The Breakfast Club Nearly Had Rick Moranis (and Boobs)

Hard as it is to believe, ’80s teen classic The Breakfast Club turned 30 years old this year. (Fun fact: cult classic Into the Night was released that same day. Vision Quest, too.)

Not coincidentally, screenings of The Breakfast Club are popping up at theaters all over the country. The movie lives on via cable and streaming services too, and somewhere in my mom’s attic there’s a beat-to-hell VHS copy that’s seen better days.

The Breakfast Club is so ubiquitous, in fact, that I was stunned to learn from this recent Vanity Fair article that there are still fun bits of buried trivia to be discovered. For instance, did you know that Rick Moranis was originally cast as the janitor? Apparently it’s true.

Throwback Thursday: A Tribe Called Quest

Hip hop tends to be a young man’s game. As much as any genre of music, the tastes and styles of hip hop evolve so quickly that even a smash hit from just a few years back feels stale and dated today. Remember that Dr. Dre CD you played over and over and over? Yeah, it’s pretty much an archeological curiosity now.

Which makes the enduring brilliance of A Tribe Called Quest all the more impressive.

The Queens natives exploded on the scene in the early- to mid-1990s with hits like Scenario, Can I Kick It?, and the delightfully compulsive Bonita Applebaum. Walk into a room of people in their thirties, start a sentence with the words, “I left my wallet . . .”, and see how long it takes for someone to chime in with “in El Segundo!”

Today feels like a hip hop Thursday — maybe you didn’t get much sleep last night, maybe your boss is really hounding you for those TPS reports — so with that in mind, take a load off and enjoy this timeless jam, courtesy of the Tribe. (And if your Venn diagram of interests overlaps at ‘1990s Hip Hop’ and ‘Indie Documentaries’, be sure to check out Beats, Rhymes and Life, which streams intermittently on Crackle and Netflix, and is available for rental and purchase in all the popular places.)

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Listen to This: Karmin

Start with a generation of suburban white kids who grow up listening not just to rock and pop music, but also to hip hop. Mix a boy and a girl, each with a Berklee College of Music education. Shake. Repeat.

This is the approximate recipe for Karmin, an ascendant pop group with a formula that is at once pleasurably derivative and entirely of the moment. They smartly built a foundation of massive YouTube views with an album of re-imagined contemporary pop hits, and leveraged the ensuing viral word-of-mouth into a record deal with Epic. (Best entry point: this cover of What’s My Name, which is a simple improvement on the 2010 Rihanna/Drake chart-topper.)

Whether or not you like Karmin probably depends on how you feel about pop music in general. If anything peppier than Lithium is considered off-limits artistically, this may not be for you. But those who are open-minded on the subject of sugary confections will find a lot to like with Karmin. Their background as legitimately-trained musicians shows itself in gems like Walking on the Moon and Hello. It’s Top 40 music with a classically-trained pedigree.

Watch This: 0507

And now a funny little short film from The Blaine Brothers:

Better than a Michael Bay movie, and at 1/10,000th the cost.

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Watch This: The Counselor

Released to little fanfare last fall, The Counselor is a stylishly grim crime noir that bombed at the box office — but which just might get a second life with future audiences. Alternately overlooked or dismissed, it may one day be recognized for what it is: a flawed, misunderstood masterpiece.

The Counselor has a lot going for it, starting with a complex and challenging script from the pen of Cormac McCarthy. The story is a clever variation on the classic ordinary-guy-gets-in-over-his-head genre, but the action is painted in subtle strokes, with very little spelled out directly. You have to pay close attention to what’s going on. Remember when more movies respected the audience enough to let that happen?

This Doesn’t Sound So Bad, Really

Ah, Sarah Silverman. How do I love thee?

Sarah is so consistently funny, so consistently relatable, so consistently outrageous that it’s easy to take her for granted. She’s also pretty damn well-rounded: from standup to sitcoms to books to movies to viral videos, there’s not much she can’t (or won’t) do.

But she won’t be doing any of those things tonight, because she’s got some other shit planned:

Not gonna lie. This sounds pretty appealing. I’ve had worse Thursdays.

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Read This: Too High to Fail

The accessibility and legality of any drug, from coffee to craft brews, inevitably leads to an upstart cottage industry. And, in quick succession, a burgeoning nerd culture right alongside it.

Colorado voters made big headlines last fall when, along with their peers in Washington state, they legalized marijuana for recreational use. The effects won’t be felt until 2014 (pun intended), when a slew of regulatory measures kicks in and any ID-carrying citizen 21 and over can walk into a dispensary and buy as much as an ounce of high-potency shit at a time.

But while this has proven an easy target for writers at The Daily Show and elsewhere, the business implications haven’t gotten nearly the attention they should. At last, an article in the forthcoming issue of Rolling Stone takes a closer look at what these new laws mean for the residents of Colorado, and for the young generation of pot entrepreneurs that are blazing a trail (again, pun intended) into uncharted territory.

Watch This: Bachelorette

There are precious few screens available in today’s megaplex theaters for dark, foul-mouthed ensemble indie comedies. Mix in a few doses of poignant drama, challenging female leads, and the misfortune of following a similarly-themed Apatow production, and you’re bound to be overlooked.

Bachelorette will forever be compared (when acknowledged at all) to its big-budget predecessor, Bridesmaids. Both are brash, vulgar comedies that revolve around a rag-tag group of women preparing for a friend’s impending wedding. But while both are good films, they share little beyond the setup.

Where Bridesmaids feels big and bright and good-natured, Bachelorette is cut from darker, more jagged material. There’s nothing wrong with the broad laughs that come from the former. But if you like your movies with a little more pathos, a little more precision, you’ll probably find the latter more enjoyable from start to finish.