MOVIES: NOVEMBER

We like movies. And we try to watch a lot of them. In this space, we will tell you about old and new movies we've liked—and loved. For movies we've hated, you'll have to read our diaries.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THE FABULOUS STAINS
(dir. Lou Adler, 1982)
 
Best known for its smart, compact satire of the thankless music industry, 1982’s LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THE FABULOUS STAINS deserves exposure as an eerily apropos cult classic. The Stains themselves are an all-girl, punk three-piece, helmed by the zealous Corrine “Third Degree” Burns, played by the lovely (and young!) Diane Lane, who, recently orphaned, sets out on a hard-nosed quest for fame through their amateurish and basically amusical band. Realizing a knack for media marketing, The Stains, who look great but sound terrible, brand an image and a philosophy that feeds on the anxieties of other teenage girls, turning them into an overnight success. Young Ray Winstone fronts a touring punk band, The Looters, comprised of real-life-punkers Paul Cook and Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols, and Paul Simonon of The Clash. Fee Waybill also appears as Lou Corpse, singer for the washed-up, coked-out Kiss knockoff The Metal Corpses, a hilarious jab at the hair metal movement’s unabashed pursuit of sex and narcotics over musical integrity. Despite THE FABULOUS STAINS’s prophetic anticipations of media-made icons like Madonna and, more recently, the pop-art performance project that is Lady Gaga, the film still captures that initial moment of wonderment and legitimacy, when as a bored teen in a small town, you saw that rock & roll band play and it showed you what to do with yourself.

Click here to watch the trailer for LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: THE FABULOUS STAINS.