the groundhog day project

[Parasocial relationships] are a set of feelings viewers develop toward media characters that allow viewers to think and feel toward characters as if they know and have a special connection with them. (Eyal & Cohen, 2006, p. 504) Struck by Lightning is on again . Saer is here watching, of course. Her in was author/star Chris Colfer. But, the setting is generic movie-high-school enough for anyone to get. The main character is a writer, he's a bit of a sarcastic smartass, and he blackmails popular kids to get them to write for his literary magazine--I should love this. But, it's almost too generic. Still, Carson (Colfer) is wry enough to be entertaining. Fisherkeller (1997) suggests that our parasocial relationships--for teens at least--can get us models for our own behavior. My daughter, for example, wants to act (in movies, on stage, wherever really--a while back she starred in a stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird and I think I mentioned that in the blog... [ I ...

A subversive eye-candy explosion of Clueless, Heathers and Carrie gleefully detonated by sex bomb Rose McGowan. That is Crackle 's description for Jawbreaker . If you don't know the movie, imagine if the spiritual successor to Heathers had seen The Craft a few too many times but didn't like witchcraft, and just couldn't be bothered to be audience friendly enough to make Mean Girls . The Heathers, the Plastics, the Debbies (bonus points if you get that reference)--here, the Flawless Four. We begin with a little voiceover--gotta have some voiceover because the audience needs things spelled out--then it's the morning of the birthday of the nice one of the Flawless Four--Liz (Charlotte Roldan). The other three, disguised with masks and hoodies staged a kidnapping to surprise her. The titular piece of candy in her mouth and some duct tape over it and when they go to open the trunk of the car (oh, they also tied her up and stashed her in the trunk), turns out she;s...

The Heathers evolved into the "Plastics" and, I've only seen this movie one time. Cady (Lindsay Lohan) is like Roger Ebert ( yesterday ) going into a high school movie. Her inability to fit in and her lack of knowledge about how the school works means the movie starts on a reset. It can accept whatever high school movie tropes it wants to accept and reject whichever it wants to reject. It's a good position from which to deconstruct the genre. (To be fair, since I've only see the movie once, I cannot recall just how much it is going to do this.) "Pretending that nothing was wrong turned out to be surprisingly easy." That's an interesting line given the subject of teenagers. All performance and face, rarely the reality. You are who you pretend to be in high school (especially, movie high school). Cady's problem, here, in fact, is that if she hangs out with the Plastics enough, she might actually understand them, even like them. (Sidenote: th...

Take Heathers as a metaphor instead of a dark comedy (or rather both) for the moment. In context, the deaths are real, but the point is not about life or death, not literally. Think in adolescent/teeanger terms, instead. This is about that life or death. Veronica used to be friends with Betty, still sort of is, but now she's with the Heathers, and that limits access. High school cliques, when they are clearly drawn--i.e. especially the cinematic incarnations of high school cliques--don't mix well. Watch that bit in... it's either 10 Things I Hate about You or The Faculty --or maybe both--where the cliques are spelled out in front of the school, and each one has its own space apart from the others, and it's all neat and discrete. The population of the school seems a little small, of course, with a singular popular girl clique, or a singular jock clique, or a singular stoner clique, but if movies dealt with public school student numbers realistically, there would not b...

I love the way Veronica writes in her diary, not just angrily but so inefficiently--writing so large that each page has maybe a dozen words. It makes for a nice visual. Watching Heathers , by the way. Might have to watch this more than once because I'm enjoying it too much to write anything... ...                         Seriously.