Remember My Name

Fame
Director: Alan Parker
Cast: Irene Cara, Paul McCrane, Anne Meara
Released: May 16, 1980

Oscar nominations:
Best Editing - lost to Raging Bull
Best Score - Michael Gore (won)
Best Original Song - Michael Gore and Leslie Gore for "Fame" (won)
Best Original Song - Michael Gore and Leslie Gore for "Out Here On My Own"
Best Sound - lost to The Empire Strike Back
Best Adapted Screenplay - Christopher Gore (lost to Bo Goldman for Melvin and Howard)

I wonder what Freddie Prinze Jr. thinks about this movie. Because his dad is sure mentioned often throughout it. I've heard of Fame, but I've never seen it until now. The closest comparison I can come up for it is Center Stage or Camp. This is about the New York City High School for the Performing Arts (a bit of a mouthful for a school name!) that focuses on the arts such as acting, dance, and music for young students. We start with the auditions so presumably it's very prestigious to get in, but don't let that fool you...this is no Julliard. First of all, a lot of the kids who made it weren't that great as it feels like they will take anybody and it seems like this school is way overcrowded, so I don't think they're very exclusive in who they choose! We see a lot of different kids auditioning and literally everyone but one makes it into the damn school! I guess they had to have somebody not make it so we get a scene of what that looks like. 

It doesn't surprise me that this was a TV show in the '80s...it ran for six seasons. I've never seen one second of it so I don't know anything about it, but I assume it was a precursor to Glee with all the singing and dancing. The movie follows a handful of students through all four years of their high school career and even at a little over two hours long, there still seems to be a lot of unanswered questions. There's just too many characters and subplots to squeeze into a 2 plus hour movie. The movie does a good job of showing how gritty New York looked in the late '70s.

Let's meet all the characters we follow, shall we? Most of them intermingle with each other. There's Doris, a meek, shy girl who auditions by singing. She's okay at best, but her mother is crying during her audition, I mean tears are streaming down her face like her daughter is freakin' Adele or something. I know she's her mother, so of course she's going to think her daughter is the next big thing, but my God! Her reactions is ridiculous! When we first meet her, Doris has the worst hairstyle I have ever seen in any movie, ever. Her hair is curly, she has bangs, and she's wearing pigtails. It's like, no, honey, no. All three of those should never be on one person. This movie was filmed in 1979, so of course we're going to see a lot of atrocious hairstyles and clothes. Her hair does get a little better once she starts school. Speaking of people with bad hair, she meets Montgomery (played by Paul McCrane, the only member of the young cast I was familiar with...he would go on to have a pretty good TV career; he played Dr. Romano on ER and Jack Bauer's brother on 24), another acting student, who has this curly red mop on his head that looks good on nobody. Later on in the movie, it gets a little more manageable but I guess they'e trying to tell us the people with bad haircuts are the ones with no friends? Doris meets Montgomery on the steps outside the lunch room and they bond over being the only students not in the lunchroom at the time. Seriously, that lunchroom crowd was ridiculous. This school is obviously overcrowded (as they will literally let anybody in!) and maybe this was before schools divided lunches into groups, but every freaking student at this school eats lunch at the same time (and they only have a half hour!) From Doris's pov, we see how crowded and chaotic the cafeteria is. The musicians are practicing their instruments, the dancers are stretching, the actors are rehearsing, there are students reading or working on homework (how can they even concentrate, I don't know!), but most of them are just talking and horsing around. This is one of about four or five dance/song numbers where a little ditty is sung about the lunch lady and the food she serves. Yes, it is as stupid as it sounds. Doris can't move an inch without bumping into somebody so that's when she goes out in the hall and sees Montgomery on the steps and they become friends. They practice acting exercises with each other and this includes a scene where they're walking down a busy street and Doris is pretending to be blind and is holding a walking stick while Montgomery is assisting her. Someone puts a quarter in a cup she's holding and she offers to buy Montgomery a cup of coffee...with a quarter! Well, we have certainly come a long way since 1980!

Rounding out the acting posse is Ralph Garci who embellishes his resume. He's the jerk of the group and at a stand-up comedy routine (where he is painfully unfunny...and I don't think that was supposed to be intentional!), he claims he is a "professional asshole." I always assumed Fame was a light-hearted song and dance movie, but this movie gets dark. Ralph has a little sister who gets "attacked" by some junkie. Whether that means physically or sexually or what, I don't know, but that was a place where I didn't expect the movie to go. He starts dating Doris and they go see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Doris, who has always been shy, is super proud of herself when she goes up front to dance to The Time Warp...where there are about fifteen other people up there dancing too. Not that big of a deal, Doris, excuse me, Dominique. She wants to change her name to Dominique DuPont to sound young.

The acting teacher tells that that 50,000 people call themselves actors, but only 500 make a living at it. He wants his students to think of their most painful memory and give a monologue about it. No, thank you. Montgomery talks about his sexuality and comes out and Ralph talks about when his idol, Freddie Prinze, died. This is about one of four mentions when he's mentioned. Well, at least in 19 years he can see his son star in She's All That! Apparently he went to the school they attend so I guess this is a real school? I should mention this happens before his sister is brutally attacked.

Irene Cara plays Coco, an up and coming dancer/singer. Obviously Irene Cara is probably best known for singing "What a Feeling" from Flashdance which is an amazing song. She also sings the title song from this movie, which, I admit, is catchy, but it is so outdated with all the synthesizers. It also won the Oscar for Best Song over "9 to 5" by Dolly Parton which I think is ridiculous. You never hear "Fame" anymore on the radio, but they'll still play "9 to 5". I think the Academy was on the wrong side of history with that choice. Another song from Fame was also nominated, so I'm surprised they didn't split the votes.

Bruno Martelli, a music student who likes to play around with electronic music (and carries all these bulking machines and amps around all the time...imagine what he could do in the day and age with a Mac!) is the one who created the music and his father, a taxi driver, stops in front of the school and blares the song from the speakers on top of his cab. All the students come out and start dancing and singing....there must be about 200 of these idiots stopping traffic in the middle of the day as they jump up on cars and are just in the way while they get honked at. This scene infuriated me. I absolutely hate when there's any traffic and if a bunch of effing teenagers started streaming out of their school and onto the street and were holding up traffic because they had to dance to a song....I'd be running them over. There is no need to hold up traffic in a busy city. Absolutely ridiculous. This one guy in a truck yells "Move your f*cking parade!" and I was totally on his side.

Coco meets this sleazy guy at a diner who recognizes her as a dancer from some Broadway play and tells her she could go on to better things because she has a "beautiful face and a delicious figure"....eww....He wants to invite her to a screen testing and, seriously, how naive is this girl? Of course he ends up being some amateur porno director and just wants to film her with her top off....which she does, while crying the entire time.

Leroy is a character who originally wasn't auditioning. He was there to help a friend who was...she's literally the only person who doesn't get in and she is pissed when she finds out. I don't blame her, I would be pissed too if everyone else who auditioned got it and they danced just as crappily as I did! My gaydar was pinging hard on Leroy...he was wearing these short shorts and this weird cropped vest and in another scene he's wearing a crop top with his name on it. However, all the women were falling over themselves for him while he was dancing..he was rubbing his crotch, then his butt. Seriously, is that supposed to be a turn on? It's really gross. His audition scene is the only scene Debbie Allen is in. She was much more of a bigger component on the TV show. (Janet Jackson was also on the TV show). Every girl seems to be in love with him and he gets a rich girl named Hilary pregnant and she has to get an abortion. It was obvious they cast the girl as a dancer first because she was a great dancer, but a terrible actress!


Leroy clashes with an English teacher named Mrs. Sherwood played by the late Anne Meara (aka Ben Stiller's mom). She doesn't like him because he brings his "ghetto blaster" (her words!) which are headphones with what looks to be a turn table on his desk. Seriously, these late '70 kids had it ROUGH! And I thought having a discman was a pain in the ass! She tells Leroy that if he can't pass his academic classes, he can't dance. We find out that he can't read...but since he can dance, he can get in! There is one crazy scene where Leroy gets super mad at Mrs. Sherwood, calls her a f**king b*tch, then proceeds to go out in the hall and start breaking all these glass trophy cases...and NOTHING HAPPENS TO HIM! No suspension, no being expelled, nothing. It is absolutely asinine. This school is way too tolerant of their students. Later on, they will come to an understanding, although it will take a few more screaming matches to get there.

Then we have another dancer, Lisa, who is always being chastised by the dance teacher for "not sweating enough" and while she enjoys dancing, isn't ambitious about it enough to make it into a career. The teacher tells her she's not a good fit for the class and while at a subway station, Lisa is about to walk in front of an oncoming train, but at the last minute just kicked her dance clothes on the tracks.

I think I mentioned everybody. As you can see, there are a lot of characters and some get a lot more screen time than others.

The movie ends with the graduation ceremony where we the final song and dance scene.I assume it's the graduation ceremony, but nobody is wearing their robes and caps. I guess there was a re-make of this film in 2009 which I had no idea. 

What a Way To Make a Living

9 to 5

Director: Colin Higgins

Cast: Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Dabney Coleman

Released: December 19, 1980

Oscar nominations:

Best Original Song - Dolly Parton for "Nine to Five" (Lost to Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford for "Fame")

I have long been familiar with the snappy song, "Nine to Five" sung by Dolly Parton, but had never seen the movie she had sung it for and starred in until just recently. While I knew it was a workplace comedy, I really never knew what exactly was about and now I think that Horrible Bosses got its inspiration from it...although that movie was a lot darker! 

Violet (Lily Tomlin), Judy (Jane Fonda), and Doralee (Dolly Parton) all work at a place called Consolidated Companies and their boss, Mr. Hart (Dabney Coleman) is, and I quote, "a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot." I'm not really sure what they do at this place, but there's lots of writing of reports and answering of calls and making of copies. 

Violet has been at the company for eleven years. She has by far the most experience out of anyone else and knows everything there is to know about the company. She is expecting to be rewarded with the big promotion Mr. Hart will be giving to someone soon. Judy is the new woman at the company and Violet shows her around and introduces her to everyone and warns her about Mr. Hart and tells her to watch out for Roz, the office snitch who goes and tattles on Mr. Hart anytime she hears a piece of gossip. Doralee is Mr. Hart's secretary and everyone hates her because they think she's sleeping with the boss. He sexually harasses her and when she tells him that she's a married woman, his reply is that he's married too and that's what makes it perfect for them to have an affair. 

Violet is beyond furious when she learns that the promotion has gone to a man who has been at the company five years less than her. Mr. Hart explains to her that he got the job because people would rather deal with a man than a woman in that particular situation (whichever that might be...I'm not sure what the promotion was for!). Judy is furious at Mr. Hart when a woman gets fired for being overheard by Roz that they are getting unfair wages. Doralee is furious when she learns that Mr. Hart has been spreading rumors that they are having an affair. The three woman get a drink, then later smoke a joint and share their fantasies about getting even with their jerk boss. Judy's fantasy is to hunt him down and mount his head as a trophy kill on his office wall (where he keeps his other trophy kills like deer). I would have thought this would be more apt to Doralee's fantasy because she's the one who keeps a gun in her purse! (She is from Texas, after all!) She threatens Mr. Hart that if he continues to tell people they are having an affair, she'll take her gun and change him from a rooster to a hen with one shot! Doralee's fantasy is that she wants to turn the tables on Mr. Hart and give him "a taste of his own medicine" and be the one to sexually harass him and oogle his body. This seems like a lame fantasy. I would imagine somebody in her position would rather call out their harasser as being the pig they are. Although at the end of her fantasy, she's roasting him over a fire like a pig. Violet's fantasy is that she's like Snow White (dressed in a similar costume) and Mr. Hart is akin to the Evil Queen and she poisons his morning coffee. There are animated animals in her fantasy which I'm impressed they could do way back in 1980. I didn't think being able to mix live action and animation was achieved until 1988 with Who Framed Roger Rabbit? 

The next day, Mr. Hart is rushed to the hospital right after Violet gives him his coffee. She freaks out and thinks she's poisoned him when she realizes she's accidentally put rat poison in his coffee instead of the Sweet and Low. You see, the rat poison and Sweet and Low are both kept in boxes of the same color and size and are kept in the same cabinet on the same shelf...wtf? I don't know if this is just a plot device or if people were really that stupid in the early '80s and kept food and poison in the same cabinet! I'm hoping and guessing it's the former! What really happened is that Mr. Hart fell out of his chair and hit his head. He had been having trouble with his office chair in prior scenes. He spilled his coffee and never drank it, but Violet has no idea and she and Judy rush to the hospital where Doralee took him.

Mr. Hart is fine and walks out and in the same room he was in, they bring in a man they're trying to revive, but he dies. The women arrive when the doctor talks to a police officer telling him the man in the room has died and he thinks it was poisoning. This mistaken identity reminded me of the scene in Adventures in Baby-Sitting when the doctor tells Elisabeth Shue that the young man with the stab wound died, but he was actually talking about another person and not Brad. Violet is sure this means jail time for her and wants to get rid of the body before they can do an autopsy on it and confirm that it was indeed poisoning. When no one's looking, she takes the body on the gurney and wheels it to her car and puts it in the trunk. They find out the body isn't Mr. Hart, and confused, sneak it back to the hospital. 

The next day all the women are confused, but relieved when Mr. Hart comes to work, quite alive. They discuss the matter in the bathroom and are glad to get on with their lives. They had checked under the stalls and nobody was in any of them, but when they leave we see Roz the snitch had been there the whole time with her feet up on the toilet taking notes with toilet paper! OMG, is this woman for real? I would hate to work with someone like her! She, of course, snitches to Mr. Hart and he confronts the women and threatens to have them all prosecuted for attempting to kill him and will only forget about it if Doralee sleeps with him. 

During this time, Mr. Hart's wife is on a cruise so the women decide to kidnap him in his own house. They keep him tied up (though he is free to move around in the bedroom) and bring him his meals and always have somebody at the house to watch him. They find a way to blackmail him when Violet discovers he's been embezzling money and want to keep him tied up until they have evidence to prove it. Their only obstacle is Roz because after a few days she starts to get suspicious on where Mr. Hart is since she sees him every day. They finally send her to Paris when they tell her Mr. Hart wants her to go there to learn French. (I don't know why you would have to go all the way there just to learn the language...haven't these people ever heard of Rosetta Stone? Haha!) 

While Mr. Hart is "away", the three women pretty much run the place and make up new rules and even give the office a new makeover. The woman who was fired unfairly is given her job back and a daycare center is put in. When Mr. Hart is finally released after the women know he will not snitch on them, he gives the Chairman of the Board a tour of the places and all its new amenities even though Violet has to explain everything since Mr. Hart has no idea about any of it. The Chairman is so impressed by what Mr. Hart did that he sends him to Brazil to oversee their operation. Everyone is happy except for Roz who never got to say goodbye to him.

When this movie came out, Dolly Parton was 34, Lily Tomlin was 41, and Jane Fonda was 43. With the huge Granny glasses and the awful old lady hair cut she has, I would have guessed Jane Fonda to be closer to the age she is now - which is nearly 80! I don't know why people dressed so horribly and had terrible hair cuts in the early '80s...why would you want to look two decades older than what you actually are? Don't get me wrong, I love the '80s, but I'm kind of glad I was a baby/little kid during it! 

Don't call him Shirley!

Airplane!

Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, Julie Hagerty, Robert Hays, Robert Stack, Peter Graves

Released: July 2, 1980

This is a movie I've seen in bits and pieces when it was on TV, but had never watched it in its entirety until just now. The only scene I can even recall from when I did watch a little bit of it was the Saturday Night Fever dance spoof scene and I only remember it because my brother tried to emulate the main guy when he was doing that move where he's squatting on the floor with his arms crossed and kicking his legs out. Of course this dance move is pretty much impossible without the use of your arms and so my brother could never do it. 

This is one of the most famous spoof movies out there, but because this movie came out before my time, I didn't know any of the movies that were being spoofed aside from the aforementioned Saturday Night Fever scene. I'm sure there are other movies spoofed that I would probably know, but just didn't realize. The jokes/gags are funny though some of them seem really antiquated (there's a scene right before the plane takes off and a guy right outside the pilot's window puts this contraption on the windowpane (and I should note that the window was open...which obviously you can't do on a real plane because that would be very bad!) At first I thought he was measuring the window, but then the pilot gives him what looks to be a credit card and the guy swipes it though the device. I had no idea what it was and figured it must be something of the time) or they were a bit racist (like the "translation" given for the two black guys speaking "jive" - although it was funny when that little old white lady said she could translate jive) or they were just a little bit dark (three passengers committed suicide because they couldn't stand listening to the main character's story of how he met the love of his life...I don't really get how that was suppose to be funny! It's not like the stories were that tedious!)

Ex-fighter-pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) is on Trans American Flight 209 from L.A. to Chicago. His ex-girlfriend, Elaine (Julie Hagerty), who he still has feelings for, is a flight attendant (or a stewardess as they were called in those days) on that flight. As we hear from the (apparently awful and tedious) stories that Striker told some of the passengers, they met during the war and fell in love. I was really confused what era this movie was set because they made it seem like he was in World War II, but then he meets Elaine while dancing to "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees and obviously they didn't have '70s disco music back then! Then I realized that it must be part of the joke.

The pilot was called Captain Oveur so he would say, "Captain Oveur, over" and the first officer was named Roger so everytime the Captain would say something to the air traffic control tower and end it with "Roger!", his co-pilot would say, "Huh?" When a young boy visits the cockpit, he outs the First Officer as being basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar which he repeatedly denies even though the boy finds a basketball on the floor and we later see "Roger" wearing basketball shorts and knee pads and sneakers. 

I noticed that the overhead compartments where the luggage is stored were just shelves - there were no actual compartments that you could open and close to store your belongings. I thought that was really weird because if there's even a little bit of turbulence, all that luggage is going to come spilling out and hurt somebody...so I don't know if this was a real thing back in then and people who designed planes were really stupid or if this was going to be a joke that was going to pay off later. We do see the plane go in a nosedive, but there was only two pieces of luggage that fell! So maybe that was the joke? I don't know; I didn't get that. But passengers did get hit in the head with an object when a flight attendant asks the nun if she can borrow her guitar to sing to the sick girl on the gurney and when she takes it, she whacks everyone in the head when she brings it down the aisle. 

Leslie Nielsen plays an on-flight doctor ("Surely you can do something doctor"; "Don't call me Shirley!") and after everybody who ate the fish for dinner gets food poisoning, he tells another flight attendant that they need to get everybody to a hospital and when she replies with, "Hospital? What is it?" (meaning what was wrong) and he replies with, "It's that big building where all the sick people go." They had a lot of jokes like that one and by the third one, it wasn't that funny anymore! The ongoing joke that worked better was when the the supervisor at the air traffic control tower (played by Lloyd Bridges) keeps exclaiming things like, "I picked a hell of a week to quit smoking!" or "I picked a hell of a week to quit drinking!" There was about four or five of those ongoing jokes. 

I don't know what the in-flight movie was, but it showed a plane crashing and bursting into flames! 

As I mentioned earlier, everyone on the plane who had fish for dinner gets food poising and passes out (although by the time they crash land, most every one is awake!) and this includes the captain, first officer, and the flight engineer and their passed out bodies are dragged through the aisle to the back of the plane in front of all the passengers. And even though the only choices were fish or chicken, the doctor states that he had the lasagna for dinner! 

Because they have no pilot, Elaine switches on the "auto-pilot" which is an inflatable pilot named Otto. But Otto isn't equipped to land the plane (you think!) and everyone is extremely sick and must be taken to a hospital as soon as possible. Over the intercom, Elaine asks a question that NO passenger on a plane ever wants to hear: "Is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?" This results in a huge panic scene where the passengers are fighting with each other and there's even a sword fight between two of them. Not only were there swords aboard this flight, but also a gun and gasoline and matches...yeah....

Striker is the only one who is equipped to land the plane (even though he has a fear of flying from being traumatized by an event in the war where he lost six (actually seven according to Elaine!) men). He is also one of the very few who didn't eat the fish. It's a little touch and go, but he manages to land, er, crash land the plane! 

Something I like to do before watching a movie is look through its IMDb page and see if there are any character actors that I might recognize. Honestly, the only person I knew from this movie was Leslie Nielsen and I knew Lloyd Bridges is the father of Beau and Jeff, but I wouldn't have known that it was him if I didn't know if he was in it. I did see a name I recognized: Jonathan Banks. I kept my eye out on him, but I never did see him in the movie. This is probably because this movie came out over 30 years ago and I'm familiar with him looking like Mike Ehrmantraut. He's also in only one scene as an air traffic controller. Now, if we remember our Breaking Bad lore, Jane's dad was also an air traffic controller and stupidly goes to work after his daughter is found dead and causes a mid-air collision because his mind is elsewhere. As for Airplane!, the movie never gets that dire! It's a comedy, after all!