I’d forgotten how excellent Mary Stuart Masterson is in the 1987 film Some Kind of Wonderful. Mainly because I haven’t seen that film since 1987. She acts her heart out in that work.

Underrated 1980s movie. Goddamn, 1987 feels like such a foreign place now. I remember it pretty clearly and while I wouldn’t want to go back, I also could not go back; I’d no longer have any idea how to operate there anymore. I could speak the language but not exist with the assumptions and expectations that they (we) aligned with then. I’d be an alien even more than I was when I was actually there.

One of the big changes that is that music was extremely important to us in a way that is just not now. It wasn’t just background noise, or a time filler, as it is currently. It was a passion — there’s a reason that they made Watts’ character a drummer in the film and why the movie is just saturated with music. I think there is a lot of great music now, don’t get me wrong, but it just doesn’t take up nearly as much cultural space, or hold the same import, as it did back then.