the groundhog day project

For some reason, Ginger Snaps is one horror film I have just never gotten around to. I just noticed on IMDb that is was made in Canada. That might be why I've been avoiding it, either consciously or unconsciously. Canadian horror films generally do not work for me... But, it starts well enough. Suburban neighborhood. Kid finds mutilated dog's foot in his sandbox. Turn to a couple teenage girls--sisters Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle)--who apparently enjoy staging photos of themselves as dead bodies in various fatal circumstances. (That one of the lead characters is named Ginger makes me wary, like the the title is going to be a bit too literal in its figurativeness.) Brigitte and Ginger are the resident goth girls--they wear necklaces with bird skulls on them--in an otherwise (apparently) cleancut--as if that is inherently a contradiction--school. Requisite outcasts. Quick sidenote: I was looking up an image to use and realized why Em...

[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 ...

Though it came out four years earlier, Clueless is the counterpoint to Jawbreaker . Cher (Alicia Silverstone) and Dionne (Stacey Dash) are the nice version of the Flawless Four, the Plastics, the Heathers. They may be friends because they both know what it's like to have people be jealous of them, but they also care about other people. Plus, Cher is awesome. Like her debate speech about Haiti: So like, right now for example: the Haitians need to come to America. But, some people are all, "What about the strain on our resources?" Well, it's like when i had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I put RSVP, 'cause it was a sit-down dinner. B ut, some people came that, like, did not RSVP. I was like totally buggin. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, and squish in extra place settings. But, by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, w...

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...