Long-Haired Buscemi and Forget the Bills

Airheads (1994)
directed by Michael Lehmann
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Airheads makes me miss being 14, when I probably would have liked Airheads even more. Clips of Pearl Jam on VH1 - or even Nirvana on MTV, frankly - don't really do it for me, if "doing it" means remembering what music meant to me as a teenager. Sometimes you just have to admit that you listened to as much Paul Simon as Led Zeppelin, then be grateful that your sense of humor, at least, was a little better-tuned to the times. Airheads concludes - before the credits - with Brendan Fraser's rock n' roll band not playing a concert, which gets at the heart of the movie better than anything on the soundtrack does. After all, the story about Marlon Brando impersonating Butt-head on the set of Don Juan DeMarco isn't funny because Marlon Brando was a serious actor; it's funny because Butt-head is funny. Beavis and Butt-head make a cameo in Airheads, and if there's a lesson to be learned from Lemmy, Chazz, Rex, and Pip, it's that there's no substitute for the real thing.