A little '80s romance
- Jack Colton: Wait a minute, he's after you. Who the hell are you?
Joan Wilder: Well, I'm a romance novelist.
- Romancing the Stone
Last night after dinner I spent a couple hours bringing our aging home computer back to life. (I suspect the iTunes upgrade trashed the Winsock registry keys, but I can't be sure.) At the same time, Sharon was watching that classic of '80s action/adventure, Romancing the Stone.
Most of us probably have movies that can be classified as "cable overkill" (a term I learned from my wife). These are the movies that were constantly on cable, particularly right after you first got cable and watched everything. Romancing the Stone is one of my cable overkill movies, though I do remember seeing it in the theater when it came out. I found myself reciting lines often.
I thought it was great then, and it mostly stands up to the test of time. Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas played well off each other, and Danny DeVito stole every scene he was in. The soundtrack suffers the most over time. It probably sounded fresh and cool in 1984, but it sounds really cheesy now. A contemporary pop film score just doesn't age well.
I cannot mention the music of Romancing the Stone without mentioning Eddy Grant's song of the same name. The song was commissioned for the film, but they decided not to use it. Apparently you can hear the guitar solo in one scene (in villa of Juan, the fan of Joans novels), but that's it. Luckily for all of us, Grant released it on its own, along with a video.
Not that's classic '80s romance.
1 comment:
I absolutely don't remember the song. And am glad for it.
I didn't mean to watch the whole movie, just something mindless to focus my eyes on while I ate a very late dinner. I just got sucked in, in a very nostalgic way.
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