“Don’t You (Forget About Me),” by Simple Minds, is the theme song to the 1984 teen hit, John Hughes, The Breakfast Club.  Don’t worry Mr. Hughes, this product of the eighties, will never forget this gem of a movie or any of the great stars who fulfilled the classic stereotypes of the high school paradigm. This is a love letter to the heroes of The Breakfast Club, my coming-of-age movie.

Molly Ringwald: I love you as the princess and I still wish for the janitor closet encounter with Judd Nelson (Pretty classy, being a diamond earring and all..) I am sorry, Molly, that we the children of the eighties, sold you out to the Lifetime franchise and even made you move to France for a while.

Ally Sheedy: I love you because you taught the teens of the eighties that a “basket case” can be really cool and that sometimes a make-over is not really who you are.  I apologize for the years of movie mishaps such as Maid to Order.  The eighties were hard on all of us. Read the rest of this entry »

 We have all seen some of our favorite television series pay homage to the film that is truly in love with the Big Apple.  In Gossip Girls, we see Blair (Leighton Messer) relive the famous “breakfast” scene made popular by the one and only Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly. In another on-screen affair with New York City, we see hints of Breakfast at Tiffany’s revived in scene after scene of the television series Sex and the City. Fashion and the iconic Audrey Hepburn are sprinkled in almost every televised and filmed moment portraying party girls in NYC.  Why not see where it all began? Read the rest of this entry »

Remember last month’s media dustup over the Massachusetts high school with the high teen pregnancy rate, and the conflicting reports over whether there was an actual ‘pregnancy pact’?

Flash forward to last weekend in the neighboring community of Beverly Farms, which stages an annual 4th of July “Horribles Parade” that’s apparently satirical. Among the floats were several that made fun of the baby bump epidemic in nearby Gloucester, and suddenly this year’s Horribles Parade is just too horrible for local sensibilities:

Allowing insulting floats in the annual Beverly Farms Horribles parade - including one tossing condoms with candy - has taken the baby bump to a new low, said Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk.

“I’m deeply offended, and there but for the grace of God go your daughter or daughters in any community,” said Kirk when told of the salacious satire.

Even after three Beverly Farms judges walked off, the July 4th pregnancy-pocked parade marched on with men in diapers crawling from between a woman’s legs propped in birthing stirrups and a giant phallus sprayed the crowd as parents and their tots were confronted with signs like, “GHS Girls Went to Band Camps, Came Back Pregnant Tramps.”

What the story doesn’t make clear is if this is a traditional event for “parents and their tots,” or whether it’s, like our own Krewe du Vieux, a raunchy satire for consenting adult spectators. (Yeah, I’ve seen kids at Krewe du Vieux, too, and they don’t belong there, either.)

In either case, it seems like a lot of folks around Gloucester are more upset by drag queens with fake baby-bellies than they are by teenage girls with real baby-bellies…and that’s a damn shame. Either way, they should probably steer clear of the Marigny a couple weeks before Fat Tuesday.

Award-winning filmmaker Werner Herzog is perhaps best known recently for his film Grizzly Man (trailer here), a documentary about the end of Timothy Treadwell’s life. Treadwell was a sort of obsessive naturalist who spent 13 years visiting the national parks of Alaska trying to live among the bears. He filmed bears, filmed himself tracking them and even interacting with them. Tragically, he also had a camera rolling when a bear finally attacked and ate him, almost all of which is off-camera. But Herzog pieced together his portrait from 100 hours of Treadwell’s film.

Herzog brings his new film, Encounters at the End of the World,  to town this week. There will be a screening and a Q&A with the director, which might be a good place to get a preview of his planned filming of The Bad Liutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

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The announcement that Starbucks will be closing 600 stores nationwide last week hit (see Mike Luckovich’s cartoon from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution above) kind of like an announcement that 600 drops of water were being removed from the Mississippi River. I remember a conversation I had with a friend last week, remembered semi-verbatim below:

Him: You remember, we were at the Starbucks in your old neighborhood in New York.

Me: The one by the diner.

Him: No, the one on Astor Place.

Me: The diner is on Astor Place.

Him: Right, but the other one.

Me: The one by the subway station?

Him: No, that’s the one on the east side of Astor Place. The other other one, across the street.

When I lived in the East Village for six months after Katrina, you could stand on the street outside my apartment and literally see four Starbucks stores. Where I live now, in the Bywater - and this may be one of the last places in the U.S. that this can happen - you’ll pass at least six independent coffeehouses, plus two stores owened by the Louisiana chain CC’s, before you get to the nearest Starbucks. I’m not a hater - I’ll sip from the green straw as often as anyone. But for those who like the option of caffeinating locally, this website is a nice alternative option. Here’s how it works: enter in your ZIP code, and it goes into its viewer-built database and gives you addresses, phone numbers and reviews on all the indie coffee shops within five miles of where you are (it’ll also give you the locations of all the convenient Starbucks shops, just to play fair.) You can do it from your cell phone; it’ll even give you map directions how to get there.

It’ll also do the same to find indie bookstores and movie theaters. It’s probably good for people who have become unintentional shut-ins due to Amazon and Netflix. Thankfully, you can’t buy a cup of coffee on the Internet yet.

At least two major opponents of Congressman Bill Jefferson will formally announce their candidacies this week, and more are sure to come.

Helena Moreno and Kenya Smith both will announce tomorrow (Tuesday, July 8). State Sen. Cheryl Gray is weighing her options, and former City Councilman Troy Carter has phoned potential supporters to tell them that he intends to run, but neither has yet sent word of plans for a formal announcement.

Smith, a former top aide to Mayor Ray Nagin, will announce at 5 p.m. in Woldenberg Park. A campaign source says he expects a crowd of supporters to be there, including some high-profile folks like RTA chair Cesar Burgos and New Orleans Jazz Orchestra director Irvin Mayfield.

Moreno will announce an hour later, at 6 p.m., at the Union Passenger Terminal. She has already put together a campaign team, including pollster Ed Renwick and media consultant Greg Buisson. Her friend, Saints exec Rita Benson LeBlanc, will serve as finance chair.

No doubt more will jump into the race as well.  I did a cover story on the race in this week’s Gambit Weekly, which should be online later today (Monday).

By: Allen Johnson

Qualifying for the fall elections gets underway this week, Wednesday through Friday, and political tradition dictates that the Alliance for Good Government’s annual “Legislator of the Year” banquet follows soon thereafter. This year’s four-parish banquet will begin at 7 p.m. Saturday (July 12) at the Hilton Riverside. Cocktail hour starts at 5:30 p.m. — roughly 24 hours after qualifying closes.

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By: Jeremy Alford

While usually a national issue, the military’s ongoing affairs grabbed the attention of Louisiana lawmakers several times this year.

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