Confession time: I never managed to sit through more than 10’ minutes of Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire, even though at a certain critical point of my pre-teen years a local cable network was playing it on a daily basis. Had I known my pre-teen self was so in tune with the global zeitgeist, I could have tried to get some money out of it. Oh, well.

As Jonathan Bernstein would say, the amount of times St. Elmo’s was showcased on pay-per-view channels might suggest it was a hit movie (it wasn’t) and/or it somehow conveyed the spirit of the time (it didn’t). What it actually managed to do was:

a) predate Rob Lowe’s real life bad boy turn;

b) introduce general audiences to the notion that Judd Nelson’s perf in The Breakfast Club was mostly a stroke of luck;

c) mindfuck us into embracing the fact that Demi Moore would be around for a loooooong time;

d) give many of us our first shot of Young Actors Overcompensating For Being Desperately Out Of Touch With Their Peers.

To this day, I suspect it mostly works like a Brat Pack yearbook. And the “interconnecting storylines” thing (which is edited all out of sequence here) was hardly a new trick in the Eighties. Still, two things cannot be denied: the script set the template for ensemble TV dramas such as Melrose Place, and the theme song’s clip was still on the air months after the film had died at the box office.

And now, let’s all help ourselves to a money shot montage. And/or Molly Lambert’s screenshot history.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “do anybody know óf other movies where a lead character play the sax?”

Hey kids, say hallo to guest reviewer and star reporter La Donna Di Prestigio, and pay attention to what she has to say about Walter Hill’ Wagnerian comic book Streets Of Fire…

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I only just got hit over the head with a shovel with the understanding that subconsciously (or not), Streets of Fire is responsible for atleast 80% of my sentimental education. I tend to attribute the remaining 20% to Roxanne and Some Kind of Wonderful, depending on the mood. If my idea of romance is - to this day - imagining someone walking around wearing a sullen (or mopey, or brooding) expression and suddenly bursting into song trying to lure in their humble abode beautiful strangers as sullen mopey and brooding, that’s its fault. Not Romance & Cigarettes’. No.

On a side note - how cute and totally adorable were these trailers? How totally clueless were we, the viewers? In that these things were 2 and a half minutes long on average and were basically *the* movie, the whole story condensed, often with full fledged spoilers and all that jazz. Little did we knew, at the time: we could have kept our 7000 lire, or whatever the ticket cost, and waited it out until a BluRay edition came out, twenty five years later. What? No BluRay edition? Bummer.

So, we’re here, twenty five years later. I still love how this movie has it all. A desperate marketing move or just the Reagan-induced hallucinations of a whole nation, it is difficult to say. But do follow me when I point out that Streets of Fire is

- Purple Rain, with a lot more pussy

- The Warriors, with a love story

- The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with a lot less make-up (hello, Willem Defoe!)

- Gremlins, without the Gremlins

plus,

- For unknown reasons Rick Moranis seems taller for at least half of the movie (the second ever case of cinematography payola, everybody. The first being Humphrey Bogart’s in The Big Sleep. For everything in between, hell I was distracted by the Looney Tunes. Now shut up)

- This is the first lesbian flick I ever saw where lesbians are completely absent (Amy Madigan: you don’t call, you don’t write and you certainly are not preserved in carbonite. Couldn’t you just do what Diane Lane did? or Han Solo?)

- For years I believed Dan Hartman was an African-American. The real Millo Vanillo!

- And just how priceless is the evoking of Stevie Nicks throughout the movie - not just the musical numbers? Although she did write “Sorcerer”, and just the title was in retrospect a dead giveaway, Stevie seems to have inspired the costumes, the hairdos, even the Lindsay Buckingham lookalikes (yes Willem Defoe, I’m still talking to you. but also Michael Pare).

- Still speaking of soundtracks: a wall of shame for Ry Cooder. Or maybe not? Doh, there’s even Lee Hazlewood! Turns out this is an indie flick and we didn’t realize ‘til it was already too late and it infected our DNAs. Epic win, as they say.

A few weeks ago I had the dubious privilege of introducing a girlfriend to John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. She kept a stiff upper lip until the end credits were rolling. Then she turned to me and said, “you know, I always thought it was a comedy”.

Blame it on the trailer: general vibe falls squarely in the “kids today and their wacky (but still sort of wholesome) hijinks” category, what with the running in the hallways, the rockabilly riff coming up halfway, and all those shots of the leads busting random moves.

In retrospect it’s a little weird that they threw the pot smoking in, but maybe it was the then-compulsory bait for the lowbrow comedy crowd. Why, was “Molly Ringwald holding a lipstick between her tits” an unmentionable asset those days? (Come to think of it, it probably was.)

Strangely enough, there’s no mention whatsoever of the hu-u-u-u-u-uge amount of drama inside.

Marketing divisions all over the world were still to discover the “1980s are the new 1950s” angle, and teenage angst would become a newly profitable genre only later in the decade. Were it made now, the trailer would come with its own built-in LJ community. I guess.

Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “theres a guy in my language class that looks almost exactly like the jock.”

In retrospect, evoking “MTV”, “safe sex” and “Beavis & Butthead” in the ZOMG 1993 flash cards didn’t do any favors to Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.

It’s supposed to sound like “the more things change…”, but the overall effect is much closer to “come see how your parents used to have fun, you lucky bastard you.”

The multiple interconnecting storylines did result in a ton of choice material for cutting a trailer. However, it all seems much more - together than the actual film, which is lovely, yes, and fun, sure, and ultimately depressing as fuck. Kid trying to throw a party behind his parents’ back comes off as a major narrative thread (it isn’t - shades of House Party, maybe?); Rory Cochrane is displayed as a leading player (he isn’t); images and out-of-context lines point towards a familiar stoner comedy angle (not by a long shot), while the whole boy / girl going through the initiation routine is missing (and you get plenty of that).

Linklater gloriously clashed with Gramercy and Universal Pictures before, during and after the making of this picture - it was barely released in theaters, only to achieve a cult following on VHS, and to get a second-rate treatment on DVD until 2006. On one DVD commentary you allegedly hear Cochrane digging up some ‘splainin’ for the original flop such as “people were not allowed to bring a bong into theaters”.

At least the trailer’s cut to Rock And Roll All Nite fading to Sweet Emotion, and both songs are featured in the actual film.

And yes, the immortal “…I get old, they stay the same age” line is here. So I’ll give them that.