Merry almost-Christmas! Are you listening to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You?” No? Then turn on any  adult contemporary radio station and wait five seconds.

As we zoom toward the Yule, I’m reposting the tribute I wrote last year to Carey’s contemporary Christmas classic. Read it again for the first time!

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It’s December! This is my birthday month and Christmas month. I’ve already set the DVR to record every claymation holiday special.

To kick off the best four weeks of the year, I’m making a spirited claim: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is the only significant Christmas song written since 1984.

(see why…)
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Old songs. Old friends. You know what I mean. One Saturday afternoon, you decide to put those Tori CDs on your iPod, so you dig your CaseLogic out of your bedroom closet. As you’re flipping through the plastic pages—CDs on the front side, booklets on the back—you stumble across an album that you haven’t thought about in years.

And then you’re  in high school again. You’re taking the back road to Laura’s house just so you can roll down your windows and sing along with this one amazing song without shouting over the interstate.

You play the forgotten CD. You don’t expect anything, really, except a wave of nostalgia, but then… damn! The album is great. It isn’t just old songs. It’s old friends.

This happened to me when I tumbled back into Mercury Poise, a best-of collection from alt-rock singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked. If you know her music, then get ready to relive the dream. If you don’t, then let me introduce you to a lovely lady.

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Is there a movie that you used to love, back in the day? Maybe you and your brother would watch it over and over and over, and you just knew it would be your favorite forever? Only now you’re afraid to re-watch, for fear it won’t hold up at all?

During last week’s discussion of the Best Picture Expansion Project for 1994, Gonzalo and Pristine both broached this subject, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Because lord knows, there are a few movies I am certain should live only in my memory.

Like, I used to love The Care Bears Movie, where this magician’s assistant gets possessed by an evil book at a summer camp (or something like that.) I remember thinking it was cool that there was an evil spell book that talked, and I remember having a serious crush on the magician’s assistant. (This is the only picture I can find of him, but trust me, when he wasn’t looking crazy, he was making my six year-old heart just melt.)

Something tells me, though, that The Care Bears Movie would be excruciating today. It features a character named Funshine Bear.

The film that started this whole discussion last week was Reality Bites, which I saw in the theatre in 1994. About three minutes in, I decided it was showing me the ideal vision of my future. I needed to be that cool when I was twenty two.

I watched the movie again over the weekend (I hadn’t seen it in thirteen years), and… it’s not a classic. Unlike Gonzalo, I don’t think it’s terrible, but it certainly feels like a movie written and directed by people who are just discovering the concept of pacing.

Also? Winona Ryder’s character should not turn down the offer to develop a show at a major television network, just so she can hang out with scuzzy Ethan Hawke. Ben Stiller may not be offering her a perfect world, but he is offering an amazing professional opportunity. She doesn’t have to date him, but she should sure as hell work with him.

But… of course I think that, right? I’m thirty, not fifteen.

So maybe I shouldn’t have re-watched Reality Bites. Maybe I should have  kept listening to “Stay (I Missed You)” (still a great song) and let the movie live on in my heart.

How about you? Which movies need to stay in your past?

Last night in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I attended a sing-along screening of Purple Rain, the film that won Prince an Oscar and cemented his reputation as a weird-but-wonderful genius. I knew the songs, of course, but I had never seen the movie, so I was interested to see what I’d been missing.

And… um… did you know that Purple Rain is really fucked up? Like, really fucked up. Like in one scene, The Kid (the name of Prince’s semiautobiographical character) convinces his new squeeze Apollonia to strip and dive into a lake. But then he tells her that she dove into the wrong lake before driving away on a purple motorcycle. Then he drives back and tells her to hop on the back of his chopper, but when she tries to get on, he pulls forward at the last minute. Psych! And this treatment makes her love him, so she buys him an expensive white guitar.

Then Prince beats her up. Twice. But it’s okay? Apparently? Since he’s just mimicking his abusive father? The movie suggests that since the Kid feels bad about the abuse, it’s almost forgivable.

At any rate, Apollonia stays with him. Then Daddy tries to kill himself, the Kid discovers a long-lost box of Daddy’s sheet music, and everyone wears mirrored sunglasses.

Meanwhile, there are all these subplots involving Morris Day and members of The Revolution, Prince’s band at the time. And sprinkled in between that are these amazing scenes of Prince and the Revolution performing at  a Minneapolis club. Prince humps speakers and does pirouettes and reminds us that he will always, always be sexier than we are, and yes that is his crotch in our faces, and yes he is singing falsetto, and yes we like it.

And then the “plot” resolves with Prince embracing his feminine side. As in, he starts the movie beating up his girlfriend and refusing to listen to the music that his bandmates Wendy and Lisa have written. But after his dad’s suicide attempt, he listens to one of Wendy and Lisa’s songs, and it changes him. He writes lyrics to their melody, and it becomes “Purple Rain.” Everyone at the club loves the new jam, and for the first time in the movie, the Kid decides to play more than one number for his adoring audience. After he opens up to his fans, we see a montage of him getting back together with Apollonia, and then there’s the final scene: The Kid jumps on top of a speaker during the song “Baby I’m a Star,” grabs a hidden guitar, and points its neck over the crowd. Then the guitar spurts water on everyone.

As in, the guitar has a big orgasm on Prince’s fans.

So… by embracing a woman’s creative powers, the Kid also taps into his own masculine energy. Art and sex fuse into an androgynous whole, and the man who was an abuser becomes a stronger, more feminine hero. The moral: Man + Woman = Completion. Man – Woman = Suffering and Abuse.

And that’s kind of a cool message… but it’s also kind of confusing. The way Prince’s songs are confusing. (Have you ever really listened to his lyrics?)

As befuddled as I am, however, I’m glad I saw Purple Rain. It gives me a new grasp on what the eighties let people get away with.

One of my most vivid moviegoing memories comes from seeing Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It was 1991. I was 12. I was at the movie with my dad and my uncle, and we were all enjoying the swashbuckling good times. Apparently, though, the rest of the audience was enjoying them even more than we were, because when the film ended, a large portion of the crowd burst into applause.

Sidebar: Isn’t it strange to remember that Kevin Costner was once the kind of movie star who could get people not only to see his pictures, but also to applaud when they were over? Oh Ozymandias! Your once-mighty visage is now buried in the sand!

But I digress. My point is not that glory fades. My point is that way back in 1991, I was shocked that folks were applauding for artists who couldn’t possibly hear them. As a twelve year-old, I judged those clappers, and I judged them hard.

It wasn’t until I saw the Dreamgirls movie in 2006 that I understood their response. When Jennifer Hudson finished singing “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” it didn’t matter  that I was in a movie theater in a Michigan shopping mall, or that J-Hud was probably thousands of miles away. Her performance moved me so much that I had to express myself. So I clapped for the woman on screen.

We applaud so much in Western culture that we can forget why it’s a meaningful act. When we do it sincerely, we’re not just telling artists (or athletes or politicians) that we appreciate them. Our applause is not just about them. It’s also about us… about the rush we feel when we encounter something exceptional. A truly exhilarating experience builds up in us like pressure, and that energy demands to be pushed forward and shared with those around us. 

I’m describing a religious experience, you know? If we get moved in church, we can shout or raise our hands or speak in tongues. If we get moved in a secular space, at the altar of an artwork, we can cry or laugh… or we can applaud. We can pound our hands together until the wildness in our bodies has calmed.

As I’m describing it, I’m aware of how few experiences have demanded this applause, this true applause from me. Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls. Hairspray  and Mary Stuart and August: Osage County on Broadway. The reunion episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, when RuPaul goes kabuki on those bitches and tells them to love themselves more.

For me, those were big experiences. (Yes, including the Drag Race reunion.) They manifested passions I often feel but can rarely express. I was grateful to Jennifer Hudson for belting out her wild heartbreak. I was grateful to RuPaul for defending self-respect with so much fury. I was grateful to all those artists for allowing me to witness a major emotion… to see it in front of me and so comprehend it more fully than I can when it’s swirling around in my chest.

True, I didn’t feel that passion during Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but now I respect the people who did.

My friends’  Facebook updates suggest that not everyone loved this week’s season finale of Lost, but I sure did! I’d call that some excellent television, y’all, and if Elizabeth Mitchell (Juliet) and Michael Emerson (Ben) don’t win Emmys, then I will go to Helen Hunt’s house, steal two of her 449 award statues, swaddle them in bubble wrap, stick them in FedEx envelopes, toss in two handfuls of Hershey’s Hugs, and mail them to “Liz and Mike c/o Bad Robot.”

Don’t worry… I’ll leave a few Hugs for Helen Hunt as well.

After the jump, I’ll discuss one reason the finale inspired me to pilfer Emmys. If you haven’t yet watched, do not keep reading.

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There were many things I enjoyed about the new Star Trek movie, such as…

• Zoe Saldana’s whip-smart appeal as Uhura.
• The Romulan villain’s effectively “human” backstory.
• The fact that when the actors were in close-up, you could see their pores and blemishes, which made them seem like real people.

Nothing surprised me more, however, than my deep delight at seeing Winona Ryder on screen.

After the jump, let’s remember her glory years.

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Lana LoRusso not only works in media, but also runs the fantastic pop culture website The Lanalogue.

Today, she is kind enough to give us seven, count ‘em, seven reasons to love Friday Night Lights.

Take it away, Lana!

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You guys, I can’t believe I just learned about this. In 2007 Shirley Bassey covered Pink’s “Get the Party Started.” This was the result:

Um… pardon me? Is this really happening? Dame Shirley (yes, she’s a Dame) turns the dirty-dancing original into an opulent disco track that delights and confounds me.

But it’s not the retro synth-n-strings that make her version so deliciously bizarre. It’s the fact the she crisply articulates every syllable of every word. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone pronounce the “g” in a word like “coming” so clearly, even in regular speech, so hearing it in a pop song is crazy. It’s like the Queen of England deciding to shake her tailfeather.

However, Bassey doesn’t seem like your grandma trying to prove she’s hip. For one thing, she’s still got an amazing voice, which goes a long way to validate her performance, and for another, she’s clearly aware that she is not typically the kind of perfomrer who would sing a Pink song. The way she chuckles about the line “kissing my ass” lets you know that she’s still an elegant lady. She just happens to be amused by this charming little tune, so she’s going to bless us with an interpretation.

That confidence makes her cool. As does the sexy elegance of the video. Rather than putting her in cargo pants and sending her to a glowstick convention, the video brings the song to her world, where disco singers wear furs and tuxedos are expected on the gentlemen. 

Can I please live in that world? Just for a day? It seems like people have a lot of self-aware fun over there?

I want to thank everyone for the thoughtful and elucidating responses to my post on religion in entertainment (and religion as depicted on Big Love.) I’m going to extend that conversation later today, but first, I just want to get funky. 

Or soulful. Or rocking. Or whatever you want to call the following clips from one of the best live music events ever broadcast on VH-1.

Join the party after the jump!

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