NOTHING LASTS FOREVER - Shore/Arlen/Burkhard - "Papa's Got A Brand New Paper Moon" (1984)

Well, hats off to one distressed angel for turning me on to "Nothing Lasts Forever"! I hope you have a guardian angel in your life to do the same thing for you, because this is a good movie that should be seen if you get half a chance! I thought it was never released period, but I guess it just has never really been released on DVD yet, and somebody needs to fix that! Not clearly one thing, "Nothing Lasts Forever" is a hodgepodge of SNL, National Lampoon, "Brazil," and maybe even some Firesign Theatre, and it's all pretty well done, kind of light pink on the inside, and seared full of flavour and grilled to perfection on the outside!

Zach"Gremlins"Galligan is Adam Beckett, a nice young man in a dream, but with a dream, a dream to be an artiste! He's not sure how or why, but he knows that being an artist is the destiny he needs to fulfill!

Adam has just come back from being abroad, no, not like Chas Bono, Adam has been in Europe studying, so here we are at his coming home party thrown by his Aunt Anita Ellis singing "It's Only A Paper Moon," and Uncle Mort Sahl!

The lyrics of "Paper Moon" written by E.Y. Harburg and Billy Rose set the mood for the whole film, "It's a Barnum & Baily world, just as phony as it could be, but it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me!"

Mort Sahl was one of the preeminent comedians of the 50's and 60's, and is just one of many in a cast that reads like another chapter out of The Dungeon Guide to Pop Culture!

In order for Adam to be come an Artiste, he has prove his merit, and one of the tests is nude figure drawing in three minutes or less! The model is a gal named Joanne Garahan. Adam's sketch turns out to be nothing but a dark triangle! For Joanne, like Aunt Anita, this would be her only film role!

After Adam flunks the art test, he has to go to work for the people running the whole show, The Port Authority, and his first job is to watch cars entering The Holland Tunnel, and stopping them and telling them to turn around if anything is wrong with their car, and I mean anything from a headlight cyclops to a minor dent! He's also issued a hand gun in case there is any trouble, by his boss, Mr. Dan Aykroyd, as Buck Heller. If I have to tell you who Dan Aykroyd is, then you don't live in this century!

One of Adam's Co-workers is the ravishing Dutch model and actress Apollonia Van Ravenstein as another aspiring artist Mara Hofmeier!

One of Mara's annoying artist friends is the writer and director of the movie, the brilliant Tom Schiller, who was a writer for "Saturday Night Live" for 15 years!

Mara's art skills are much more advanced than Adam's, she drinks triple espressos, and takes Adam to see this German performance artist who is walking on a treadmill as he counts to a million! The German artist was played by Marc Alderman in his solo outing!

Adam studies hard, as if you can learn to be a anti-bourgeois Dadaist by reading a book called "Understanding DaDa!"

Adam and Mara go out to a noise core anti-concert! Two of the musicians in the band are Dan Aykroyd's brother Peter, and John Belushi's wife Judith Belushi-Pisano!

Mara and Adam's lovemaking scene is interrupted when Mara notices that what's playing on the super miniature TV is Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin!" Mara really appreciates all forms of art, including film!! Wink, wink!

Adam is taken down underneath the metropolis to the literal underground command center where he finds out that the bums and homeless people are really the ones in charge of everything, and is forced to endure a very intense trial by fire ritual!

When he returns to the surface, Adam absentmindedly gets on to the wrong bus, and since this is no ordinary bus, the tour guide is none other than Bill Murray as Ted Breughel!

This is a very special bus that just happens to be going to the moon with a load of retired folks on the shopping journey of a lifetime!

The takeoff can be pretty rough on some of the elderly passengers like King Donovan here! Twenty-eight years earlier, King Donovan was Jack Belicec in the forever classic "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers!"

Lunartinis and Lunar Vision make the trip go a lot faster and keep the shoppers happy! No young people are supposed to be aboard, you see nobody notices if old people are missing for a while, and they all have chips implanted in their heads so that when they get back to Earth, if they try and talk about going to the moon, the word 'Miami' is always inserted into their speech instead of the word 'moon!'

Princess Leia's Dad, and the late Elizabeth Taylor's Ex-husband Eddie Fisher is the entertainment in the main bar. He does a request for "Oh! My Pa-Pa," a classic lounge song written by Paul Burkhard, and ponders how in the Hell he ended up at this point in his career!

The brilliant and hilarious comedienne Imogene Coca even makes an appearance as Daisy Schackman, the lady who explains the whole lunar shopping concept to Adam!

Okay, here's the part you've been waiting for, when they arrive on the moon, the passengers are greeted by some fine-lookin' singing and dancing girls, and the music is like something straight out of some unknown Disney animated feature!

The Lunartini travelers all wear lunar vision glasses to protect their eyes! Always the rebel, Adam doesn't have his on!

Gorgeous native island girls on the moon, come on, you just can't get much better than that!

Here's a really cool shot of the happy shoppers, and their destination, the ultra fabulous quonset hut "Moon-O-Rama" mall! The shoppers don't give in to the fact that they are just a bunch of fat little consumer guinea pigs!! The guy up on the big video screen welcoming the shoppers is none other than the peppermint soap magnate, a guy who really knows something about marketing himself, Dr. Bronner!

The bums had told Adam he would someday meet his one true love and spiritual muse, and here she was in all her glory and splendor, on the moon, it's Lauren Tom as Eloy, a cross between Pocahontas, Ariel, Jasmine, and Mulan! The beautiful Lauren Tom is still going strong in an amazing career that includes the voice of "Futurama's" Amy Wong!

"The meat of the music for "Nothing Lasts Forever" was created by arguably the most talented guy still working today, Mr. Howard Shore, who went from composing for "Saturday Night Live" to "Hi-Fidelity" to all of the "Lord Of The Rings" movies, and the two new "Hobbit" flicks coming out in 2012, and 2013! Howard also played alto sax in a very good Canadian jazz rock band called "Lighthouse" in the 60's and 70's! I traded in Raleigh coupons and got one of their albums for free!

"Nothing Lasts Forever" ends where it started, take out the end and beginning credits, and it would loop seamlessly!

Let's make forever never, the strikes are over, have a nice day!!"