* Where can I get one of those beanies with a hand sticking up from the top, along with the legend "Happy Fingers"?
* The song about adults--who keep their wallets "near their hearts" and grow up to push kids around because they've only gained pounds but not a sense of compassion--should be made the national anthem.
* Would this movie be immeasurably improved by taking some hallucinogens first? (My generation obviously thought so; or at least that's what I suspect most of the audience in the back room of Maxwell's in Hoboken had done when it was screened there in 1985.)
* Perhaps our economy would be a lot sounder if it was based on the Fistoola rather than the dollar.
* I think I need that raw silk, A-line, cocktail-length coat Heloise wears, in jewel tones of topaz, turquoise, and emerald. It looks like it has the power to change lives.
* Is it really possible I heard "Percy Granger" used as a rhyme in a chorus? And I am sure in fact they quoted from Hamlet.
* That's because they don't make films like this any more, the kind that has no purpose other than to exercise the imagination, and see if it can come up with something weird, mixing high, low, and everything in between. Like sardonic political commentary and such lyrics as "Dress me up in Bock beer suds"--a cri de coeur if ever I heard one.
* A nuclear threat really can end it all, especially in 1953. And again in 2009.* Was it all just a dream?
6 comments:
This movie scared the shit out of me when I was a child. It's what the new Willy Wonka with Johnny Depp was trying to be.
Yes, I'm glad I was (more or less) an adult when I first saw it; my son, though, got really hung up on the injustice angle, and was angry at adults for a long time. You are so right about the Willy Wonka remake--which made me angry at the whole sugar-marketing angle myself: I never thought I could ever tire of looking at Johnny Depp, until his face stared back from a million packages of Hostess snack cakes.
It is terrifying and I loved the surrealism at a young age, also the song: "Just Because We're Kids."
Isn't it amazing, Nancy, just how indelible are those things that frighten us as kids? They become permanent parts of our inner landscape. In this case, I watched my boy watching: I swear, he had one eye turned away, the other glued to the scene.
Now, that's weird in itself!
"Just because we're kids"--My mom used to always sing that song to me. She has a beautiful clear soprano. She still sings it to me! I should start singing it to my children. I will tonight!
Yes, the perfect anthem for the Kid Nation. Maybe they should wait to see the movie, though . . .
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