Días rebeldes

Now I know why the logo for Lorimar Motion Pictures had a direct shot of the sun shining right into your eyes - to blind you so you wouldn't be able to see movies like "American Anthem." I saw this movie on video first, and later at a drive-in under its overseas title "Take It Easy" (named after one of the songs by Andy Taylor - yes, the one from Duran Duran - that clogs up this movie) as the supporting feature to "Dirty Dancing." Swayze blew away Gaylord then as he has now (hey, how many movies has Mitch done since then? Thank you).

From the director of another bad movie starring someone with no business acting ("Purple Rain"), this was a very poor time at the flicks. I can still remember the boring scenes, the undramatic gymnastic moments (except for the one where our hero went too fast on the parallel bars, flew off and crashed - but sadly lived to twirl another day), and I can still remember Janet Jones as our hero's girlfriend dancing to synth soft rock instead of the usual stuff.

Actually, Janet's hard body and Alan Silvestri's score (which Mike Clark from 'USA TODAY' dismissed at the time as the kind of stuff associated with political campaign ads - but let's face it, what do most movie critics know about movie music?) were the only good things about the movie - I got the soundtrack album hoping that there'd be some of it, and was not happy to find none of the orchestral stuff there; he only had two synth cuts in amongst the likes of John Parr (did this man ever record anything NOT for a movie?), the aforementioned Andy Taylor and Graham Nash. In other words, like the movie, it sucked apart from him.

Lorimar should've stuck with "Dallas" and "The Waltons."