“Ladies, gentleman, ring the alarm!” This line from the Christina Aguilera single (“Dirty”) ushering her second regular album release first made me want to ring the alarm, to put out the tasteless flames of her musical career.

As a critic, I’ll get to the “Stripped” album in due time. But I find the line a fitting return to the column. It’s been about two months since the last “Rear Window” column, and with that lapse, there’s a lot of ground to cover. So fasten your seatbelts, ‘cuz I’m gonna hit you with a blast from the past!

Alright, that’s pretty darn corny, but the last four words make for the last big appearance (the romantic hit “Blast from the Past”) from Alicia Silverstone, forever known as an Aerosmith girl (she was in their videos) and as Cher from “Clueless” (hands down one of the best teen flicks of the 1990s). The latter film is an efficient encompassment of teen culture and society circa 1995, which still exists to varying degrees seven years later in our time.

“Blast” has co-star Brendan Fraser (the “Mummy” films) raised on 1960s values (his parents brought him up sealed in a bomb shelter since the early part of that decade) and being shown around a 1999 Los Angeles by a stuck-up Silverstone with a heart of gold. She charms her way through the former film, which garnered rave reviews from critics and audiences alike, and when joined by Fraser in the latter film, made for one of the most charming, if not memorable, “love teams” in recent years.

Fraser himself was part of another teen hit, along with Sean Astin (lightweight heartthrob of the early ’90s and Samwise ‘Sam’ Gamgee of “Lord of the Rings”) and Pauly Shore (that annoying “weasel” of the most infamous cheapo-tasteless flicks of the same era, the same ones quite of few of us loved to watch). “Encino Man” was a sign of the times for pre-teens and up in 1992, where Fraser played a caveman thawed out in Encino, Calif., becoming a social “claim to fame” for squares Astin and Shore.

Add a cute and pretty blonde as a love interest, a buff “letterman” as her boyfriend and the hero’s nemesis, and a senior ball for the climax, and you’ve got an “easy to swallow” film that’s also easy to like. Sure, the premise leaves nothing to the imagination, but Fraser, Astin, and Shore were engaging enough to make their film stand out.

Astin was a member of an ensemble piece of the mid ’80s, one of the most memorable adventure films of the decade: “The Goonies.” It’s the tale of some grade-school kids and their older siblings embarking on a perilous journey to a hidden treasure that will save their neighborhood. The cast was wonderfully memorable: asthma-afflicted leader Mikey (Astin), silly Chunk (the pudgy kid who was always eating), and brainiac gadget-man Data (Johnathan Ke Quan, also great as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”).

Those were some of the youth and young adult charmers of the last two decades. Today, it’s hard to find genuine entertainment like that. Aguilera may start her latest hit with, “Ladies, gentleman,” but she’s speaking for a generation of entertainment that’s summed up in one word: lacking. But more on that another day.