St. Tickle Me Elmo's Fire

I have come to a realization after finally watching "St. Elmo's Fire", the 1985 Brat Pack movie starring a whole bunch of people who were famous for a few years then disappeared except for Mare Winningham who just plain disappeared--culturally, the 1980s were a wasteland. The haircuts for both men and women were in a crappy middle ground between 1970s feathered disco look and 1990s "who cares about my hair when I have all this angst" grungy look. Styles were terrible, between guys wearing long coats and slacks with sneakers and skinny ties, and women wearing skirts that were way too long and prudish tops. (I'm excluding the one outlet for animal smuttiness, which was the heavy metal scene, but I remember enough from that era to know that wasn't the norm).

The music? Well, admittedly some '80s music was good--but even good songs were ruined by the two greatest scourges of rockin' tunes--the saxaphone and the synthesizer. I curse the day Theodore W. Synthesizer created that terrible invention. Fortunately, it has gone the way of the dodo and the new wave haircut.

And the movies of the '80s, by and large, were terrible. Red Dawn? Ugh! News flash, if a movie makes me root for the Communists to win, then it's doing a poor job! The earliest sign that George Lucas was a hack came out with 1983's Return of the Jedi, and he confirmed it with that stupid duck movie.

How was St. Elmo's Fire as a film, though? Well, picture a film about seven people going through the tough times of the mid-'80s right after graduating from a prestigious university, and the whole time you're rooting for the meteor that you are hoping will wipe them out. (Spoiler alert--there's no meteor!) Demi Moore plays a cokehead, which I'm sure was a stretch, and you can't get it out of your head that while this movie was in theaters her future husband wouldn't be able to buy a ticket to see it because he was only 7 years old at the time. Emilio Estevez plays a creepy stalker of Andie MacDowell's med student, and Andrew McCarthy plays the same type of character he always does--needy! Round it out with Judd Nelson, being whinier and less cool than his Breakfast Club character, and Rob Lowe being admittedly more pretty and feminine than any of the female leads in the film, and you got yourself yet another film where I'm rooting for the Communists.

But it did have a neat theme song.