the groundhog day project

Let us leave (presumably) the evil high school girls behind. ( Presumably because I haven't seen Struck by Lightning before.) Today, our focus is a high school boy, Carson Phillips (Chris Colfer). (And, admittedly, this movie was recommended by my daughter a good while ago and I have put it off. Which really shouldn't be parenthetical, actually, because I want to take this opportunity to a) write a bit about the movie as it plays and b) out my daughter as a crazy fangirl... except, as you will see, my point below is probably going to be that fangirls are not crazy. Plus it's a bit sexist to separate fangirls from fanboys, anyway.) Carson is rather amusingly sardonic and sarcastic--i.e. the best kind of cinematic high school character. I don't need someone who is you know, nice, and genuine. Less Rita Hanson, more Phil Connors. Just how I like a character... at least a comedy. (So, Saer--my 12-year-old daughter, for those of you who have not been following alo...

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...

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.

The whole point to movies like Pump Up the Volume or The Legend of Billie Jean (watching again today), is that not only is the system broken but the measures to fix it are broken as well. That Mark's father, the school commissioner, does his job only as his rebellious son is being arrested and Lieutenant Ringwald only tries to do his job after its too late here... and manages to do the right thing in the end by specifically by not doing his job when Billie Jean confronts Pyatt--this is a measure that things are not really working. There's no legitimate oversight... Of course, that brings up an interesting point about Pump Up the Volume --imagine if, instead of broadcasting that letter about Cheryl Biggs under the guise of Hard Harry Hard-On, Mark had pointed out the problem to his father. He wouldn't have garnered the interest of Nora, of course, would have remained the quiet nerdy guy. But, he might have save the school without some of the trouble--Paige blowing up he...

Feel like drifting. No school. No teachers. Just an old movie that might not even be any good. The   Legend of Billie Jean . I remember enjoying it years ago, but I'm watching it because right after I mentioned it a few days ago I happened to see the DVD for sale cheap. Can't pass up coincidence. I was just reading about how in the commentary track (to which I have not listened), Helen Slater and Yeardley Smith didn't remember how the movie ended as they were watching it years later. I, too, do not really remember where this movie is going. I know something's gonna happen to Billie Jean (Helen Slater, no relation to...) and her brother Binx (...Christian Slater) kills someone-- Which is happening now as I type about not remembering the details. So, Hubie (Barry Tubb) stole Binx' scooter and Pyatt, Hubie's father (Richard Bradford) just tried to rape Billie Jean, sort of, rather than pay the money she demanded for the damage done to the scooter. Now, they'...

Okay, this is really me, now. No more hiding. Listen--we're all worried, we're all in pain. That just come with having eyes and ears. But, just remember one thing: it can't get any worse, it can only get better. I mean, high school is the bottom. Being a teenager sucks, but that's the point; surviving it is the whole point. Quitting is not going to make you strong. Living will. So, just hang on and hang in there. You know I know all about the hating and the sneering. I'm a member of the "Why bother?" generation, myself. But, why did I bother coming out here tonight and why did you? I mean, it's time. It begins with us, not with politicians, the experts and the teachers, but with us, with you and with me, the ones who need it most. I believe with everything that's in me that the whole world is begging for healing' even the trees and the earth itself are crying out for it. You can heart it everywhere. It's the same kind of healing I desperate...

You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? - Hard Harry Hard-On Pump Up the Volume is not about the stuff that's wrong with the whole country, or society as a whole. There are hints of bigger stuff (especially in Mark's final speech) but mostly, Hard Harry's broadcasts keep spiraling around Hubert H. Humphrey High School, where Principal Cresswood (Annie Ross) is following in Joe Clark's footsteps (a la Lean on Me ), weeding out the bad students rather than making them (or at least helping them make themselves) better. (Plus Murdock (Andy Romano), the Vice Principal does his own locker searches without anyone around and eventually gets into a fight with a student.) Meanwhile, the lives of many of the teenagers at the school... welll, they suck. They live in Paradise Hills, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix. (And presumably the equivalent to Paradise Valley, that includes eight resorts; it's a tourist town.) And, they're living in ...

"Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." - Hard Harry Hard-On No teachers today, again , except as antagonists... Well, I suppose my take was that Joe Clark was the antagonist of the larger story if not the throughline of Lean on Me . And, for so many high schoolers, plenty of teachers are the antagonists. Not just teachers--parents, other adults; like they're all the phonies Holden Caulfield saw them as. The perspective here: this movie puts us on the side of the teenagers. Hard Harry Hard-On (Christian Slater) starts us out with the radio show we will learn is an unlicensed broadcast--that's the basic setup for Pump Up the Volume . Hard Harry Hard-On, of course, is also Mark Hunter, a fairly shy (meek may be a better descriptor) high schooler. Mark's parents grew up in the sixties but have turned establishment--his father is the "youngest school commissioner" in Arizona's history...

The reality behind Lean on Me , the truth in Dead Poets Society , the story of Stand and Deliver --truth and fiction twist together. If we take something meaningful from a film, the reality behind it doesn’t matter so much. Truth comes in the experience. And, truth is subjective. For example, one reviewer on IMDb asks, “What is the theme of this rubbish movie?” Follows that up with: “Those five Black narcissistic individuals do not respect themselves, nor [sic] they respect others and they shamelessly act (swearing, acting like horny sex maniacs and perverts).” Don’t forget the guns and the drugs. I mean, if you’re going to be dismissive in such broadstrokes, go all out. If you’re going to conclude, as that reviewer does, “This was the worst move I have ever seen!” maybe you should put a little more thought into your critique than some reactionary, presumably (but not overtly) racist bullshit. To counter that review, another reviewer on IMDb says, All five members were uncompromi...

Taking a break from seriousness with Summer School . Not that this movie doesn't demonstrate one of the points I've been trying to make--students have reasons beyond their attitudes that get in the way of schoolwork. Or, the usual Hollywood take on teaching, as Shoop (Mark Harmon) just said, "Inside every so-called bad kid is a good kid just waiting for someone to reach on down through the sleaze and the slime, pick him up and hose him off." It's a nice thought, but a teacher's gotta have a really powerful and long reach to get past the personal obstacles--like Rhonda's (Shawnee Smith) pregnancy--economic issues--like Larry's (Ken Olandt) night job--or other outstanding hinderances that have nothing to do with the kid's attitude or, necessarily, the teacher's ability. But, I said this was a break from seriousness. You know what amuses me about this movie lately? I read Roger Ebert's review of the film today and he hated this film. He ca...

Then, there was The Principal . Actually, in movie terms, this movie came before Lean on Me . It's a different beast, perhaps, because it's fiction. Doesn't start with school. Rather begins in a bar. Rick Lattimer (James Belushi) is clearly an angry, violent man. Making that clear right away, as he goes after his wife's divorce lawyer/new boyfriend with a baseball bat. Afterward, cop asks him his occupation. Wait for it--school teacher. We're supposed to be surprised. I'm not sure why we should care (except of course we know already this is a movie about a principal (who could very well also be a teacher). He's also a disgusting bachelor-type. Smells the bad milk, is revolted, puts it back in the fridge, for example. (Box office aside: I saw this movie at The Academy, a second-run theater in Pasadena, so I'm not sure when I saw it. But, looking at the weekend it came out, I like that I saw all of the top 12 ( The Principal was #4), but only about ...

(I'm not done with Joe Clark.) "...any school must deal with the student as they receive them, no more and no less" (Clere, 2015, April 1). An interesting line from an article at ethosreview.org , this past April, that is partly about Lean on Me and partly about recent North Carolina policy that grades schools based on standardized test scores (not a novel idea, certainly). And, I both agree and disagree with the sentiment. On the one hand, yeah, a student comes to school with certain values and beliefs instilled in the home (or from the places outside the home where they spend time). A student is limited by his or her socioeconomic conditions. All students are not created equal. Case in point: Kaneesha (Karen Malina White) was a student at School 6 where Joe Clark (Morgan Freeman) was previously principal, she seems set up in the film as one of the good students. Yet, at the end of the movie, she's the one who has gotten pregnant. Children make stupid decisions...

Naught but a few seconds into Lean on Me and I had to pause the movie and do some factchecking. I already knew there were some factual problems with this "true story"--and I'll get to some of those below--but right away, the opening text crawl quotes an "official report" that called Eastside High a "cauldron of violence." I was curious what kind of "official" report said this. According to a piece at northjersey.com , 22 October 2009, it was a county prosecutor in the 1970s who dubbed Eastside a "cauldron of violence." A prosecutor. So the evidence here in the crawl that Eastside is bad--and trust me, the movie is going to offer up some more evidence as soon as the crawl gets done--is a man or woman... I tried to check who specifically said it and found a New York Times piece that says it was Joe Clark. I.E. the protagonist of this film. Not a prosecutor. So, 1) if it was a prosecutor, then it was a man or woman who was legally r...

Return to teachers. Get a little Roger Ebert in at the top for the transition back to the sort-of-ongoing theme... "Dangerous Minds" tells another one of those uplifting parables in which the dedicated teacher takes on a schoolroom full of rebellious malcontents, and wins them over with an unorthodox approach. Movies like this are inevitably "based on a real story." Maybe they tell you that because otherwise you'd think they were pure fantasy. He calls "this version" of the story "less than compelling." I mostly remember this movie in pieces. I worked at a movie theater in 1995 when it came out (20 years and 3 days ago). The movie opened #1 at the box office. If I remember right (and I probably do), our theater also had Something to Talk About (#4), The Net (#6), Casper (#13), Batman Forever , and Braveheart at the time. (Saw a lot of movies in the six months I worked there because in addition to being able to see our own theater'...