Defamer has opened up their closed comment system (presumably temporarily) so that the blog’s readers can post questions to legendarily reclusive 80s teen film auteur John Hughes. According to Stu VanAirsdale, the site is also looking for “tipsters, spies and industry moles” who can contact Hughes and pass the comment thread questions along. Apparently, that task is more formidable than it might sound: the L.A. Times‘ Patrick Goldstein, who apparently wasn’t able to get to Hughes whilst researching this story, credits Vince Vaughn as the “one person who made contact.” Here’s hoping Defamer’s Q & A challenge strikes a victory for citizen journalism. Subsequently, let’s also hope that if Hughes does deign to take a look at the questions, he’s not put off by the commenter who compares Hughes to Reverend Wright and begs him to “please stay retired forever.”
Semi-related: the new poster for the Sundance doc, American Teen.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon recently gave a lengthy interview to the GeeksOn podcast, and half the blogs in my Google Reader are talking about it (yes, the mostly the nerdy ones). You’d assume that the geeks would be most excited about what Whedon had to say about future movie projects, or maybe the his new TV series, which stars Buffy/Angel vet Eliza Dushku. Wrong. All anyone is talking about is a throwaway diss from Whedon on the subject of John Hughes’ Weird Science:
I hate Weird Science not a little. I find it offensive. The boy fantasy of building a girl. Obviously, we were doing the nasty version of it, because I find it grotesque.
When Whedon says “we”, he’s talking about a storyline on a late season of Buffy, in which ancillary character Warren built a robot version of Buffy for the sexual gratification of Spike. Warren eventually got flayed by Buffy’s lesbian witch friend Willow, and the Buffybot was destroyed by demons, so I guess everyone got their comeupance for engaging in the “grotesquerie” of the robot girlfriend game. Except for Spike, who moved to LA and partnered with Buffy’s other vampire ex-boyfriend to fight evil lawyers. But whatever. Back to Weird Science…
We haven’t done an installment of The Micro Five in a couple of weeks, so let me give you a refresher: the basic idea is not to create a definitive (read: totally subjective) Top Five list, but to pick a super-specific topic and examine how five films handled it differently. You can read previous installments here, here, here and here.
This time out, we’re looking at musical numbers of the 80s. The Hollywood musical is thought in some quarters to have lost its way in the late 70s/early 80s (although recent reappraisals have been kinder to the era that produced curiosities like One From the Heart.) Still, the influence of MTV on all aspects of 80s culture (but especially youth culture) by the end of the decade led to an normalization of song and dance scenes (but especially dance scenes) in non-musicals. See my take on five numbers involving John Hughes, Spike Lee and Christopher Walken, after the jump.
Defamer has opened up their closed comment system (presumably temporarily) so that the blog’s readers can 
