I like movies, it was one of the consistent entertainments I could afford to do with my friends way back when to where it almost became an event rather than just a way to waste time. Sadly, as time has marched on, movies have largely just become a way to waste time. So my friend Mike and I have been talking for a while now about all the goofy movies we loved from back when movie watching WAS an event for both of us and coming up with excuses to watch silly movies we liked and share the weird ones the other hasn’t seen.

This stalled of course, as most grandiose ideas with abstract payout tend to do, but then the idea came to fruition during quarantine, while watching Johnny Mnemonic for the first time since I saw it in the theater 25 years ago and noted how many goofy things were “futuristic” when that movie came out (e.g. 160GB being a TON of data, wireless signals causing illness, Ice-T leading the resistance, etc…). I mean, we’ve caught up to the future in a ton of movies, none quite so celebrated as Back to the Future 2 in 2015 presumably because it was so middle of the road that it’s assumed everyone in America saw it. That said, this seemed like a happy hunting ground for those of us starved for decent entertainment in the time of COVID as we’ve now surpassed the dates in which so many dystopian and utopian films take place.

So here is the challenge: Make a list of movies made before 2000 but take place between 2000 and 2020 so we’ve already “lived the future”, watch the movies in fictional chronological order in an outdoor setting with a cheap projector for COVID safety, and finally, write and produce a song about each of the films (or character, setting, whatever). So here is that list:

Death Race 2000 – 2000
2001: A Space Odyssey – 2001
Death Machine – 2003
Time Cop – 2004
Freejack – 2009
Barb Wire – 2017
Running Man – 2017
Cherry2000 – 2017
Rollerball (Original) – 2018
The New Barbarians – 2019
Fall Of New York – 2019
Blade Runner – 2019
Johnny Mnemonic – “Second decade of the 2000’s”

Kind of heavy on the latter part of our timeline, but we were trying for just the right mix of films that are good, goofy, classic, underappreciated, some we’ve seen and some we haven’t. MANY movies didn’t make the list, naturally, as we want to be able to get it done within a summer. Most of those films though will have their trailers shown in previews before the actual feature so it at least feels like going to a theater or drive in.

So first up: Death Race 2000