April 9, 2007
Music Mondays Presents Times Square
Tonight, Alamo Music Mondays presents Times Square, Allan Moyle's two-against-the-world teen drama set in the grimy, x-rated heart of late 1970s Manhattan.
Featuring music by Gary Numan, XTC, Roxy Music, The Ruts, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads, the film follows two teenage girls who escape from a psychiatric hospital, take up residence in an abandoned warehouse and form an underground punk band called "The Sleez Sisters". With the help of a hip late-night radio DJ named Johnny LaGuardia (perfectly acted by Tim Curry), the girls become local celebrities-- but the pressures of life on the street soon threaten to tear their friendship apart.
In a lot of ways, Times Square is a sort of precursor to Moyle's more popular (but in our opinion less cool) follow-up feature Pump Up the Volume. Youthful alienation? Check. Rebellious DJ? Check. Bad poetry? Check. Amazing (and commercially successful) soundtrack? Check. But despite the similarities, Times Square didn't turn out exactly the way Moyle had intended. He left the production over disputes with producer Robert Stigwood, who had just produced Saturday Night Fever and wanted to add more (in some cases completely inconsistent) music in order to pad the film's soundtrack for retail sale. Moyle and Stigwood also butted heads over several lesbian sequences that were ultimately cut in a effort to heighten the film's commercial viability.
In any case, Times Square still turned out to be a fantastic teen drama that stands up fairly well, even after almost three decades. And despite some of Stigwood's weird additions (the Bee Gees? WTF?), the film's soundtrack eventually helped it become a cult hit both in the United States and abroad.
Music Mondays Presents Times Square
Monday, April 9th
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
9:45pm, $2 / $1 Student, AFS
[Tickets]
Featuring music by Gary Numan, XTC, Roxy Music, The Ruts, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and the Talking Heads, the film follows two teenage girls who escape from a psychiatric hospital, take up residence in an abandoned warehouse and form an underground punk band called "The Sleez Sisters". With the help of a hip late-night radio DJ named Johnny LaGuardia (perfectly acted by Tim Curry), the girls become local celebrities-- but the pressures of life on the street soon threaten to tear their friendship apart.
In a lot of ways, Times Square is a sort of precursor to Moyle's more popular (but in our opinion less cool) follow-up feature Pump Up the Volume. Youthful alienation? Check. Rebellious DJ? Check. Bad poetry? Check. Amazing (and commercially successful) soundtrack? Check. But despite the similarities, Times Square didn't turn out exactly the way Moyle had intended. He left the production over disputes with producer Robert Stigwood, who had just produced Saturday Night Fever and wanted to add more (in some cases completely inconsistent) music in order to pad the film's soundtrack for retail sale. Moyle and Stigwood also butted heads over several lesbian sequences that were ultimately cut in a effort to heighten the film's commercial viability.
In any case, Times Square still turned out to be a fantastic teen drama that stands up fairly well, even after almost three decades. And despite some of Stigwood's weird additions (the Bee Gees? WTF?), the film's soundtrack eventually helped it become a cult hit both in the United States and abroad.
Music Mondays Presents Times Square
Monday, April 9th
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown
9:45pm, $2 / $1 Student, AFS
[Tickets]
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Pump Up The Volume is a seriously underrated movie and in the running for one of the best soundtracks of all time...my fave is either the 80s-period Leonard Cohen or the weird-ass Was (Not Was) song "Dad, I'm In Jail."
Don't get me wrong... I loves me some Pump Up the Volume (Easily THE defining early-90s soundtrack. Ice-T's Freedom of Speech? Sonic Youth's Titanium Expose? The good version of the Pixies' Wave of Mutilation? The list goes on). But I like Times Square a lot more; either because it has less cheeseball dialog, or because its late 70s setting helps you forgive its cheeseball dialog - I'm not sure which. And for it's time period (11 years before PUTV), the Times Square soundtrack is just as good. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth a look.