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2020 MOVIE DISCUSSION


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I know I am a year late on this but Booksmart is an instant classic. What a funny and smart take on high school movies. It completely flipped the script on the genre. And it also was not afraid to still do gross-out humor and get into the awkwardness of early sex.

But, mostly, the theme of “Wow, actually high school was not bad, and the people who were supposedly the popular kids were really not that bad and maybe I was not the dork I thought I was.”

I had my 20th reunion a few years ago and it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I was picked on and bullied a ton when I was younger... but then it hit me that it was all in grade school and middle school and by the time high school actually counted anyone who was still physically bullying others was just seen as a gigantic asshole. 

I am still really close with a lot of people from high school. None of my friends I talk to pretty much daily were going to be caught dead going. But I wanted to go from a sociological perspective and for comedy material is my role in life. And two really good friends were going so I had that role as well.

When I arrived, the first person I saw was this girl Lindsay who I never spoke to. She was the head cheerleader. But I had no idea what kind of person she was — just different cliques. But she started saying how funny she thought I was on Facebook, and that she wish she knew me back in high school. 

I also had this really epic chat with another cheerleader named Melissa. I actually knew her pretty well because we were lab partners in biology. She was really nice — super smart and we got along great. We did not hang out of school at all but we were friendly in school.

We started doing the whole “what do you do for work?” thing. And she told me she was a scientist — a researcher at one of the big pharmaceutical companies and they were working on a cure for a certain type of Hepatitis, and it was awesome because she wanted to be a scientist her whole life.

I just got curious and told her we could go back to being goofy if we wanted to. But I wanted to ask her something serious. I told her I knew how smart she was, but wanted to know if it was hard to balance that out with being a cheerleader who always had a boyfriend and etc. She said high school completely sucked for her. She wanted to be in AP classes but she was cast as an airhead because she was a cheerleader and her parents had to threaten to sue the school so she could take those classes. And the only reason she was a cheerleader was because she took gymnastics as a kid and loved it and cheerleading was the only equivalent option she had when she got older, and the aforementioned Lindsay was her best friend. But she said the worst part was that she fell into the trap of being afraid to let people know she was a brainiac at heart — especially boys, do she acted how she felt like they wanted her to act. And then she said college was miserable because science classes and labs were really a lot of work and she had such a chip on her shoulder that all she did was work and had no social life. 

Then she asked me what high school was like for me. She said that people used to love having classes with me and my friends because we were all really funny and made things great. Then I told her that I was really miserable a lot of times and felt like I did not have a lot of friends and not having any girlfriends was a major bummer. She was shocked to hear that because she said it looked like the opposite, and that I had the best time out of everyone because everyone always had a great time with me. 
 

It was a pretty crazy conversation that made me really go back and reconsider everything I thought about myself growing up — and maybe it really was not as bad as I thought It was at the time. 

I know Booksmart takes place in high school, but it is all about just not realizing how they are considered. The two main characters look down on the kids who don’t take school seriously... and then they realize they did take school seriously. And those kids do not realize how much fun the main characters are until they prove that they are just as much fun.

I am probably over analyzing it, but it really is an awesome movie with insights into adolescence that really resonate with me a lot as an adult. A+ movie and something I am definitely going to watch again.

 

 

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Die Hard isn't a Christmas movie because "it takes place around Christmas"

It's a Christmas movie because Christmas is absolutely integral to the plot, and informs what happens in the movie. Batman Returns changes very little other than set design if you move it to February. Die Hard would become a fundamentally different movie.

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8 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

Die Hard isn't a Christmas movie because "it takes place around Christmas"

It's a Christmas movie because Christmas is absolutely integral to the plot, and informs what happens in the movie. Batman Returns changes very little other than set design if you move it to February. Die Hard would become a fundamentally different movie.

Counterpoint:

 

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On 12/15/2020 at 10:20 AM, Dolfan in NYC said:

Counterpoint:

 

Yeah, the Bruce/Selena story definitely plays out like a twisted Christmas romance movie.  And the Catwoman/Shreck story in general has an anti-consumerist bent that’s common to Christmas movies.

Also!  Penguin’s final plot to kill all the first born sons of Gotham invokes the spirit of King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents as depicted in the gospel of Matthew (which gets left out of most Nativity retellings for reasons I can’t *quite* put my finger on).

Edited by EVA
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On 12/24/2020 at 8:26 AM, Control said:

Discovered two new (to me) Xmas classics this year: SILENT PARTNER, a 1970s Canadian heist flick with Eliot Gould and Christopher Plummer, ...

Aw damn, I saw this three times in the theater (the UA Cinema behind the Parkway Plaza mall in El Cajon, CA) and thought it was the best movie i ever saw, right behind "Love at First Bite" (which we also saw three times ((once twice in a row))).  One of the first movies we had delivered by Netflix, along with Don Coscarelli's "Kenny & Company". I still love it.

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12 minutes ago, Trebor said:

Aw damn, I saw this three times in the theater (the UA Cinema behind the Parkway Plaza mall in El Cajon, CA) and thought it was the best movie i ever saw, right behind "Love at First Bite" (which we also saw three times ((once twice in a row))).  One of the first movies we had delivered by Netflix, along with Don Coscarelli's "Kenny & Company". I still love it.

Wait, there’s a DVD release out there of KENNY & COMPANY?

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I watched Last Night last night. The Canadian one about the end of the World, not the English one about cheating on your wife. Still good. Felt a lot more emotional about it in 2020 than I did 20 years ago. Not many people have seen it, more should. It's thought provoking.

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Why has it taken me this long to figure out that by the end of Five Element Ninjas, all of the standard Venom Mob performers that usually play heroic roles are dead and two of the three men left standing are Yu Tai-Ping and Wang Li: guys that are synonymous with villainous roles in Shaw Brothers joints?

Edited by J.T.
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On 12/26/2020 at 3:49 PM, Control said:

My wife got me the Criterion Collection Godzilla Showa Era set. I got her The Complete Agnes Varda. So, some fun double features in the near future. 

Varda’s DAGUERROTYPE is confined to within 90 meters of the filmmaker’s home, because she needs to be near her infant child. In SON OF GODZILLA, Godzilla teaches Manilla the “important monster skills of roaring and using its atomic ray.” Both dramatize the challenges of parenting.

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