"Joyride"

Or: "How I found something great and learned to shoegaze from a mediocre movie".

And when I say "mediocre" I mean "I liked it!". Last week, on thursday, I was looking through the movies on OnDemand's FearNet channel. After watching "You Better Watch Out!", a christmas set horror movie with a killer santa clause, I thought it'd be cool to watch "Joyride", don't ask. Thinking I was about to watch that one scary movie with Paul Walker and the semi-truck, the "Joyride" I was actually about to watch was very, very different. It's this 1996 film starring Tobey Maguire and that one girl from Felicity (Amy Hathaway!), and this other guy. It's about this teenaged motel clerk (Maquire) who steals one of his guest's car one night with his friends, for a joyride, and the car turns out to be that of a female assassins!! No joke! Very 96, about a step up from the trash level of "The Doom Generation", and the acting is funny. So I enjoyed it very much. The best thing about it though was its SOUNDTRACK, which is just awesome. I liked a few of the songs throughout the movie and when the credits rolled I figured I should see who some of the artists were for fun. I wrote down like, all the names, and noticed that pretty much every artist was signed to 4AD, which is the label that originally took in the Breeders, and I was intrigued. Long story short- I did a few amazon seaches, dl a ton of albums, read some stuff, dl more, and noooow I'm like a bona fide shoegazing shoegazer!! Haha, the soundtrack included artists like Lush, Pale Saints, Spirea X, and Swallow. I didn't know it then, but these are all bands that were pretty well loved in the shoegaze community around the early 90s, and have all made some really incredible music. From there I got into Rollerskate Skinny, Chapterhouse, and Slowdive, also very popular with the shoegaze kids, and also all very good. I can't get enough of them! And I feel I've only scratched the surface of this thing called Shoegaze. Not like it's hard to love though, it's all washey and dreamy and noisey, with beautiful melodies and whispers and all, but it's sure got me hooked. It's pretty funny, last thursday I hadn't even heard of any of these bands, and now I prob couldn't live without em. And all from some cheap movie on tv that I had no intention of ever watching! It's great!! I love movies!!

Where I'll go from here I have no idea, yeah i'm a changed man now. Well not really haha, but it's still awesome the things movies can do for you, even when you don't expect it. It's all magic...