1979

Movies, Music, and TV

I enjoyed the movie 10, a romantic comedy in which a middle-aged man George (Dudley Moore) becomes infatuated with a young woman, Jenny (Bo Derek) whom he sees walking out of the water with long braded hair.  The scene, reminiscent of Ur Ursula Andress walking out of the water in a white bikini in the James Bond movie Dr. No back in ’62, became fixated in many men’s minds including my own.  George, having never met the woman, goes on a comic chase after her ending with an unsatisfying sexual encounter in which he starts Boléro on his phonograph, which lasts 15 ¼  minutes, (an appropriate duration for lovemaking) and ends with cannons firing at the climax but finds his timing is off and has to interrupt hislovemaking to replay the ending of the music, several times.   Every time I listen to the piece I think of that scene.  In 1980 we got to see more of Bo Derek when she was the cover girl for Playboy magazine which I was an avid reader.   Interesting enough, Bo began a relationship with John Derek, 30 years older than her, when she was 16, and then moved to Germany, where John would not be subject to prosecution under California statutory rape laws. They returned to the United States soon after Derek's 18th birthday and were wed in 1976. They remained married until John's death in 1998.  

I went to see Apocalypse Now  a couple of weeks after it came out and found it totally depressing, again glad I didn’t get drafted.

The movie China syndrome  came out about a nuclear reactor meltdown, the name describing a fictional result of a nuclear meltdown, where reactor components melt through their containment structures and into the underlying earth, "all the way to China".  It was released on March 16, 1979, two weeks later there was the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, which then me and most everyone else in the U.S. went to see the movie.

The new James Bond movie Moonraker came out, again with Roger Moore again playing Bond.  Then there was Lois Chiles playing the Bond girl Doctor Holly Goodhead.  The only Bond girl with better name was Pussy Galore from Goldfinger, well there was Octopussy...  The Jaws villain, who miraculously managed to survive from the previous movie, returned and helped Bond, in the end, persuades to switch sides and helping Bond.   I didn’t care much for Moonraker, the space scenes seemed cheesy.

Several science fiction movies came out including the first full length Star Trek movie came out, appropriately name “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” I guess for people wouldn’t confuse it with the original TV show which ended ten years before although re-runs were still on and I had seen all the episodes at least four or five times.   The Movie had all the original characters, although all looking much older.  You would think in the 23rd century they would have slowed down ageing.  The movie was fair, not one I would not see twice until it came out on TV several years later.

V.I.N.CENT

Another science fiction movie was the Disney’s The Black Hole in which the crew of a spaceship discovers another spaceship stranded at the edge of a black hole and go investigate discovering a mad scientist.  Being a Disney movie, I found it a bit childish, but it did have a cute robot called V.I.N.CENT (Vital Information Necessary CENTralized) who ends up saving the last of the crew.

But the best science fiction move that came out and has always been one of my favorites was Alien with Sigourney Weaver which is now a classic.  It is hard core science fiction, spaceship traveling while through space detect and investigate a distress signal and find a crashed spaceship in which all the crew is dead.  The movie had some of the most realistic spaceship scenes like I had envisioned from all in all the science fiction books I had read over the years.   And then there was the Alien. Nothing more needs to be said.  It was one of the most suspenseful movies I had ever seen.

In music, ‘79 wasn’t much a music year for me, although there was the "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People which I hated for the YMCA got stuck in my mind for hours after hearing the song. TV wasn’t much better but at least they renewed Mork and Mindy for another season and there were always Star Trek reruns.