AIRHEADS
A film review by Lon Ponschock
Copyright 1995 Lon Ponschock
Directed by Michael Lehman Starring: Brendan Frazer, Steve Buscemi, Adam Sandler, Joe Montegna
I really enjoyed this. I kind of suspected I would enjoy it since it is about radio and rock and roll but the real treat was the *language*.
AIRHEADS has more in the writing of it than the usual round of expletives: it's a compendium of slang of the eighties and nineties. Where else are you going to hear a words like 'queve' or 'dufuss'? And all woven into a story that is ideal to display this usage: a metal trio invades a radio station to get their demo played.
Michael Lehman is a new name to me, can't tell you much about him, but Brendan Frazer (SCHOOL TIES, ENCINO MAN) Steve Buscemi (RESERVOIR DOGS, IN THE SOUP) and Adam Sandler ("Saturday Night Live" and SHAKES THE CLOWN) plus Joe Montegna (HOUSE OF GAMES, BODY OF EVIDENCE, and many more) are all well known and talented performers.
This film has a solid soundtrack, and interesting idea which succeeds in execution more often than it fails and a passable but unintrusive directing style which lets the story sort of tell itself without being too arty.
This film is about rock and roll and radio: an idea has been done before on television and in films, always or nearly always to good effect. It wasn't really until I did radio myself that I appreciated the interaction of the two so much. Radio, more than any other, is people's media: something everyone can enjoy and potentially *do* as well. And there are enough 'holes in the system' to still be able to get out and do THE WORK if you really want to. My time for doing that is pretty much over but I still appreciate it when someone is out there with that DIY spirit keeping the independence and the joy of radio alive. It's not easy but it can be done.
AIRHEADS is a feast of language-- street language and has enough hooks and turns to provide you with some major laughs. Well, it did for *me* anyway.
-- lon lon@edsi.org
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews