Huey Lewis and the Afterthoughts, uh, I mean the News became music superstars with the release of 1984's "Sports". Lewis himself looked like he worked at a machine shop during the day and let his sister-in-law cut his hair and pick his stage outfits. In many ways though it was his everyguy image that underpinned his popularity and Lewis never shied away from it. Following the pinnacle of "Sports" and it's followup "Fore" HL&TN began a long slide into obscurity. By the late 80s they had parted with their record company and gone on an extended hiatus. The advent of grunge drove the final nail into the coffin of Lewis' brand of feel good, uber-mainstream, working class pop.

So where is Huey Lewis today anyway?

Huey Lewis then and now.

Huey Lewis and the News still do a fair number of live shows each year, though these days they play venues like the California State Fair and the Cape Cod Melody Tent. Their new album "Soulsville" did manage to crack the Billboard 200, peaking at number 121. Lewis himself doesn't seem to have changed much over the years. He's still a happy go lucky figure who seems quite content to get together with the boys and play to whoever will listen.

One of my favorite Christmas songs of all time. Merry Christmas from Paris and myself.

On October 31, 1984 Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India and arguably the most powerful woman in the world, was on her way to a television interview that was to be conducted by British actor Peter Ustinov. As she crossed the grounds of the PM's residence in New Delhi she was confronted by two of her Sikh bodyguards who opened fire on her at close range. One of the assailants fired 9 rounds from a handgun at her before he was killed by other guards and the second gunman pumped as many as 30 bullets into her body as she lay on the ground before he was overpowered and taken into custody.

In response to the assassination an estimated 2,700 Indian Sikhs were murdered during four days of rioting by supporters of the late PM with some estimates putting the number of dead even higher. Several diplomatic cables that have recently been leaked show that American intelligence agencies at the time believed the anti-Sikh violence was orchestrated by high level officials of the Indian government.

Gandhi's assassination was itself a response to her having ordered the Indian military to clear the so-called "Golden Temple" - Sikhdom's holiest shrine - of Sikh militants several months earlier. That operation resulted in the deaths of a large number of Sikh militants who were holed up inside and also resulted in extensive damage to the temple.

The body of assassinated Indian PM Indira Gandhi lies in state. To the left is her son and future PM Rajiv.

"This is Spinal Tap" pretty much invented the modern mockumentary. Released in 1984 it did almost no business at the box office but once it made its way to the small screen it took on a life of its own and has since become recognized as a comedy classic.

Nigel (Christopher Guest), Derek (Harry Shearer) and David (Michael McKean) are a ragamuffin British power trio on the downside of a long music career. (They're a trio because their drummers all tend to die of mysterious circumstances soon after joining the band.) They started life as a folk group in the 60s before going through various marketing makeovers and finally emerging as hard rockers.

Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner, who also directs) is a documentary film maker who has decided to chronicle Spinal Tap's return to touring after a six year absence. Because they're no longer at the top of their game (or the charts) this tour is notable for the rock star accoutrement that isn't there. None of the band members wants to believe they're nobody now and many of the biggest laughs are generated by juxtaposing their desperate belief in their own rock stardom with manifestations of their irrelevance.

These guys are emblematic of what can happen to ordinary blokes in a celebrity obsessed world. Guys with little or no book learnin' can wind up stars if they're in the right place at the right time and that's one of the great egalitarian aspects of modern culture. Unfortunately a lot of people who get caught up in the whirlwind make the mistake of believing their own press and when the spotlight shifts to the next big thing are left flailing about in life unable to understand what happened. When you're riding the crest of the wave its tough to imagine that there will ever be a time when the wave has crashed ashore and left you high and dry. Such is the case with Spinal Tap.

But the film makers never use their movie as a platform from which to launch mean-spirited critiques of their subjects. It's not about tearing them down because they didn't do anything to be torn down for. They simply took advantage of what the world they were born into offered them, even if they maybe didn't quite understand what they were getting into. Its the system that nurtured them that takes the biggest digs in This is Spinal Tap. From the incompetent manager to the ineffective publicist to prop designers to roadies to record company executives This is Spinal Tap forces each to stand bound in front of the bands Marshall amps and turns the volume up to 11.

The rock star documentary itself comes under the same scrutiny. There's a hilarious bit where the band pay a visit to Elvis' gravesite for the mandatory "homage to those who blazed the trail" scene and are at a complete loss for what to do. They wind up forcing out a pitiful 3-part harmony version of "Heartbreak Hotel" before David finally gives into the futility of the moment and declares "Too much f**king perspective!"

He's absolutely right of course even if he doesn't know it and that's what makes the scene so hilarious. This is Spinal Tap takes on every rockumentary from "Don't Look Back" to "Truth or Dare" and leaves no stone unturned in rooting out the innate absurdity of it all. And isn't that the job of comedy? To gently shed light on those aspects of life that we'd rather not discuss because of what they say about us? Of course it is, and This is Spinal Tap does that job incredibly well. In the end, (after you stop laughing), you're left wondering more about yourself and why you ever bought into the PR surrounding this or that band then you are about the band members you helped make millionaires. That's no small accomplishment for a low budget comedy in any day and age.

Here's a few of my favorite Spinal Tap quotes.

David: "Well, I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation."

Nigel: "I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really. It's like a Mach piece, really. It's sort of..."
Marty DiBergi: What do you call this?
Nigel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump".

Derek: "... people should be envying us, you know."
David: "I envy us."

"As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll."

The original Macintosh was released in January 1984 amidst a marketing storm highlighted by a Super Bowl ad dubbed "1984" (directed by Ridley Scott). At first there was a lack of software for the machine, which departed from convention by using a GUI rather than text based interface, and this caused sales to be sluggish. Another reason initial sales were sluggish was the price: a hefty $2,000 at a time when $2,000 was $2,000. Undaunted Steve Jobs and Co plowed ahead, tweaking the hardware, writing new software programs and gradually turning the Macintosh into the machine of choice for the desktop publishing crowd.

In time the humble Macintosh would become the bedrock upon which Apple would construct the world's most valuable technology company and Steve Jobs would become a household name, a billionaire many times over and an icon in the world of industrial design.

Steve Jobs died today at the age of 56. Unlike many he lived long enough to see his wildest dreams come true, though that's cold comfort for the millions of people around the world who saw him as a one of the true visionaries of the post modern world of hi tech interconnectedness.

The Cars came out of Boston in the late 70s with a debut album that managed to combine the power of punk with the sophistication of pop. After that debut album though each subsequent release scored lower on the charts than the previous one. That is until 1984's "Heartbeat City". The albums success was, to some extent, a matter of right band/right time since MTV was just gaining traction and the band had the foresight to invest in some state of the art videos to promote it.

But Heartbeat City was more than just luck and marketing. It was damn good and the best track on the album was the one featured here; the monster hit "Drive". Benjamin Orr, who takes lead duties here, was the voice of the Cars on many of their other best known songs like "Just What I Needed", "Bye Bye Love" and "Let's Go". October 3 marks 11 years since his passing and it still seems kind of hard to believe.

So this one's for you Benjamin Orr, wherever you are.

Let's get this out of the way up front: Amadeus, Milos Foreman's screen adaptation of the Peter Schaffer play is not a biographical account of the life of Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart, arguably the greatest composer who ever lived and one of the towering figures in the pantheon of troubled geniuses.

What it is is a cautionary tale about the destructive power of envy and how that twisted emotional state skews a persons perceptions of both the envied and, just as importantly, the envious; here depicted by a highly fictionalized, aging, bitter, cynical self-loathing Antonio Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham in his Oscar winning performance).

Certainly some aspects of Mozart's actual character make it into this film: his fondness for scatological humor, his irreverence, his self confidence. But other equally important biographical details are left out because they don't serve the story that it being told here. For instance, Mozart was deeply devoted to his mother and his sister Nannerl who are never mentioned in the film. In fact he was with his mother on an extended stay in Paris when she died, leaving him emotionally crushed. He also traveled widely (for his day). He spent a great portion of his life in transit between the capitals of Europe (long, incredibly difficult journeys over roads that were barely more than root-filled quagmires) seeking commissions, playing for royalty, "getting the word out" in modern parlance. In the film you'd think he was a Vienna homeboy who never ventured beyond the tavern. He was the father of six children, four of whom died young but two of which survived into the mid-19th century. He was also, by most accounts, on the mend during the final year of his life. His income was up, he stopped accruing debts and even began paying down some of his previous loans and had a major success with The Magic Flute. The skewed time line in the movie makes it seem like his father died and a few months later he went into a permanent death spiral. (His father actually died four years before he did.)

But as I said few of the actual details of his life are important to the tale on view here because this is not a biopic. The real subject of the film is the Salieri character and his rabid embrace of one of the seven deadly sins (envy). Everything about the film's namesake is presented through the warped lens of his jealous delusions.

With all that said the story opens with an aging Salieri having just attempted suicide. He's confined to an insane asylum for his action and there is visited by a local priest who attempts to get him to confess his sins. The young lad doesn't know what he's in for as the brittle old coot unloads upon him his version of the Mozart story, the one he's always desperately wanted to believe himself. The one where he was a rival of Mozart and Mozart was little short of the devil incarnate. Fact is there was no rivalry, only in Salieri's head was he important enough to be considered a rival of Mozart.

But the aging prune has a captive audience and takes full advantage of it spinning a yarn for the ages. According to Salieri, Mozart was little more than a ungrateful pervert, molesting pretty young society things under tables during banquets. He was insultingly boastful and contemptuous, constantly drunk and possessed a demonic laugh that was one part hyena one part drunken trollop with touches of mocking insincerity thrown in for good measure. (It's crucial to note that when Mozart laughs what Salieri hears is god mocking him for his mediocrity).

The Salieri here is unrelenting in his final attempt to skew the Mozart narrative away from adoration to one of loathing. If he had lived in the 21st century he'd have been feeding these 'stories' to the Enquirer or News of the World, sitting back and reveling in the anti-Mozart backlash. But he lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries so his attempts to undo Mozart's reputation posthumously fell only on the overwhelmed ears of a parish priest.

He hints that he was responsible for Mozart's death but never says exactly how. He also suggests that he secretly commissioned the Requium Mozart was working on at the time of his death and spent the last night of Mozart's life in his bedroom with him acting as a kind of co-composer. (According to contemporary accounts Mozart died in the company of his wife and her sister. Salieri was no where near his deathbed.) About the only person in Mozart's life who gets anything like a sympathetic reading from Salieri is Mozart's father, Leopold. A stern disciplinarian and mediocre talent himself whose wishes Mozart often rebelled against, Salieri sees in him a kindred spirit and plays up to the listening priest the idea that Mozart was also a bad son.

Filmed in Foreman's native Prague Amadeus has an air of authenticity about it that is captivating in its own right. The cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek creates layers of texture that allow the viewer to sink into the world of 18th century middle Europe while the music is complementary and informative without becoming the picture; which was surely a danger given the quantity and quality of the material the film makers had to draw from.

Tom Hulce, cast as Salieri's version of Mozart, does a great job in a difficult role. The temptation had to be to play the character straight up, but that would have undercut the story. Instead he has to straddle realities and comes away with an admirable performance where the core of the character somehow manages to shine through the layers of contemptible and libelous attributions his narrator has slathered upon him.

F. Murray Abraham's Salieri is more pathetic than sympathetic. Sure it's tough to come face to face with someone in your chosen line of work who makes you look like a rube, but the level to which he's allowed himself to be consumed by his envy and the tireless lengths he's gone to (and indeed continues to go to even decades after Mozart's death) to snuff out the reputation of the master sets him beyond the border of understandable into the netherworld of despicable. By the end he's lost track not only of the facts surrounding the focus of his envy but of the facts surrounding himself and therein lies the real tragedy.

It might seem that the film makers were a bit hard on ol' Antonio, and truth be told they probably were, but again this is not a biopic, it is a cautionary tale and if the film makers had made Salieri have some change of heart in old age the story would have fallen apart.

So enjoy Amadeus for what it is; which is remarkable, resonant, beautifully crafted and deeply moving in parts. But please don't mistake it for history or biography.

Chris was listening to "The Unforgettable Fire" album again today and I have to say it's got to be my favorite U2 album as well. Here's another cut from it; A Sort of Homecoming. This is the official video for this song. They decided to use the video as a platform to highlight their live show, but its a very faithful rendition of the album track.

Dune seems to be one of the most inexplicable films ever made. Visionary, frustrating, inspiring, obtuse, thrilling and confusing are just some of the words that have been bandied about to describe David Lynch's cinematic version of Frank Herbert's tale. Lynch leads us down a rabbit hole into a future that might be the future or might be the past (since earth doesn't figure into the story in any capacity why would anyone assume its the year 10,191 relative to our planet?) or might be a dream, and certainly most of the film plays like a dream; narratively disjointed, nearly monochromatic in many places and blurry around the edges. Indeed, in spots it seems to be making itself up as it goes along as would a dream.

Some would (and have) said that these characteristics are a sign of a film maker who's lost touch with the material, maybe even the entire project. But this is David Lynch we're talking about here. If you hire David Lynch and expect to get George Lucas you haven't done your due diligence. Lynch wanted a world apart. Unrecognizable in some respects, nonsensical to a degree yet still 'real' enough to connect on a visceral, emotional level. He reaches back into art history's darkest, most evocative corners for inspiration; Hieronymus Bosch can be seen in the Freemen massing at the imperial gates late in the film, the floating grotesquerie that is the Baron Harkonnen has Francis Bacon oozing from his pustuals. The art direction in and of itself is worth the price of admission. The medieval-modern of the emperor's palace, the carved-from-solid-mahogany-and-covered-in-27-coats-of-laquer look of the Atreides home on Caladan; nothing is done half-way or overlooked for its symbolic potential. Case in point, the shoreline on Caladan is not some tranquil white sand paradise but a roiling, crashing, dimly lit tumult echoing the feelings of Paul and his family as they prepare to walk into the lions den of Arrakis. The Guild Navigator is the baby from Lynch's Eraserhead all grown up. The great hall where Paul declares "Long live the fighters!" is more than a little reminiscent of H.R. Giger's 'shafts' drawings of the 60s which were, interestingly, a record of one of his recurring nightmares. (Giger himself was hired on to help with earlier, unsuccessful attempts to bring the story to the screen and echoes of his hand are faintly felt at various points throughout the film.) Dune is also replete with many of Lynch's recurring themes: appearance vs reality, grinding, steam-belching machinery, mutation either genetic or man-made, the complex and powerful nature of sexuality. Even his semi-infatuation with the post wars years can be seen in the bulbous spacecraft that bring the members of House Harkonnen to Arrakis as well as the Guild Navigator's "tub"; both of which look like the mutant spawn of a 1950s Buick.

Why all this emphasis on the look of the film over the script/storyline? Because in Lynch's reading Paul's journey is not a political one so much as it is an emotional one. Because of this the emotional landscape Lynch creates with his imagery is crucial to telling the story as he sees it. More important, in fact, than fleshing out the back-stories of particular characters or wallowing in hours of exposition in an effort to clarify details of the myriad political intrigues. As a result Paul's life as depicted here is, like ours, nothing if not a series of vaguely connected occurrences that sometimes make sense and often don't and its how he deals with the stew of emotions engendered by these occurrences that will determine what position he rises or falls to within his own milieu. Were he not buttressed by vague yet powerful feelings of a fate largely beyond his control he'd crumble at the task before him. Instead he assembles himself like a grand jigsaw puzzle out of the disparate elements of his emotional life and only when he finally feels his external reality match up with his internal dialogue is he able to proclaim "Father! The sleeper has awakened!" and cast his fears aside. His apotheosis is not the result of outmaneuvering his opponent on the battlefield, but instead of creating an emotional harmony between his internal and external lives.

So focusing on where Lynch may have failed to literally illustrate Herbert's words is, to me, a waste of time. If literal is what you want rent the scifi channel's version from 2000. I take it as a given that Lynch has discarded much of the book's literal narrative in favor of emotional narrative and appreciate the lengths he's gone to to recreate with images Paul's emotional saga. Anyone uneasy with this aesthetic choice will probably be unhappy with the resultant film, feeling he's betrayed Herbert. But film is its own medium with its own possibilities and limitations and Lynch has made a career out of exploring its possibilities. Dune is no exception.

Dune is not a film that requires the viewer to suspend their disbelief. On the contrary Lynch insists that you believe that there are truths which transcend reality lurking in the subconscious of every man and that only a fool ignores them. When the final credits on his expansive, beautiful, unsettling epic began to roll I didn't feel as though I'd reached the end of a movie, I felt like I was waking up.

She was part of a group that was loved by musicians and critics but largely ignored by fans. Her husband/manager, while a talented musician himself, was also a drug-addicted control freak who got off on beating up women. She'd been on national TV and played in down and out ramshackle clubs in the boondocks. But one thing was clear: at the dawn of the 80s Tina Turner's career in music was dead in the water and there didn't seem to be a whole lot of people who even noticed.

So, what's a girl to do? Well, Tina called some of those music biz types that were so fond of her earlier work with the "Revue" and got them to produce a new batch of songs with her. Among the people who answered the call were Mark Knopfler, Jeff Beck and Terry Bitten along with  Martyn Ware and Ian Marsh of the British band "Heaven 17". The result was "Private Dancer", and album that would catapult Tina above and beyond anything she had known before in terms of popularity and sell over 5 million copies in the US alone. Almost overnight she went from being just another also-ran to having a #1 hit (What's Love Got To Do With It?), headlining sold out concerts all over the world, winning Grammy awards and starring in big budget Hollywood movies (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome).

The whole world fell in love with this graduate of the School of Hard Knocks and that love affair hasn't really waned in the intervening decades. She's gone on to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful female solo live act in history and in 2005, in an event she probably had a hard time imagining in 1981, she was welcomed to the White House as a Kennedy Center Honoree by President Bush. Maybe the sweetest aspect of all her success since Private Dancer though is the knowledge that she finally put that wife-beating cretin of a "husband" so far in the rear-view that almost no one remembers him. She who laughs last...

Tina Turner at the White House as a Kennedy Center Honoree, 2005

The Chevrolet Corvette was languishing. The "Stingray" had been in production in one form or another for 2 decades and had grown into (or devolved into depending on your point of view) little more than a bloated avenue trawler with a notable family name. Questions abounded about the future of the once mighty Vette, with as many people fearing the end had come as were convinced that Chevy would find a way to breath new life into the name.

The fact that no Corvettes were produced for the '83 model year alerted people that something was up and indeed by the time 1984 rolled around anticipation was at a fever pitch. Few people were disappointed with the car that Chevrolet finally rolled into showrooms nationwide. The new C4 was a radical departure from the C3. Gone was the Coke bottle "Stingray" with its pinched cabin and its gi-normous front end and in its place was a sleeked out, wide body (at least it felt that way) sports car, redesigned, re-engineered and resuscitated with plenty of European design cues.

While it took a few years to work out the kinks (suspension problems, transmission issues and the fact that the initial C4 basically had the '82 C3 engine with a meager 205 hp) there was no denying that the Vette was back on the right track. By 1987 no one was disputing that the C4 was a world class sports car with its turbo-charged 345 hp version driving highway policeman batty from coast to coast.

The redesigned 1984 Corvette C4 with its Porsche inspired running lights where the grill used to be.

Roland Joffe's 1984 film was one of those productions that come along every once in a while and are labeled "important" almost from the time they're greenlit. Few actually live up to that title but "The Killing Fields" is one. I've tried for a long time to put my finger on why it works and the best I can come up with is that it goes where no one (in Hollywood) had dared to go before: into the lives of the locals. It's as though "Lawrence of Arabia" didn't follow Lawrence back to Cairo after the fall of Aquaba but instead stayed behind to tell the tale of the Arabs as they struggled to find common cause and inspiration in a victory few of them actually cared about at the time. This is not a knock on Lawrence of Arabia by any stretch. It remains one of the great motion pictures ever made. It is simply to try and make the point that by staying behind after all the white guys left The Killing Fields strays into territory that makes it more than a simple night at the movies. The real story of the tragedy that was Cambodia in the 70s and 80s is not one of drunken journalist from the US and Europe escaping by the hair of their chinny-chin-chins. It's a tale of a revolution gone horribly wrong and the imposition of a modern day reign of terror that made the original French version seem like a walk in the park. This is not a story that can be told by looking through the eyes of Sidney Schanberg or any of the other journalists who were there for the fall but absent for the disintegration.

For the Cambodian people there would be no one coming over the hill to save them for years, (until Vietnam invaded and sent the Khmer rats scurrying back into the jungle). They were on their own against some of the worst humankind has to offer and in that disintegrated world Dith Pran (played brilliantly by Dr Haing S. Ngor), bereft of his western sponsors, is as powerless as any other Cambodian citizen to stop the hemorrhaging. He must forage for compassion, put out the lightest of feelers for spiritual connection and stay strong while those around him do their utmost to tear him down. The Khmer Rouge said they were starting over again with the year 0, and it only seems fitting. What other number would suffice to describe a world shorn of cultural touchstones and family ties, where history and education were dirty words, countless numbers were worked to death and heavily armed children were encouraged to pass snap judgements on people they didn't know. This was nihilism on an institutional level not seen since the Holocaust and Joffe bravely attempts to confront it by following Pran through a largely wordless hell.

It is a story that can only be told effectively through the use of the camera, where minute gestures or facial expressions can spell the difference between life and death, and Joffe seems to instinctively understand this. He doesn't pad out Pran's story with clumsy exposition. The dread is in the silence. Hearing is used only to ingest propaganda or to listen for predators. Speaking is prohibited. If you don't know how to observe your chances of survival are slim at best. So, like the people he's chronicling Joffe observes and we observe along with him and them and in the end we find that words come hard when trying to explain what happened and, more importantly, why and how. Only that it did and that if people hadn't kept their eyes open to the horror unfolding around them and remembered what they saw there's a chance no one on the outside would have ever known what really occurred.

Maybe that's the lesson of The Killing Fields: don't look away. Don't ever look away.

Patricia Mae Andrzejewski aka Pat Benatar was 5 feet of pop-rock over-the-top intensity. During the 80s she had 19 top 40 singles and was an MTV staple. "We Belong" is from her 6th studio album, - 1984's "Tropico" - and was a departure in style for her. In my opinion it was the kind of departure she should have made more often because the softer sound really works beautifully with the upper part of her vocal range. I love this song. To me it's one of the top singles of the 80s. Written by Dan Navarro (a cousin of Jane's Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro) the song reached #5 in the States and earned her a Grammy nomination.

James Cameron was sick. He was lying in his hotel bed in Rome during the filming of Piranha II when he had a fever induced nightmare about a powerful humanoid robot skeleton emerging ominously from the detritus of an enormous explosion. He got up and sketched out what he'd imagined and went back to sleep. Later, after he'd been dropped from Piranha II and was back in California he wrote out the draft of a story based on his fever dream image and "The Terminator" was born. Raw, crisp and with a kinetic energy Cameron would perfect several years later with "Aliens" The Terminator starts with a bang and doesn't let up.

The machine overlords of the year 2029 are tired of fighting the pesky human resistance and come up with a plan to circumvent history. They send a human looking robotic killing machine (a terminator) back through time to kill the mother of the resistance leader; thereby preventing his birth and saving them a huge hassle. Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator arrives in the Los Angeles of 1984 and quickly gets to work, murdering a couple of SoCal punks for their clothes (if you blink you'll miss a young Bill Paxton in this scene) and discovering via the phone book all the women in LA who share the name of his target: Sarah Conner. Shortly afterward Michael Biehn's Reese arrives via the same time displacement equipment the terminator used. His mission: to prevent the terminator from killing Sarah Conner. Given that, in Reese's own words, the terminator "can't be bargained with... can't be reasoned with... doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear (and) absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!" and is virtually indestructible on top of all that it's fair to say that Reese has his work cut out for him.

The Terminator cuts a swath of destruction across LA in his quest to find and kill his target with Reese and Sarah Conner barely a step ahead of him (Cameron's use of chase scenes as platforms for exposition makes it seem as though the film simply never takes a breath). Sarah's initial reluctance to believe anything Reese is telling her gets blown away when the terminator tracks her down to a police station, drives a car through the front doors (after Ahnuld utters what was to become his signature line; "I'll be back") and proceeds to spray wall to wall death and destruction upon the ineffective cops. After narrowly escaping Reese and Sarah find one night of peace together during which time John is conceived but they're soon tracked down again and the chase resumes. After fleeing back toward the city the terminator chases them down and there's the climactic encounter in a factory.

In my opinion the plot wasn't what made this work so successful as a motion picture, though it is a strong script. So what was? Well, to begin with the film looks cool. Cameron creates a Los Angeles that could be the precursor to the LA in Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", but more fundamental to the films success is the blissful lack of post-modern irony. Reese is not an anti-hero, he's an old-fashioned hero ready to give his life for the greater good. Schwarznegger's terminator has absolutely no redeeming value or sympathy-evoking root causes for his behavior. He wasn't a good kid who's gone bad. He's death on two feet. He is the void. His job is to kill you, period. In a world increasingly overrun by moral relativity Cameron's simple good vs evil paradigm was refreshing and easy for average movie goers to get their head around. There were no inconvenient pangs of guilt clanging around in the subconscious mitigating your enjoyment of seeing the villian get his comeuppance.

Casting Schwarznegger against type was also a stroke of genius. Ahnuld's agent was against him taking the role, concerned it would ruin his public image, but Cameron knew better. He knew that Schwarznegger's steely tuetonic presence was perfect for the terminator and he was right. Given virtually no lines to screw up Ahnuld was able to make the role his own and his career took off like a rocket after this film. Michael Beihn, Lance Henricksen, Earl Boen and Paul Winfield deliver strong supporting performances with the only weak link in the entire production chain being the in over her head Linda Hamilton. The woman simply can't act. There isn't a moment in the entire film that I believe she is Sarah Conner. When compared to Sigourney Weaver's iconic performance in Cameron's 1986 masterpiece "Aliens" Hamilton's performance here is, frankly, embarrassing (as was her work in T2). That said, the special effects were also first rate for their day and stand as a testament to how well, even at this early point in his career, Cameron understood the craft of film making.

Put all those elements together: compelling concept, easy to understand good vs bad moral structure, career making performances, strong script, deft direction and good special effects and you have a movie worth spending a couple of hours with. The Terminator was not in and of itself a game changer, but it certainly helped push contemporary cinema of the time toward the 21st century.

The Terminator 1984 - trailer

It was one of the most vexing problems facing western civilization in the late 20th century. Philosophers, engineers, politicians and physicists had all taken stabs at solving it, yet all had somehow failed: how do you keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool?

Well in 1984 McDonalds solved the riddle and people everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. No longer would we be subjected to limp, runny, lukewarm tomato slices. No longer would our rectangular piece of cheese-style consumable product turn into a gooey layer of chemicals before we had a chance to fully enjoy it's robust artificial flavor. No longer would we endure the shame of bringing home a wet, soggy take out bag or experience the uneasy feeling of being had as we lapped up our dead cow patties.

The idea, like most revolutionary ideas, was simple. Seperate the hot side from the cool side using a double breasted styrofoam container. Sure it increased the size of the average take out bag by 639% and created choking floods of styrofoam trash in landfills around America, but who cared? Things were as they should be. Order and honor had been restored to the fast food universe and McDonalds even created an advertising campaign using the future George Costanza (Jason Alexander with hair) to bring the message of renewal to the masses.





Hey, if it's good enough for George it's good enough for me. Gimme two to go!

The Eagles were the 70s. It's impossible to think of the 70s and not think of songs like "Take it Easy" and "Hotel California". But by 1980 the band members (particularly Don Henley and Glenn Frey) were at each others throats and split up, vowing never to play together again. With not much else to do Don Henley embarked on a solo career and proved pretty convincingly that he was the major creative force behind the Eagles success.

His second solo album "Building the Perfect Beast" was released in 1984. It was a huge seller and contained several top 40 hits including "The Boys of Summer" and the song I'm featuring here, "All She Wants to do is Dance"; a funky little tale about bad boys courting trouble in a Central American banana republic and one particular chiquita who's always party-ready.

He was the odd-son-out in the carnival that was John Lennon's personal life. Raised largely by his mother Cynthia he lived his childhood out of the spotlight in England. That all changed in 1980. Following the murder of his father Julian Lennon (John Charles Julian Lennon) was thrust into the limelight as the media went searching for John Lennon-related stories. Inevitably he took up his father's musical mantel and for a while in the mid-80s became a mainstay on MTV. Over time interest in him as the 'second coming' began to fade and he assumed the life of a journeyman rocker; playing clubs, releasing albums that got little or no attention and doing the occasional interview.

That doesn't mean he went away though.

Today Julian Lennon is still an active musician (his new album Everything Changes is due out this year) a film producer (the documentary Whaledreamers about an aboriginal tribe) and head of the environmental and humanitarian White Feather Foundation. At 48 he's outlived his legendary father by 8 years and by all accounts is a happy and centered man.

Julian Lennon then and now

When Talk Talk first hit the scene most music critics compared them to Duran Duran. They got their start in the early 80s and, for a while, those comparisons were valid. A lot of their earliest stuff sounds like Duran Duran outtakes. By 1984 however they had managed to carve their own musical niche and finally achieved breakthrough success with the the title track from their album "It's My Life". I've loved it from the first time I heard it and was so happy that No Doubt did a faithful remake of it in 2003, in the process bringing this great song to the attention of a whole new generation of listeners.

Talk Talk - It's My Life

He was a controversial choice to play one of the great genuises of all-time and he had some heady competition: Mel Gibson, David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mick Jagger, Sam Waterston, Mark Hamill and Tim Curry all either auditioned or were considered for the role at some point. In his autobiography Kenneth Branagh states that he was actually cast in the role before producer Saul Zaentz changed his mind and decided to work with an American cast and crew.

So the wheel of fortune stopped on Tom Hulce's number and he went on to create one of the most memorable film performances of the 80s as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the film, Amadeus. The movie won 8 academy awards including Best Picture. Hulce himself was nominated for Best Actor but lost out to his Amadeus co-star F. Murray Abraham. Hulce went on to appear in a number of other films through the 80s and 90s, though he was never to revisit the mountaintop that was Amadeus.

Hulce retired from acting in the late 90s and spends much of his time in New York now where he has had a successful second career producing for the stage.

Hard to believe but there was actually a time when Bono was not the ambassador of all free-thinking people of conscience, hobnobbing with world leaders at G8 summits and solving sovereign debt problems the world over. Swear to god. Back in the 80s U2 was a band, not a clothing line and they were arguably the most influential and exciting band working.

Following the international recognition that came with "War" they sought a change in direction and signed on an initially reluctant Brian Eno to help them find that direction. He and Daniel Lanois deconstructed the band's sound in order to find it's soul and after months of patient, persistent effort (at Ireland's Slane Castle and at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin) band and crew emerged with a mystical, ambiguous, pulsating work of genius. The lead single "Pride (in the name of love)" acted as a bridge between War and the new sound but it was the album's other cuts like "Elvis Presley and America", "A Sort of Homecoming" and "Wired" that really brought the house down on the band's past. Here was rock music that didn't beat you into submission but quietly convinced you upon repeated listening that it was 'right'.

Though in the long run The Unforgettable Fire would be overshadowed by the mega-success of The Joshua Tree (which we'll talk about later) I think it's pretty safe to say there would have been no Joshua Tree without it. It's my favorite U2 album and in my top 5 of best rock albums ever.

Title track: The Unforgettable Fire