What Happened to Hollywood Magic?

The rinse and repeat of everything that was once golden, the soundtracks of our lives, and DM-ing childhood actors on Myspace

Jul 07, 2024

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: wishing upon a star for a hero to save us all.

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Ingredient List

🎵 : A bunch of the soundtracks listed below, but also Third Eye Blind’s self-titled album from 1997, which I feel is the quintessential summer album, especially Motorcycle Drive By.

📖 : This week was kind of crazy, so not much reading, but I’m in the middle of a few long form stories that I’ll probably recommend next week.

This Past Week

Love it or leave it, the Fourth of July is probably my favorite holiday. I grew up out in rural America surrounded by farms and fields, we like things that go “boom.” Fireworks do that. It’s not hard to connect the dots, and if you want to learn more, please read Don’t Leave Before the Fireworks, which I honestly should’ve saved for last week.

As an adult, I get it– fireworks are annoying. But give me this one day a year.

Anyway, I may have bought and set off way too many fireworks on the family farm. So many, that my throat was sore for the past three days because I was sucking in sulfuric smoke for an hour and a half straight. It legit looked like a Civil War reenactment at times. Anyway, nobody was injured severely, though my brother narrowly escaped a blown off hand when the last ball of a big Roman Candle failed to exit the tube. What’s a reward without the risk?

I mean, they were Raccoon Fireworks, of course I bought them

I also got in a good long run back home and Kimi and I got to go on a couple relaxed dinner dates since my kids were at my parents’ house all week. Oh, also– the Summer GRIT party for Believe in the Run! About 500 runners showed up and we ran along the water here in Baltimore on a beautiful summer night, ending at Mobtown Brewing where everyone was treated to free beer and Ekiben (IYKYK).

Some other things I wrote this week:

Check Out the Trail Running Shoes Worn at Western States (Believe in the Run)
Puma Deviate Nitro Elite 3 (shoe review for Believe in the Run)
Asics Superblast 2 (shoe review for Believe in the Run)
Gear of the Month (July gear roundup for Believe in the Run)

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, please silence your cell phones. nto the dinner service.

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Iron and Wine

A good soundtrack is hard to find, or at least that’s how it used to be. Prior to the 2000s, it felt like movie soundtracks were mostly just instrumental or Pure Moods track listings in film form. I’m sure it had something to do with the music industry and licensing, but pairing good songs with good scenes seemed to pick up in the early aughts. I’m not sure where it started, but I know where it peaked and it was a straight line from The OC to Garden State to Grey’s Anatomy. I can’t tell you how much those first two productions mattered, especially as a music nerd who never saw my favorite artists represented in the mainstream. In hindsight, I’m not sure if it was good or bad, but it was great at the time. Like– see, I told you!– this music is awesome.

At the time, I made mixed CDs with the fervor of a Keebler elf on the Great British Bakeoff. You got one whether you wanted it or not, and good luck to you if you were the object of my affection. One song was an absolute staple, so good that it found its way onto every mix CD– The Shins’ “New Slang.” For awhile, it seemed like it was a secret song, an absolute dagger into any indie girls’ heart. Or so I thought. “Check out this song by this band on Nirvana’s old label. It’ll change your life.”

And then Zach Braff ripped its raw power from my hands when he announced the same sentiment to Natalie Portman in the most memorable scene of Garden State, ushering in a whole era of guys trying to get girls with indie music. Don’t get me wrong, the whole thing hit me in the feels, because Braff was living my dream– to change a girl’s life with a song. Needless to say, it never worked in real life. Turns out you can’t fix them. That’s also when the song died for me, at least a little bit.

I still loved the soundtrack– songs like Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York,” or Iron and Wine covering The Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” were absolute gems. I’ve loved plenty of soundtracks before then and since then as well. Mostly they’ve opened my mind up to other great music, which is how I found out about The Smiths (The Wedding Singer), James (American Pie), Fountains of Wayne (Just Friends), and many more.

Nevertheless, nothing hits like The Shins playing while a twee girl rides sidecar on an old military motorcycle. On the other hand (with a wooden finger), there’s Margot Tenenbaum smoking a cigarette, walking in slo-mo while Nico paints New York City all around her fur-coated visage. Yeah, that probably wins.

Here’s a list of my favorite soundtracks of all time, and I’m surely forgetting some:

Harold and Maude
Almost Famous
The Wedding Singer
Vanilla Sky
The Royal Tenenbaums
Minari
Interstellar
Garden State
The OC, seasons 1 through forever
Drive
Donnie Darko

And for those I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Buttercream

Movies have a special place in my heart, mostly because I couldn’t watch them for the first 14 years of my life. My mom is probably cringing reading this, but I know that they were doing their best. I’m here, life is good, so who cares. Growing up in an extremely conservative Christian house, there were plenty of things that were going to corrupt us. Dungeons and Dragons, Guns N’ Roses, and “new age” stuff, which was basically a blanket term for anything cool. Movies and rock and roll were moral tiger traps, waiting to pull is into a spiked pit containing all of the above. Boy, would that backfire later in life.

As with any kid in the nineties, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. I read the book, which had more curse words than I’d ever encountered. I collected the trading cards. I drew dinosaurs incessantly. I had a fake bear claw and pretended to be a velociraptor. But I never saw the movie because a) my family never went to the movies, b) my family never rented movies, and c) I wasn’t allowed to go to Molly Rettig’s 12th birthday party, which was a viewing of Jurassic Park, the blockbuster hit of the summer. To this day, it still stings.

Cinematically, we survived off one copy each of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and the Muppets’ Christmas Carol, as well as a monthly subscription to a small distribution company called Feature Films for Families.

At the time, Feature Films for Families was weirdly popular, especially if your family had any kind of self-proclaimed morals or grew up in the evangelical church. They weren’t faith-based films, but kind of just wholesome in that “small town America” or “frontier living” type of way. Trad wives would go wild for them.

There were films like Space Camp, which somehow had a star-studded cast featuring a young Joaquin Phoenix, Kate Capshaw, Lea Thompson, and Marissa’s dad from The OC (seeing how many times I can reference The OC in one newsletter). That was about a NASA space shuttle that accidentally launched while teenagers were inside. It’s actually pretty solid. There was also Split Infinity, a movie about a girl who time travels to just before the stock market crash of 1929 and saves the family farm, a scenario that I actually think about way too much. Then there was Rigoletto, a movie about a girl who finds her singing voice thanks to the town monster living in a castle on the hill. Turns out that the monster was just a guy with a burned face who was really good at opera and, in the climactic scene, the townspeople beat him to death for purely speculative reasons.

However, if you grew up watching these, you know that there’s one film that is the scion of the collection: The Buttercream Gang. Yes, it sounds gayer than Brokeback Mountain and the premise of the film doesn’t help its cause (a group of boys form a good kids club named after the town’s original gang who helped women churn butter). After one summer break, one of the group’s members (Pete) goes off the rails after visiting his aunt in the big city of Chicago, bringing Antifa-like antics to small-town America. Despite being whiter than the freshly fallen snow, he arrived home in a Latino gangster-style button up with a red bandana and an all-new accent, which tells you all you needed to know.

Could Scott, Lenny, and Eldon save Pete from himself? Only time will tell. I could also tell, since I watched the movie dozens of times, no exaggeration. Every line memorized, every scene broken down into its individual parts.

Later in life, when I was in the band, I found out that our lead singer lived a remarkably similar upbringing. He also thrived on the idyllic dreams of the Buttercream Gang and their baseball-and-apple-pie kind of life. He had all the lines memorized.

One night on tour, we were drinking and talking about the movie and I started searching for cast members on Myspace. This was before social media, when things like a Top 8 mattered. None of the gang members were showing up, but then I searched for Stephanie Dees, who played Margaret– the strong, independent teenage girl in the film. Red-headed and bespectacled, she was the annoying know-it-all until she went from ugly duckling to thirst trap just by taking off her glasses. She walked so Laney Boggs could run for prom queen in She’s All That.

And there she was. We found Margaret.

We messaged her from the band account and told her how we were both huge fans of The Buttercream Gang and would love if she checked out our music. She read the message and was somehow not creeped out and actually responded. She gave us a follow and even ordered our album when it came out. On our next tour, we invited her out to a show at The Masquerade since we knew she lived near Atlanta, and lo and behold– there was Margaret, at our merch table, all grown up.

This sounds insane. It is insane. But to us, growing up with that film, she was a real life celebrity, a legit movie star in real life. So while it was insane, it was also awesome. Luke, our lead singer, had enough foresight to bring his childhood VHS copy of the movie, which she autographed for him. It likely went down as one of the weirdest moments of that woman’s life.

They made two sequels to that first film. They obviously weren’t as good. But the trilogy carried me through childhood, until I could start watching movies at my friends’ houses or drive to the theater myself. For almost a decade, it was all the culture I had.

Which is why, once I was free to see whatever I wanted, I went crazy for movies, watching as many as possible, catching up for all the time I missed out. Point being, if you want someone to be obsessed with art, film, and music, just starve them of it for the most of their childhood. Then again, that’s also how you end up with a kid who watched the original Fast and the Furious six times in the movie theater.

Choose wisely.

Course 3

The Main: Large Lasagna with a Side of Boiled Vegetables

A couple weeks ago, I took my kids to a morning matinee of the highly anticipated Garfield Movie. Growing up, I was never a huge Garfield fan; when I read the funny pages every Sunday, it ranked on the same level as Family Circus and Marmaduke. Bland, boring, and a bit try-to-hard. Sorry, Jim Davis. In reality, it would prepare me for a job as a government contractor. A fat feline eating lasagna who complains about Mondays, an introverted single guy with photos of his fur babies, a brain-dead beagle– that about covered the majority of my cubicle-life coworkers.

The theater experience itself was abysmal. Despite going to the moon on r/Wallstreetbets, AMC has apparently gone to hell as well. The theater was disguised as a cave– dark (good), dank (not good), and sticky (gross), words that, in combination, should only be used to describe marijuana strains. We were the first ones in the theater, snagging the good seats before the attendance ballooned to a total of seven theater-goers.

We endured the pre-previews, which seemed like 14 variations on a Coca-Cola ad, mixed in with a bit of garbage trivia. Then there were the real previews. For 24(!) minutes, we were force-fed trailers that we’ve all seen on YouTube or Disney+ or Paramount+ already. Almost all of the movies were sequels, with the exception of The Forge, a faith-based film that featured a bad kid who turned his life around by working in an Amazon warehouse and joining a men’s prayer group where they randomly pull out a broad sword to bond over. It was corny as hell but the Braveheart weaponry kind of ruled.

Then there was the main event, The Garfield Movie, not to be confused with Garfield: The Movie, a film that came out twenty years ago about the same exact fat cat. They obviously thought hard about how they could differentiate the two and thought “hey, that colon can do all the heavy lifting.”

Let’s get to the point– it wasn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. That honor goes to Old, the straight-to-Netflix film by M. Night Shyamalan, who I’m convinced just got lucky for one movie and milked all six of its senses bone dry with three decades of trash movies. I hadn’t seen The Garfield Movie before, but I had seen it. Hundreds of times.

It employed every cliché imaginable– from Ethan Hunt-style stunts to Star Wars daddy issues to a myriad of unashamed product placements, with a sprinkle of humor on par with network television sitcoms. The jokes were predictable and dumb and appealed to an audience that was neither my kids or myself. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it was written by AI: make a movie about a cat eating lasagna, he never knew his dad but then he comes back into the picture, include an evil villain with two henchman, have a sensei train them to overcome an obstacle, everyone lives happily ever after.

We’ve all seen that movie in all its variations, over and over again. It’s a vegetable boiled to death, nutrients leached into the water, served without seasoning on a plastic plate. It’s hospital food. It’ll keep you alive until you die.

Around the same time as Garfield, The Fall Guy was released, a film featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, including Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. It was an original movie with an original script, not a sequel or a book adaptation. In short, it’s a rarity these days, especially for big production companies. Heavy on both action and fun, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews. One could call it the perfect summer movie. Instead, it was the perfect summer flop, pulling in only $27 million its opening weekend, a standard typically reserved for Adam Sandler. It barely beat out Garfield’s first weekend haul. Apparently Ryan Gosling is not Ken-ough.

Kudos to Universal for taking a risk of making a big budget original movie with A-list stars, as crazy as that sounds. It may be the last one. Because every studio exec knows that if you threw either of those stars into a Marvel movie, they would’ve earned far more than the original they starred in.

And so, the death spiral of sequels continues, because nothing is original and creativity is dead, at least on a balance sheet.

My kids should not be looking to Garfield for inspiration. A cat that eats whole lasagnas and offers up middling one-liners belongs on the pages of a newspaper, nothing more. They also don’t deserve Ninja Turtles or Super Mario or Sonic or Ghostbusters or the strip-mined subplots of Star Wars. Not because they’re not good (some of them are very good), but because my kids are surviving on the bones of the golden age of creativity and cinema, when pop culture ran free and wild. Now, it’s just a rinse and repeat of everything other people thought of.

What heroes do kids have except for the ones that went before us? And why do we insist on marching them out there, decade after decade, insisting that the product is still as good as it once was? We act like they’re running for president of the United States. No one wants to see Harrison Ford holding a whip in the same way that no one wants to see Joe Biden going off script. Just let them go gentle into that good night.

There were once good ideas mixed in with some great ones and some truly god-awful ones. But at least there were risks. Sure, plenty of movies sucked, but you still endured them instead of exiting out and skipping to the next movie, mostly cause you paid $6 for a one-night rental or you were already in your theater seat. Either way, you need the dirt to find the diamonds.

Today though, there’s no goonies finding treasure, no kids on a sandlot, no angels in the outfield, or Ferris Buellers taking days off. We got our own thing, why can’t they have theirs? The answer, of course, is money. A sure bet is always better than a risky one, and because we’re all sheep that bleat “baaa”, the studios keep shearing us, knowing we’ll go back to whatever they grow back. Rinse and repeat, but since it’s wool, hang us out to dry.

That’s not to say there aren’t some great studios making great films. A24 is the most obvious one; they apparently can’t miss, especially when it comes to original horror films. Studio Ghibli still makes awesome movies once a decade. But under the grand umbrella of pop culture and its icons, the kind that kids pay attention to and emulate, there’s just nothing new under the sun.

I wish there were more, that sometime in the next five years creativity and originality will be rewarded again. Because I don’t want to relate to my kids or their heroes. I don’t want to correct them on the origin story of Spiderman or the genealogy of Boba Fett. I want them to have their own thing that’s just theirs when they grew up, to explain to me how it works, and for me to not understand.

I need someone to save us before my childhood is ruined, and theirs is too. Maybe it comes in the form of a kid who writes scripts in class, always reprimanded by his teacher, but one day, while walking home from school, he throws a rock through the window of the old mansion on the edge of town. The old lady who lives there grabs him by the arm, but instead of reprimanding him, she tells him she has something for him. Turns out she possesses a type of powder that can make any script come alive, the words on the page turning into real life characters.

He just needs to complete three tasks.

See? It’s not that hard.

Course 4

Dessert: Starvation Mode

I don’t have much else to say this week, so I’m asking you to say something. What’s a legitimately great movie that came out in the last ten years that deserves to be seen? Something original and rewarding and worth the time. Since having kids I’ve been a bit behind, but would love to watch something that’s soul stirring and satisfying. Leave your recommendation in the comments.

Fin

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