Rock Hudson’s story has been told many times either through his films, or more broadly, alongside Old Hollywood tales. Other times, it’s been shared through the stories of his collaborators and closefriends such as Doris Day or Elizabeth Taylor. Most prominently to modern audiences, the story of Rock Hudson has been told through the larger stories of AIDS and the inadvertent role that Hudson would play there as the first famous person to openly reveal they had acquired it in the mid 1980s. It is nice then to see him get the story all to himself, this time, in a film that celebrates rather than mourns...
Chris looks back at one of the best soundtracks of the year, Atomic Blonde...
There’s no other film I wanted to musically take up residence inside this year more than Atomic Blonde. The film is loaded with techno pseudo-political new age and best played at full volume, featuring the likes of The Clash to A Flock of Seagulls. It’s a film that gifts us with the glory of Til Tuesday’s glorious “Voices Carry” not once, but twice!
While some might reduce its endless stream of songs to added set dressing (cue Daniel Walber’s Atomic Blonde installment of The Funiture here) or just another fabulous costume, it actually does some heavy lifting to both immerse us into a specific world of its the Cold War setting and distinguish the era apart from the cinematic cliches of the subgenre. The electric glamor and brutality has been some of the film’s major discussion points for how the film looks unlike your average Cold War film, but it’s equally crucial that it doesn’t sound like one either...
1985 is our "Year of the Month", as we work towards the Supporting Actress Smackdown (Sunday October 1st!). We'll be periodically peppering the blog with takes on showbiz from that year. But first a "TOTALLY 80s" overview of the year that was in movies, music, theater, and tv after the jump...
Nathaniel already looked at his favourite George Michael songs in tribute to the man's passing at age 53, and today a 1985 tour documentary featuring the finest male vocalist of his generation.
Three decades ago when China figuratively opened their doors to western culture, the first to arrive were… Big Bird and Wham! Two fey, energetic, hyper-coloured performers who sought a mutual exchange through music and film. The yellow Sesame Street character had Big Bird in China, while George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley got Wham! In China: Foreign Skies.
It’s a peculiar film, and not an especially good one. Half Chinese travelogue for the western audiences fascinated by the newly open China with their bustling food markets, seas of grey fashion, and their Great Wall; half concert film focusing, rightly, on the energetic and handsome George Michael sashaying around on stage like nobody had ever seen before.
As a general rule of thumb, we love list-making and recapping of the year's significant moments and events but the exception is the work of the grim reaper. Death has claimed so many icons recently, particularly from the music world, that 2016 is starting to feel like a parody of its apocalyptic self as we reach its conclusion.
On Christmas day, of all days considering that one of his most enduring hits is "Last Christmas," George Michael was taken from us. Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou (better known as George Michael) was born in East Finchley London in 1963. By the age of 19 he'd charted his first hit with his friend Andrew Ridgeley (the other half of Wham!) called "Young Guns (Go for It!)". Two years later he was world famous by way of the global smash "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go." Which is when little Nathaniel first fell in love. But that initial fame wasn't the half of it. In fact the early hits I loved so much only hinted at the artist he'd become. He proved himself one of the great pop singers and composers over and over again. "Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I," released in 1990 is surely his masterpiece (and one of the greatest pop albums ever recorded) but he continued to be brilliant even when record contract troubles and personal problems overshadowed his talent with the public. His career had been quiet for some time but it's worth noting that he made one last significant contribution to pop culture that people don't regularly attribute to him -- he was the first star to sing with James Corden whilst driving around in a car back in 2011 which eventually became the ubiquitous "Carpool Karaoke" series of the here and now.
Given his death this weekend, the lyrics and defiance of one of his very last records "White Light" (recorded in 2012 and inspired by his near death in 2011) are suddenly so much sadder.
There is no white light and I'm not through I'm alive I'm alive and I've got so much more that I want to do.
Was it music or science that saved me?
After the jump 16 favorite songs from his career...
Saturday, July 8, 2023 at 5:00PM 
