Say what you will about Cincinnati, but we have an FM station devoted to the pop/jazz music of the thirties, forties and fifties. They even play the CBS Mystery Playhouse every night from 7:00 – 8:00. Is it our abnormally high population of geriatric Caucasians that sustains such an endeavor? Certainly yes. But that’s OK; I’m willing to throw my lot in with them.
There’s a few things I need to get off my chest about The Great Debasers Podcast, and it’s more than I can unload on twitter. My friends made this podcast as a way to revel in the nostalgia of their youths misspent watching film, and in spite of the fact that we went to the same school, grew up at the same time, and lived in the same city, my early history with film couldn’t be more different from these guys’.
Let’s look at the first 10 episodes: “Lost in Translation”, “KIDS”, “A Fish Called Wanda”, “Jackie Brown”, “Last Tango in Paris”, “The Fugitive”, “Eyes Wide Shut”, “Office Space”, “Do the Right Thing”, “Romeo + Juliet”. Alright, of those ten movies, I’ve seen five (“Lost”, “Jackie”, “Tango”, “Fugitive”, “Eyes”) and of those five, there’s only two that really made an impression on me (“Jackie Brown”, “Eyes Wide Shut”) and I saw them both in college.
It really got to me with the “Clueless” podcast, because it turns out all my college buds consider that movie a touchstone of their adolescence, and they all cop to having seen it about a hundred times. I saw it for the first time in June, just so I could understand what they were talking about.
Since this is my blog and I can do what I want, I’m going to go on record with the movies that I watched incessantly in middle/high school and which played a part in my own personal formation:
Auntie Mame
Interview with the Vampire
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Heathers
Immortal Beloved (I know…)
Les Trois Couleurs: Bleu
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
I can still recite every line of dialogue in these movies. Other than that, all I wanted to do was watch The Simpsons and Absolutely Fabulous, and listen to Vivaldi concertos, Beethoven Symphonies and Strauss waltzes. And to AM 1260, D.C.’s nostalgia radio station, and they didn’t even play the CBS Mystery Playhouse.