Syrian Intervention for Fun and or profit.

There is an old PSA about the right time to talk to your children about relationship abuse.  It’s a steady shot of a man and his son in a diner, sitting uncomfortably as a couple have a fairly one-sided argument in which the man screams at her, degrades her with name calling and intimidation, and then ultimately decrees “We’re leaving;” pulling her out of the diner by the arm.  The father does nothing to intervene or assist the woman, who will likely get a few black eyes when she goes home with her date.  The ad then poses the question: “When should you intervene in an abusive relationship?” or some pointed question similar to that one.  It zooms in closer on the son, who looks like he just realized his father isn’t Superman, and says, “Right now.”  The idea is simple: end the abusive cycle by immunizing your own children against it.  I can’t seem to find the PSA anywhere online, probably because it’s a terrible PSA, and all PSAs should be banished to the festering wasteland of awful and obvious messages cobbled together by hack directors who couldn’t get a job directing a Ronco Food Dehydrator infomercial.

Because No One Asked: Ranking the 80s teen movies I’ve seen, with little to no explanation whatsoever.

As a child of the mid-80s, I grew up watching the TBS edit of many 1980s movies, and wondering why the pretty white people from upper middle class families in those movies had so many problems not related to their family’s socio-economic status.  Looking back, many of the plots are a weird sort of logic house of cards, in that we need to believe that the cliques existed in high school, and that becoming popular was the most important part of life, and would fix everything once the whole school recognized their value.  As is the case with all my lists, I’ll group them into an overarching and overly simplified collection of movies and provide almost no rationale.  It’s like I’m a surly, passive aggressive person with highly anal-retentive needs to provide order and structure to speciously connected things. Remember, these are only the movies I’ve seen.  You won’t find Risky Business or Fame on here. Let’s go!