Tonight, I have two dance scenes to share with you. The first one was recommended to me by fellow TSL contributor, Valerie Troutman. It comes from 1985’s Girls Just Wanna Have Fun! I haven’t seen this film but I enjoy this scene. It pretty much just screams “1985,” doesn’t it?
(And who wouldn’t want to spend all day watching Dance TV?)
I’ve shared this second scene before but, since we’re on kind of an 80s theme tonight, I simply had to share it again. From 1989’s Teen Witch, here’s “Top That!”
Anyone who watches television, reads a newspaper, or surfs the Internet today knows the axiom “Politics is a dirty business” is dead on point. The mudslinging and brickbats are being tossed at record rates, and it just keeps escalating. Here at Cracked Rear Viewer, we’re just plain tired of all the nonsense. Ah, for the old days, when politics was much more genteel and civil, right? Wrong! Politics has always been a dirty business, proving another old adage, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. Case in point: the 1942 film THE GLASS KEY.
The story’s based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, and was filmed once before in 1935 with George Raft, Edward Arnold, and Claire Dodd. In this version, Paramount chose to star their red-hot team of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, fresh off their hit THIS GUN FOR HIRE. Brian Donlevy takes the Arnold role as Paul Madvig, a…
This makes three Tim Pope music videos now. We saw him do a video for Ministry when they were very unhappy. We also saw him do a video for Talk Talk when they didn’t mind appearing in the video, but weren’t going to lip-sync. Now we get Tim Pope doing The Safety Dance? By that I mean I have no idea other than that they all do fall under New Wave. Your guess is as good as mine.
I look at this video and not only think it screams British, but also do Louise Court and Mike Edmonds have reunions from time to time to talk about being in this music video that they will never live down? It could be happening. The ladies from Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love do that, so why not these two? Especially since Louise Court was recently found in 2013 working as a director of Hearst Magazine UK. Up till then it was a mystery who this woman was in one of the most well known and aired music videos every made. That’s awesome and really sad. I’ve said it before, but submit music videos to IMDb. They clearly want to put a stop to nonsense like that continuing.
I also look at this music video and see something cheap that was thrown together in a day or so at most. The only particularly interesting parts come right at the very end when the lead singer looks up into the sky and it cuts to a bomb being dropped from a plane as the song starts to sound like a siren. Along with that part, this was apparently done as a protest against the way bouncers were treating a new form of dancing in clubs. Despite it looking like a violent dance, it’s a safe dance that they felt discriminated against for doing in clubs. That’s why the bomb dropping thing happens. It represented the establishment, and the dance was anti-establishment.
The main portion of this video involves the lead singer marching into town and drawing a crowd to come along and dance with him. The ending part though where everyone is just dancing around for fun makes the most sense to me considering the intended message. “Everybody’s taking a chance,” but “it’s safe to dance.”
Through the Shattered Lens 