the groundhog day project

The thing about Police Academy --in particular, but also several of the other films from my childhood that preached irreverence through most of the story--is that that, in the end, the status quo is held up. At the beginning, these new recruits are jokes. By the end of the film, they have all bought in to the police academy, even Mahoney, who was forced into it, and Jones, who happened into it because of Mahoney. The film reifies law and order, promotes conformity, and reinforces heteronormativity. Regarding the latter, the film starts in on masculinity at least right away. The second segment is Mahoney at work and he shames a guy for having a wig. Losing your hair is an easy mark for a measure of one's manhood. McCann, Plummer, and Minichiello (2010) explains: Humour's role as an 'othering' technique has two functions: first, it marks out what is to be taken seriously such as stoic, heterosexual masculinity, and what can be devalued by being laugh at. (p. 519) Fla...

It's no wonder I grew up to be a bit strange, a little socially awkward, and rarely thinking too far into the future as far as planning my life. I grew up with popular culture telling me that World War III could happen any time and with my church and school concurring that, yes indeed, the world was ending soon. Meanwhile, I'm seeing movies like Porky's , all about the pursuit of sex, when I'm being told by my parents, by my teachers, by the ministers at church every week, that sex (premarital sex anyway) is a sin, and I'm basically a sinner for even thinking about it. But, first, a few things to think about when it comes to Porky's . Though the main cast spend most of the movie seeking out heterosexual sex, they never actually have any. Pee Wee is finally losing his virginity as the film ends, but none of the other main characters actually have sex. And, I pointed out yesterday that Tommy and Billy don't even have sex with Cherry Forever when it seems lik...

Bob Clark directed Black Christmas , Porky's and A Christmas Story . There is either something really wrong with that fact or something really awesome. On the one hand, those are three very different films. A horror film, a sex comedy and a nostalgic family picture. I don't think the odd man out here is A Christmas Story , though. I think it's Black Christmas . Black Christmas , whatever its faults--check this blog last December for details on that film and A Christmas Story --is a fairly straight forward film, played for realism (unlike the over-the-top remake). Porky's and A Christmas Story , on the other hand, are actually both quite nostalgic. The simpler time for A Christmas Story is 1939-40, before World War II really twisted the 20th century around, before the Cold War. The simpler time here in Porky's , on the other hand, is decade and a half later, World War II has come and gone, young men are fighting across the world in Korea now, but it's not t...