Donnie Iris – "Ah! Leah!" (1980)

It ain’t no use

We’re headed for disaster!

I’m sure you’ve been wondering what 2 or 3 lines thinks about two of the biggest movies of the summer: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and Oppenheimer.  

If you want to know what I think of Barbie, don’t hold your breath.  That’s a girls’ movie, and I’m a boy.  

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Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is two hours and 45 minutes of non-stop car chases, train wrecks, and other “whammies.”  (In Hollywood lingo, “whammies” are the scenes in an action movie where something big crashes or blows up, hopefully killing a number of bad guys.) 

I won’t say that sitting through all those whammies was pleasant, but I survived the experience – albeit with ringing ears and jangled nerves.

What I couldn’t handle was the surprise (to me) revelation that Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning was part one of a two-part movie.  It seems that we’re expected to wait almost a year to learn what happens to Tom Cruise and the sunken Russian submarine and that strange cruciform key because part two of the movie isn’t scheduled to be released until June 2024.  

I would have NEVER paid good money to see Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning if I had known it was a to-be-continued movie.  

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Let’s now turn our attention to Oppenheimer, which has been lionized by the critics like no other movie I can remember.

While Oppenheimer certainly isn’t a bad movie, I think it has been grossly overrated.  

I had a lot of problems with the movie.  For one thing, about half the dialogue was unintelligible.  (I really should have gone to a showing with open captions.)

But my main problem with Oppenheimer is that – despite the fact that it is three hours long – it wasn’t nearly long enough to tell the whole Oppenheimer story.  

I walked out of the movie with a lot more questions than answers.  I wish Oppenheimer had been an eight- or ten-hour series instead of a three-hour movie.

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Donnie Iris (who was born Dominic Ierace in New Castle, Pennsylvania in 1943) was the man behind one of my favorite one-hit wonders, The Jaggerz – whose 1970 single, “The Rapper,” made it all the way to #2 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

Iris recorded today’s featured song a decade later.  It was a top-30 single, but I don’t remember ever hearing it until it started popping up on Sirius/XM a couple of years ago.  

Donnie Iris

From Wikipedia:

A 2008 report by The Beaver County Times revealed that the Leah [who inspired the record’s title] was Leah Frankford of Chippewa Township, Pennsylvania, near Iris’s hometown . . . .  Frankford had moved to Florida just before The Jaggerz hit it big, and got confirmation from Iris himself after Iris’s girlfriend by chance became friends with Frankford’s daughter through Iris’s mortgage business.  Frankford had moved back to Beaver County by the time the song came out, and always noticed many girls at her two daughters’ softball games also named Leah.

Got it?

Click here to listen to “Ah! Leah!”

Click here to order the record from Amazon.