Thank You For Sending Me An Angel

Watched the movie Adventureland last night, and I have to say that this is probably one of the first times in awhile where I saw a current film capture the feeling of the 1980's without it being some kind of Wedding Singer style hokey time capsule. And you know what I'm talking about.

The past always looks ridiculous when we look back at it. The beauty of this movie is that none of those ridiculous fashion/music/vernacular cliches were dutifully trotted out because they really wanted the era to feel like the way it felt when you were actually living it. And few movies have ever depicted the year 1987 the way it truly felt like they did in this picture.

Or maybe it just felt more like the 1987 I experienced, when I was an 18 year old college student. Musically, it was spot-on. That was the year I was blasting "I Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely" in my car, or that Christmas cranking "Looking For A Kiss" by the New York Dolls. And the year I got into the Velvet Underground. And The Replacements. Even The Rolling Stones Tattoo You album. And I think I even dressed like Kristen Stewart every damn day of that year, in jeans and army jackets and Lou Reed T-shirts. The movie even ended with my favorite INXS song, the very first INXS song that I had ever heard, back in 1983. Holy shit, was that ME up on the screen the whole time? Nah... my hair never looked that good.

But the movie did something right when it comes to creating nostalgia with music: It's more about a feeling than historical pop culture accuracy. In the 80's, I was listening to a lot of music from the 60's. Like Stewart's character, my room was decorated in David Bowie and Buzzcocks posters. The movie set out to create an atmosphere of an almost Proustian remembrance of things past -- of sounds and smells and textures, from the drop of a needle on a scratchy Jesus And Mary Chain record to the muggy summer heat in an amusement park filled with odors of cotton candy and vomit while "Rock Me Amadeus" plays repeatedly over long-ago blown out speakers throughout the midway.

It's a scratch-n-sniff movie of tactile flashback, but particularly for myself and the way my hair stood on the back of my neck as each minute of the movie unfolded before me.

Plus, girl music geeks. Why aren't there more of them in film?