Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Rock and Roll High School, Neighbors, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip (2)

Renting movies at Captain Video, and spending the weekend watching them was pretty regular thing in my family. A lot of the time, we'd rent movies we'd seen before, and often more than once. Buying movies on VHS wasn't really feasible since they were priced insanely high back then. I think 80 bucks was often the average price, but maybe I'm exaggerating it in my memory. All I know is we rarely actually bought any movies. We'd just rent them over and over.

On this weekend we re-watched three movies. The first was an all-time fave: Rock N Roll High School.



I'm not sure when I first saw Rock N Roll High School, but I do know at some point I went to see it at the Roxie Theater. Whatever the case, this viewing was probably my fifth or so.

This movie introduced me to the Ramones, and a lifelong love was born. Here's how much I loved them: When I was 16, I had brain surgery, (not a lobotomy, I swear), and a week later I was front row at a Ramones concert at Wolgang's. I might not have loved them quite as much as Riff Randall did, but not much could keep me away from one of their concerts.

And one more personal anecdote about the movie: I took a film studies class taught by one of the movie's screenwriters, and it was one of the worst classes I've ever taken, mainly because that professor was the kind of teacher the kids at Vince Lombardi High would have bound, gagged, and pelted with apple brown betty.

The second movie was Neighbors, a bit of a flop that starred John Belushi and Dan Akroyd.



I know I didn't like it much the first time we saw it, which was in 1981 when it was released, but perhaps my parents liked it, and that's why we chose to watch it again. I'm actually a bit curious to re-watch it now, as I imagine its black humor might have been a tad lost of me at the time. It's not available on DVD from Netflix, but it can be viewed online, so I might give the movie another shot at some point...

Finally, we rewatched Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip, and you can read about my first viewing of that here.

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