This will no doubt be an illegal movie forever. After seeing it at the UC Theater in the summer of '82, I recently found a copy on a bootleg VHS for $1 at a Friends of the Library sale, still burned with the Sundance Channel bug. In today's cinema, much is made of the nostalgia value of the 1980s soundtrack: a famous example being Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" during Donnie Darko's opening. You can have your MTV, though, since URGH! A Music War was the soundtrack to my 1980s. Hey, what a surprise, no Duran Duran, no INXS, no Soft Cell covering a Gloria Jones soul classic and convincing a history-impaired generation that they wrote it. And yet it's clear why this film failed.

As a business scheme URGH seems, in 2008 hindsight, a uniquely quick way to burn a fortune. The film documents second-wave punk and New Wave bands playing from LA to London, editing them together without any particular zeitgeisty event like a music festival. So: play it a little under a real kiss-of-death title, and then wait to be deafened by the wails of bands, managers and lawyers zooming in to fight over the non-existant money. The Police were the headliners, opening and closing the film. They wrap up the film, too; you can see drummer Miles Copeland wearing an URGH! T-shirt. Is this perhaps all he was paid for this film? There are mostly cinematic performances here, and we see how much was lost by the fact that the Industry couldn't figure out a way to use their talents in the movies. Here's a key to the best of the show, omitting slurs of forgotten bands who perished long years ago.

You might question my picking of Back to School as a guilty pleasure. The Rodney Dangerfield movie, about a rude, millionaire businessman who enrolls in the college his son attends, was pretty well received by critics and it did really well at the box office (almost taking in $100 million in 1986). But I never enjoyed it for being a good movie. Dangerfield, while compared to Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields by Roger Ebert, always seemed to me an acquired taste. A taste I never acquired enough to enjoy any of his other pictures. When it came out, I was just a kid and I loved it in the same way I loved other dumb comedies of the '80s. When it was funny, it made me laugh and when it was slow -- take any scene with Sally Kellerman, for instance -- it made me bored. Later in life, I figured my enjoyment was based on nostalgia, though I had new appreciations in that I was then a fan of Oingo Boingo (and front man Danny Elfman) and Kurt Vonnegut, who appear in cameos as themselves.

Today, I appreciate it on another personal, rather than critical, level. As I begin college today after a ten-year hiatus, I feel somewhat related to Dangerfield's character of Thornton Melon. Sure, he was going for the first time and I'm returning after having dropped out, and he was much, much older than I am now, but nonetheless, I am an older-than-usual college student. Unfortunately I'm not rich enough to have a hot tub in my dorm (actually I won't be living in a dorm) or hire Vonnegut to write my papers on his own work. I also don't plan on wooing any professors, going out for the diving team, or doing much of what Melon does in the movie -- I would like to see if Burt Young wants the job of my bodyguard, though.