large back window had also rotted, and the rain that collected in the spare-tire well sloshed around every time I turned.) Let’s just say that the world was not my oyster— and I knew it.
After walking across the stage in AUM’s gymnasium in December 1996, my three realities didn’t really mesh well together: a degree in English, which many people in the Deep South regard as a prime example of useless erudition; five or six years of work experience doing menial labor in a variety of settings; and an unrepentantly surly attitude about how my life had gone so far. So I took those skills into the one field where they would be appreciated: the bar business.
My first job after college was working the door at an all-night jazz-and-blues bar called 1048. A friend worked there as a bartender, and she called the week I graduated to ask if I wanted a job. Somebody had just quit, and December was always busy with college students coming home for the break. They needed somebody right now. So, in addition to my vet’s office job, I started spending every Friday and Saturday night from 9 PM until 2 AM standing in the cold, taking up five-dollar bills, and arguing with people whose friends had gotten in before the bar reached capacity. For my trouble, I earned $35 and two free drinks. It felt like Heaven.
December 19, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “How Cool It Was— Back Then”
There’s been a lot of heavy stuff to write about lately in the Deep South . . . race in politics, controversial legislation, and the death of a talented writer. Here it is, the heart of the winter, nearly a full month into the dead season with more than two months still to go until spring, and I’m looking for something good to talk about.
[image error]So, what better way to take my mind off the mean ol’ present by waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ past. I’m about a half a year late writing about this one, but not too long ago I read that last May marked the 35th anniversary of the release of the classically zany film depiction of the Deep South in the late ’70s, Smokey and the Bandit, starring Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed and Jackie Gleason. If you’ve never seen this movie, shame on you! And frankly, the only thing I respect less than a Southerner who has never seen this movie is a Southerner who has only seen the censored TBS version that used to air on lazy Saturday afternoons, the version where Sheriff Buford T. Justice keeps using the overdubbed, heavily censored epithet “scum bum” (in the place of “sumbitch”).
December 18, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Panic On!”
[image error]Can you believe it has been ten years since Mike Houser died? What began thirty years ago as a pair of guys who liked to play music together – John Bell and Mike Houser – has grown exponentially into one of modern Southern culture’s musical mainstays. Sadly, Houser succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2002, but he’s still with us in a lot of ways— from his brilliant playing on Widespread Panic’s albums and in concerts to those stickers with his sitting-down-to-play silhouette that I see on the back of a car every now and then.
I first saw Widespread Panic live back in the early 1990s at an outdoor venue in southern Montgomery County called Sandy Creek, which was basically an open field down a one-lane dirt road, and at the time I had no idea who they were. I had seen this bright orange poster on a phone pole for a band that was playing out there and decided to go. Shows at Sandy Creek always made for a good time. Bringing your own cooler was easy enough, and the crowds contained an unpredictably eclectic mix of rednecks, stoners, college students, bikers, undercover cops and other sundry characters. But Sandy Creek is closed now, and I don’t remember much about that show at all . . .
