This has to be one of the oddest and most haunting things I’ve heard this summer –and it’s not necessarily something you’d play outside at a barbecue.

Remember the 1984 chestnut “Footloose” –the movie and its soundtrack? Kevin Bacon moves to right-wing, uptight town where dancing and rock and roll music are outlawed by a morally-correct minister (John Lithgow), and then bags his doe-eyed daughter (Lori Singer), all of which culminates in a rousing dance number, indeed a metaphor back then for freedom and, uh, breaking the rules. 24 years ago indeed, and it made a star out of Bacon and was a so-so film. Need a refresher from the movie itself? Come on, you know you want it (video below).

Of course, this being the 80s, all those musical films had their own soundtrack. “Footloose” contained a lot of singles, among them the title track by Kenny Loggins (he who would make a career out of schlocky soundtrack tunes). Also, you can’t forget the bombastic wonder that was Bonnie Tyler and her “Holding Out For a Hero”, “Almost Paradise”, a duet with the girl from Heart and the lead singer from Loverboy, the enormous pop hit “Let’s Hear it for the Boy” by Deniece Williams (you remember the scene in the movie, come on!) or even the kinda silly Read the rest of this entry »

Tell me you have not wanted to poke your eyes out every time you saw or heard the inescapable commercial or jingle from FreeCreditReport.com. You know which one. The one where this curly-haired slacker and his band, dressed as pirates, have taken to working at a poor man’s Red Lobster (if there is such a thing) seafood joint, “serving chowder and iced tea” to “tourists” in what is clearly a low-paying, dead-end job. Or the one where the same dude is bopping his head as he sings again –same melody, slightly different lyrics—this time in a beat-up old Geo Metro, pulling up the stoplight while a carful of babes in a new convertible next to him are laughing at him –and his Read the rest of this entry »

I was going to write an open letter to Kathy Hilton, she being Paris’s mother, responding to her brief commentary she put up on Huffingtonpost.com over the weekend. She was somehow bothered that John McCain, in an idiotic ad last Friday, suggested that Barack Obama was being treated as a celebrity in the same way as her daughter Paris. (And Britney Spears.)

I was going to call her a hypocrite and that no Hilton would ever turn down any publicity, no matter how unsavory, and that she was just asking for more attention. I was going to challenge her to do the unthinkable: simply say or do nothing and thus not dignify what was, even among many Republican circles and pundits, a superficial ad. Reaching farther still, I was going to blame her for raising the one person who has perhaps singlehandedly glorified the meaning of celebrity and all of its vapidity. I was going to say that Paris, the talentless heiress who became superstar famous for a sex tape and for Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a little fun with Adam West, and timely indeed given the recent media stir created by The Dark Knight.

Can you guess which of the following quotes — provided by Philadelphia sketch group, Secret Pants — belong to our president, George W. Bush, and which belong to Batman from his 1960s TV series?

It’s harder than you might imagine…

[Via ComedyCentral]