monday music trip: in a big country [ BIG COUNTRY ]

For all the fashion faux-pas and too-painful-to-re-watch performances associated with the decade, there were a lot of gnarly things about the 1980s.  Such as Brit post-pop and intense concerts like this one.

Snippette from Wiki:

Big Country are a Scottish rock band born out of Dunfermline, Fife. They were most popular in the early to mid-1980s, but they still release material for a cult following. The band were notable for music infused with Scottish folk and martial music styles, as well as for playing and engineering their guitar driven sound to evoke the inspirational spirit of bagpipes, fiddles and other traditional folk instruments.

I'm not sure how big Big Country was here, but they apparently had - and still have - a following at some other part of the world.  I like the upbeat '80s new wave sound combined with bagpipey guitars.

About this single.  I guess I was too young to appreciate it when was released in 1983, and I suppose I hadn't heard of it until a few later after because I'm not Scottish. Still I have an attachment to it because it's linked to a memory I have of an inter-school cheering competition my high school participated in back in 1993, where we won gold and all went home ecstatic.
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friday flick fix:sliding doors

 Poster image from here.

Sliding Doors

(1998)

Gwyneth Paltrow * John Hannah

Written and directed by Peter Howitt

It's not at all astoundinglythoughtprovokinglyspectacular, but I kinda think  Sliding Doors has been underrated (I mean at least here, where I'm from). I can easily imagine it to be some fatalist's favorite, or a romantic's reference, but it seems like no one even remembers it anymore (at least not here).  It's not an intellectually challenging sort of movie, but it sparks viewers' thoughts about their own lives - questions about destiny, happy accidents, what ifs and the power of a seemingly insignificant moment in time.

What stands out about Sliding Doors isn't Gwyneth nor the atypical leading men, but the theme cleverly conveyed through parallel plots.  The story of a woman named Helena is shown in two possible paths, diverged due to an event that took but a split second.  We follow her through both, compare the severely different lives, and wonder if everything truly did come to the same end.

Well, I thought it was somewhat brilliant. Not outstanding, but at least moderately good. I just had to ignore Gwyneth's unconvincingly phony accent.  I enjoyed the movie enough that after seeing it at the cinema, I recommended it to my mom and I agreed to watch it a second time with her (I hadn't exactly thought that through; witnessing an awkward howling orgasm scene within the first ten minutes with my mother right beside me was deathly uncomfortable).  And I have to say, as much as I disliked Gwyneth - who in 1998 was the overexposed girlfriend of a certain Brad Pitt - I loved her short blonde haircut.

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back when they were (already cute but) not yet so glamorous: part 1

I know that fashion fads and people's looks change through the years, but there have been some drastic makeovers and metamorphoses that I can't not take note of.

lookie here!

Darla and Alfalfa from The Little Rascals (1994) all grown up.