Words Seem Out Of Place

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade.  This entry is the result of a friendly challenge to take a brief, seemingly inconsequential moment from my life and explore why it made an impact on me. Sometimes, when something or other triggers the memory of her, I think about that summer night a hundred years ago when a beautiful dancer invited me to join her in the back room of the strip club, to "get to know each other." I wonder what might've happened had I taken her up on that offer. I wonder how she's doing now. I'm getting ahead of myself. It all happened one June night in the pivotal year of 1995 , when my friends took me a strip club to celebrate my newfound freedom. I had just broken off a monumentally bad several-months long relationship (we were just so wrong for each other) and was currently navigating the start of a healthy, new relationship with an old friend, Naomi, o...

Exploring why the 1995 film  Showgirls is  an enduring cult classic. ( Due to the film's copious amount of salty language and nudity, these posts are probably NSFW) If there's one character in Paul Verhoeven's deliciously trashy and impressively thongtastic 1995 classic Showgirls who epitomizes how the Vegas entertainment industry chews up and spits out innocent blood, it's Penny, AKA Hope (Rena Riffel). Poor, poor Penny. After arriving at Al Torres's (Robert Davi) Cheetah's Topless Club, fresh and new and full of excitement for a career in dance, Penny is immediately and consistently degraded by one character after another, often through the use of very imaginative and colorful language. Her initial naivety is at turns hilarious and depressing. Here's a sampling, from the film's IMDb page , of the way other characters (mostly men) talk to her: Al Torres  :  If you want to last longer than a week, you give me a blow-job. First I...

Everybody knows I love Frankie and Johnny . Everybody knows that, hard as it is to choose a favorite, Frankie will always have my heart when it comes to Michelle Pfeiffer characters. So, pardon me if you've heard or read all of this from me before, but here are just a few reasons why I love everything about this beautiful film. Sometimes you form such a personal connection with a film that you can't even imagine who you would be without it in your life. Frankie and Johnny  (1991) is that film for me. It hooked me first time I saw it, thanks to e xtraordinary performances from the two leads, Michelle Pfeiffer as Frankie and Al Pacino as Johnny; a sensational supporting cast, including Nathan Lane, Kate Nelligan, and Hector Elizondo; that sublime Marvin Hamlisch score; and Terrence McNally's exquisite adaptation of his own off-Broadway play, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Together, these elements combine to create something truly magical. I've been liv...

Author, essayist, journalist, and Gen X icon Elizabeth Wurtzel died earlier this week, after several years of living with cancer and its recurrence. She was only 52. For an intimate look at her life, I would encourage you to seek out any number of heartfelt and honest remembrances to this iconoclastic writer, this fierce and uncompromising woman, which are being written this week by friends and colleagues who knew her better than most . Even for those of us who never knew her, Wurtzel's influence was everywhere, especially during my college years in the epic decade of the nineties , thanks to her first memoir, Prozac Nation , from 1994. I can remember standing against the shelves in some Borders or other, lost in the rawness of her confessional tale of depression. It was raw at a time when raw was not socially acceptable. When it came out, establishment critics at places like the New York Times were ripping her and the book to shreds with reviews that couldn't have been...

This series looks back at the 1990s and its influence on the generation of people who came of age during the decade. [This post may not be safe for work, thanks to a gif below.] More than two decades since its release, the sci-fi comic book movie  Barb Wire remains one of the essential documents of the 1990s for a few reasons. As written by Chuck Pfarrer and Ilene Chaiken, the film feels like both a time capsule of the American decade in which it was made, and uncanny foreshadowing of where we've ended up in America today, in 2019. I'm serious. Hear me out before you sneer. Maybe you had to be there in order to fully appreciate the absolute lunacy of peak Pamela Anderson media hype. When that infamous sex tape of her and then-hubby Tommy Lee was stolen in 1995, it was uploaded to the still-nascent and damn-near lawless internet for all the world to see—well, okay, for people who had the patience to sit through dial-up's excruciating wait times. Then in 1996 t...

Looking back at the pop culture mainstays of this Gen Xer's gloriously misspent youth. I first laid eyes on screen and stage actress Kate Nelligan watching John Badham's Dracula (1979) a few years after its release. Even at that time, at a very young age of seven or eight, I was captivated by her. I understood nothing about romance or attraction yet, but I could still see why Frank Langella's Dracula wanted to sink his teeth into that neck. There was something in her eyes—an attractive melancholy that I'd be increasingly drawn to as I got older and became more melancholy myself. She had a pensive, thoughtful look. Something about her face felt safe and comforting to little me: "This," some omniscient narrator declared in my head, "is what quiet beauty looks like, kid." Nelligan was heartbreakingly good as Lucy in Dracula . That must've been the early 1980s, probably during the brief halcyon period when my parents subscribed to...

Celebrating Scream Queens that make the Halloween season the most wonderful time of year. In many ways, Linnea Quigley is the ultimate Scream Queen. A pint-sized bundle of pure punk rock spirit, Quigley has starred in countless horror and exploitation classics: The Return of the Living Dead: Silent Night, Deadly Night; Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama: Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers: Night of the Demons; Creepozoids; Nightmare Sisters ...get the point? Many of these cult classics are from the 1980s and early 1990s, when Quigley first shot to fame within the B-movie world. She was everywhere back then, at least if you were a horror-loving kid like myself. She seemed to pop up in every other splatter flick I watched on USA Up All Night or rented from the video store during those days. Whenever she joined host Rhonda Shear on set, it was like the horror gods had answered our heathen prayers. Explosive sex appeal, hilariously deadpan Valley Girl-esque charm, and a wil...