rm | sometimes we really do get everything we dreamed of when we were 13

I am sitting in a cafe in the UK, with my boots rudely up on the extra chair and over the speakers is David Bowie's theme-song for Absolute Beginners.

Which, by the way, I still think is an utterly brilliant film that happened entirely at the wrong moment for anyone to care.

This message brought to you by I Am a Child of the 80s and I Love Musicals.

Seriously, are you actually going to try to argue against David Bowie tap dancing on a giant typewriter? Or a gossip columnist character named Dido Lament? Or choreographed scenes of street party/chaos that then later actually get visually referenced in the awesome Gigolo Joe portion of A.I. (another movie everyone hates that I think is pretty impressive and totally relevant to lots of stuff)?

I'm not saying the mere existence of this film isn't nearly inexplicable. Trust me, I know its existence boggles the mind (although, being about teen culture and race issues, it makes an interesting companion piece to the original Hairspray).

I'm just saying that despite/because of its oddness of genre and combination of themes that it is actually a COMPLETELY AWESOME movie musical that was released in a period in which the genre was pretty much non-existent despite the advent of the music video's vague (and unsuccessful) attempts to push it back into existence (Giorgio Moroder's re-assembly of Metropolis with modern music was also a part of this sort of thing (as was, arguably, Electric Dreams, which I'll admit still charms the crap outta me, even if it's still too 80s for you -- of course, I'm also a big fan of the piece of music used to illustrate the film's central conceit), which people also didn't really like, but which I still love like burning).