1 post tagged “irrevertible time suck”

Well, it's close.  One night about a year ago I watched St. Elmo's Fire for the first time.  I was appalled.  Then I got a little drunk and watched it ALL OVER AGAIN and "live blogged" my thoughts...  It's long, but worth it I think...

About me?  The plot of “St. Elmo’s Fire”, a 1985 movie about young adults and all their post-college shenanigans, will give you similar feelings of frustration, confusion, and boredom, just as if you actually knew me.  I just watched this gem by myself on a Friday night.  Shortly afterwards I attempted hari kari in the backyard.  This movie turned from just a “bad movie” to an “irrevertible time suck” about half way through, out of sheer will power.  You have to really want to be that bad.  St. Elmo’s Fire is about a bunch of people you don’t care about go through one of the most banal phases of their lives, wearing awful clothes and listening to the most obnoxious sax music ever.  The oeuvre begins with a bunch of people running into an emergency room, to check on their friends: “Billy” and “Wendy”.  Apparently “Wendy” let drunk “Billy” drive her car and wreck it.  Escaping with only a minor head wound, she laughs off the accident, and everyone else does too… Because after leaving the hospital they head right over to a bar.  Enablers!  We see that the friends consist of Emilio Estevez playing a waiter named Kirby, but I think of him as the “Elmo” in this story.  Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson play “Leslie” and “Alec” the uber yuppie couple.  Demi Moore plays “Jules” the JAP with a heart of gold.   There’s an utterly forgettable character named “Kevin”, played by Andrew McCarthy.  And Mare Winningham is a big fat dork as “Wendy” with Rob Lowe’s hair playing the role of “Billy”.

Back to the bar, Wendy, still wearing her bandages, reminds Billy that he should call his wife. Turns out that Billy has a kid and is accepting money from the fat chick, who is really not that fat but has self-esteem issues.  Alec, looking like a lurking ape, gives Billy a talking to.  Gives him a swirly that is.  Tha’ll teach ya!  Billy gets trashed, although he may have still been drunk from when he wrecked Wendy’s car earlier that night.  Then Demi Moore, Jules the drunk slut, comes over and bitches about her stepmother being in a coma.  “Leslie” the perfect one, immediately follows up Jules’ revelation of immenent death in the family with her hilarious marriage proposal by Alpha male Alec.  Hahaha, that Leslie sure can empathize.  Then that Kevin guy plays bongos to Aretha Franklin alone in his apartment, sowing the seeds for possible gayness in the character development.  Kirby barges in looking like a member of a barbershop quartet and talks like a crazy man.   Billy comes in with his neon green bicycle.  This is all highly unbelievable because, let me tell you, in D.C. you do not just leave your front door open so that your friends can come in and out all the time.  At least seven locks and a dead bolt is standard on most Logan Circle flats.

Back from commercial, Jules is not only an alcoholic, but also a shopaholic, and shockingly, an attention whore.  When Kevin won’t make out with her, Jules comes to the conclusion that he must be gay.  Kirby starts acting like a crazy man in order to impress Andie McDowell’s character, “Gail”, which is really, really crazy.  He says that she is “the only evidence of God he has in this universe” then talks about laundary.   The yuppy character turn from obnoxious young democrats to obnoxious young republicans in a blink of an eye.   Kevin continues to be cynical, except when talking about his Malt-liquor drinking, bongo-playing, lovesick 8th grader days.  Alec comes home with a red nighty and then orders his wife to put it on.  The couple practically has sex in front of Kevin so he leaves and gets called “gay” by a hooker.  She breathes on him.  Meanwhile, Jules is accusing Arabs of forcing her to do coke so that they can gang bang her (allegedly, she admits “she doesn’t understand much Arabic but I think they said something about Gang banging”).  Is this really made 20 years ago?  The fat girl gets dissed by a welfare mama who has two white kids and one minority, in order to offend everyone.  Billy manipulates the fat chick to get him into her mansion so that he can insult her entire family.  I do love it when Wendy’s mother hisses “cancer”.  Wendy reminds he dad that she has a good job with the government as she accepts money from him to give to her fuck-up friend Billy.  But Billy’s just sad he’s not in school any more.  He doesn’t like to work.  Then he pretends to jump off the roof but he’s JUST KIDDING.  Just like he was just goofing around when he smashed Wendy’s head against the dashboard.  They get super drunk and Billy tries to get in Wendy because he just found out she’s a virgin.  Then, class act that he is, he makes fun of her girdle.  That guy is so lovable!  And his hair!  This movie employs a weird “fade to neon” effect to indicate the passage of time.  At Haloween they are all back together at the bar, the most depressingly accurate thing about post-college life in this movie so far.  Jules is outslutting herself by screwing her boss.  Alec is cheating on his perfect wife with a lingerie salesgirl.  Jules sluts it up on the drums as Rob Lowe plays his saxophone for about 7 minutes.  Billy’s wife shows up with another man, and Billy gets angry even though he made out with Jules 2 minutes ago.  He leads the crowd in hand claps and shakes his head sweat over the first row.  So Billy gets the crap beaten out of him because he starts a fight with his ugly wife’s boyfriend.  Then his wife makes out with him.  Because Billy gets away with EVERYTHING. 

Kevin, meanwhile, gets a profound life lesson from the crazy whore (not Jules) on the street corner.  Jules is scared of poor people, probably because she thinks they are all going to “gang bang” her.  In a perfectly 80s twist, Wendy’s father says he will buy her a cool car if she marrys a dork.  Oh wait!  New 80s law: something about Jules being slutty, sleeping with her boss, then accusing him of sexual harassment to get him fired, and gets her own talkshow.  The ladies lament on how they can’t kill men.  Meanwhile, Billy fucks someone in a hot tub and Kirby goes a little more psycho-bananas over Andie McDowell.  He decides to tell her of his attraction, where else than a swanky Capitol Hill cocktail party.  Andie McDowell apparently loves being stalked so much she takes Kirby back to her cheesy apartment, where he smells her pillow and accuses her of class discrimination.  Rob Lowe’s hair makes a return to his old frat house, which is the lamest thing you could possibly do.  Rob Lowe then half asses an attempt at being a good father and husband.  Krazy Kirby contuinues his stalkings and gets a dream job being the personal assistant to a rich Korean man.  The next logical step is to throw a party in the Korean Man’s house.  Billy shows up with a drink in his hand, although he promised his wife one SCENE ago that he was finshed with drinking.  Alec skips the pesky engagement question and tells all of he and Leslie’s friends.  Then he gets in a fight with Kevin for no reason, remember still in Mr. Kims house.  They break up right there.  Kirby leaves his own party to go flip out in more exotic locales than the Korean Man’s apartment.  Billy tries to rape Jules, which is a little like trying to starve an anorexic.  They get in a fist fight and magically wind up on Billy’s estranged wife’s front yard.  He’s wearing a gold lame vest.  Krazy Kirby drives his car up a mountain in the most unbelievable part of the movie yet.  First: he screams like a maniac on the porch as Gail’s presumed real boyfriend stares on in wonder.  Then gail smartly invites Kirby inside, because you definitely want to be trapped with your stalker in a cabin in the remote woods.  Gail’s unnamed boyfriend even pleads for Krazy Kirby to come in and bother them.  Meanwhile, Kevin moves in on Leslie waiting a whole 4 minutes to recover from the dissolution of her marriage and public humiliation.  We learn that Krazy Kermit isn’t the only obsessed lover in this movie.  Unnrelated, Gail tries to force Kermit to wear her real boyfriend’s pyjama’s.  Not to confuse poor Leslie more than she already is, Kevin decides to confess his long held secret love with Leslie, who decides to not lead him on or anything and fuck his brains out in a really obnoxious love scene that lasts like, forever.  But whoops, Alec comes over to Kevin’s and describes his affair in detail.  Krazy Kirby enter’s “TaxiDriver” Land as he cheerfully takes leave of Gail and her real boyfriend’s ski lovenest.  As they’r saying goodbye, Gail’s real boyfriend hsppiyl skips off to get a camera to take a picture of Gail and her stalker so no one forgets the moment.;  Gail says that she really is missing out on Krazy Kirby and he frech kisses her in front of her real boyfriend, who captures the moment on film.  Kirby then leaves gail wondfering “Dude, what the fuck” and says “later dude” to her boyfriend.  Alec and Leslie fight over bad 80s albums they’ll both wish they never owned in ten years.  They appear to have a mural of a movie still from Fight Club in the background.  “no Springsteen is leaving this house!  You can take the Carly Simon!”.  Then Kevin flips out Leslie.  Good God this movie is horrible!  Jules looses her furniture so sits around is an empty room with all the windows open.  Like the beginning of the film. This brings everyone together again.  So they send Billy, you know the guy who tried to rape her last time they were on screen together, in, becuasr that’s sure to cheer her right up and bring her back to sanity’s doorstep.  And hey, it works.  Pretty soon Jules is crying about how her dad hates her and so Billy cheers her up with a fireball using a lighter and a bottle of hairspray.  Because  of course he carries an economy size can of hairspray around with him.  Demi Moore then sums up the movie’s most relevant theme “I’m so tired of this”.  Also, “nobody buys this ‘put-together’ woman of the 80s bullshit”.  The fat chick was left out of this equation and has to hear this second hand from Billy, who provides the movie with it’s first fake closure.  He then steals fat Wendy’s virginity, ponders sticking around for his baby, then promptly leaves on a bus to be a dead beat dad somewhere else.  Where did Wendy’s weird southern accent come from when she said “Peanut Butter Sandwich”?  Leslie provides the second false closure before starring in the second least believable this in this movie other than Kirby’s hunky dory stalking adventure.  She puts her arms aroud both Kevin and Alec and announces that she’s breaking u with them, which causes them all to laugh, inexplicably.  The movie finally ends with Demi Moore babbling about burying her not-yet dead stepmother in a cat coffin,  The worst thing about this was that after the whole thing was over, I realized that the Women’s Channel was rerunning it as an encore, giving me ample time to blog about it.