Andyland, USA

Greetings, Citizens. I've been neglecting the "Hey There, Andy!" blog a little too much lately. It got a new design and I walked away like one of those spoiled couples on House Hunters . This blog started years ago as a way to give my work more of a "web presence," and to make individual columns easy to share. In the last year, "The Loafer--my main home for my word works--has gotten an incredible website redesign by the very talented people at Stellar Studios, and now I feel less motivated to double up on my columns being there and here as well. So where does that leave "Hey There, Andy!?" Welp, this place needs more stuff on it. I'm going to from time to time share older Batteries Not Included columns that aren't archived on the web anywhere else, and maybe post some original work. Another reason in why this place hasn't seen much attention is that I've been overwhelmingly busy lately. At the end of the past three years I...

If you’ve read my column with any regularity, if you’ve even interacted with me in actual life, then you’re most likely aware that I like movies and music. A lot. They are two of the biggest sources of joy in my life. I’ve talked of my origins with music a lot in these pages before, but I’ve never talked much about how my taste in film formed. If there is a common link between the two it’s that they’ve both been so prominent in my life I can’t quite trace the moment I became all about them.  What I do know with certainty is that it became clear at an early age that music and movies were things I was going to be into. I watched an old home movie a few months ago where I’m all of three and my mother can be heard remarking “When he gets up he doesn’t want to potty or anything, he wants to listen to music.” Now I don’t have any idea what the first movie I saw was. I do know that it would have been before I saw my first movie in a theater, I was not quite the first generation ...

Note: This column originally ran in The Loafer in December of 2015 to mark the 30th Anniversary of "Clue." I thought it had been uploaded here at the same time, and I recently found out it wasn't, nor was it archived on The Loafer's website.  If there’s one thing about Hollywood you can still count on these days, it’s the axiom that the true test of movies is time. Films that were hits can become forgotten footnotes, and films that were flops can become cherished classics. A shining example of this would be Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” “Vertigo” wasn’t a hit at the box office, and critics hated it. Yet today “Vertigo” is not only considered to be Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it’s also considered by many to be finest film ever made.  There’s a film which falls into that category, flop now beloved. The film in question happens to my favorite movie. A movie that I can almost recite word for word, and a movie which celebrates its 30th anniversary this coming ...

Sometimes I can surprise people when I tell them that I still haven’t seen every movie made by my favorite filmmakers. This is partially by circumstance and partially by choice--it’s nice to know there are still new to me Billy Wilder films out there in the world. There’s now one less new to me Wilder film as I’ve seen Wilder’s 1957 comedy “Love in The Afternoon”--which makes its blu-ray debut from those knights of the vault Warner Archive.  “Love in The Afternoon” is a romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, and Maurice Chevalier. The film is the first of twelve films Wilder would write with I.A.L. Diamond--one of the finest screenwriting partnerships in history. “Love in The Afternoon” centers around a French private eye (Chevalier) who is tracking down a lothario businessman (Cooper) and keeping an eye out on his numerous affairs. At the same time, our detective tries to keep all these torrid details away from his young daughter (Hepburn).  Whe...

MGM’s 1960 musical “Bells Are Ringing”--adapted from the 1956 Broadway show of the same name--is a swan song for a number of reasons. It was the final musical produced by the legendary Arthur Freed for MGM, and the last musical its director, Vincente Minnelli, made for the studio. As well, it was the final film to star Judy Holiday, just a few years before her death from breast cancer. Holiday reprises her Tony winning stage role, which was written for her. Holiday plays Ella, a young and vibrant switchboard operator at Susanswerphone, a telephone answering service. Ella takes her role seriously and takes a lot of the problems of Susanswerphone’s clients to heart. She pretends to be Santa Claus for a mother’s son, and she becomes adamant on finding ways to help her clients best.  Ella has fallen for one of the voices that comes through her headset, a struggling playwright (Dean Martin) who has a sever case of writer’s block after breaking it off with his longtime w...

With Valentine’s Day next week many are starting to make plans for what they will do with their lover. Lately I’ve been getting numerous tweets asking me “Andy, you’re a well known stud muffin, what can I do to make Valentine’s Day most memorable?” Since I have much to say on this topic, I thought I’d take time this week and share my advice for a most special February 14th.  Now you may have read that last paragraph and thought to yourself “Andy, I have no lover, why did you write something useless for me!?” Don’t worry friend, I got you. If you need a pick up a line to score the date of your dreams, simply get up the courage to walk up the one you’ve been dreaming about, take a deep breath, and tell them the following. “Hey, do you wanna fall over a cliff in love with me? ‘Cause I’m the yodeling guy from Price is Right and you just incorrectly guessed the price of a toaster oven.” Never fails.  Now comes the task of picking the right restaurant for the date. A...

I could easily state that I don’t just listen to music, I consume it. Music is perhaps the one thing in my life that is closest to an addiction. I listen to incredible amounts of it, buying records makes me happy, and I talk about it a lot. Part of my musical obsessions is one with the music of the 1960s. There are many bands of the ‘60s that are vastly overlooked and underrated--for a number of reasons, mostly generated by “holier than thou” attitudes at rock rags in the ‘70s. There’s the idea rock music didn’t really come to fore till The Beatles arrived, and/or that music was lame until The Beatles got high. I get where these attitudes come from, but I don’t hold much salt in them. However, attitudes like these are why some really great groups of the era have been regulated to their place in history--by some--based only on the merits of their biggest hit song or songs. There are numerous bands that I feel deserves more cred, praise, and appreciation. One band in particula...