Year 14, Day 78 - 3/19/22 - Movie #4,080
BEFORE: Eric Christian Olsen carries over from "The Last Kiss" - it's funny, because my wife and I were just talking about him the other day, because she's watching the show "Community" for the first time (I watched it when it aired and TRIED to get her to watch it then...) and I spotted him as a minor character in one episode she was watching. "But who IS that?" she said, and I said, "Come ON, he played one of the German guys in "Beerfest"!" And she said, "OK, if you say so..." I often forget that not everybody shares my obsessive fascination with character actors, and figuring out where I've seen them before. For me, every day is a trip through the IMDB to look at several actors' filmographies, a never-ending curiosity about how many times I've seen that person before in movies, and which movies they were. Other people fill up their lives with different, but perhaps equally as insignificant, things, I guess.
I guess I've got my work cut out for me later today, because this film has a BIG cast. But first, here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" line-up for tomorrow, March 20, featuring Best Actress winners:
6:45 am "Morning Glory" (1933)Damn, I've only seen four of these: "The Trip to Bountiful", "A River Runs Through It", "There Will Be Blood" and "Leaving Las Vegas". And 4 seen out of 11 means I'm only at 93 out of 220, holding on at 42.2%
THE PLOT: A send-up of all the teen movies that have accumulated in the previous two decades.
AFTER: There's a certain symmetry to watching this one tonight, now that the romance chain is over - because way back near the start of this year's chain, I watched "She's All That" on February 4, I watched "She's All That", and that's one of the main teen films parodied here. "Get Over It" was another one I watched this year, though I don't think that one got name-checked directly here, but it was definitely in the ballpark. In previous Movie Years I have watched "Can't Hardly Wait", "10 Things I Hate About You", "Pretty in Pink", "The Breakfast Club" and "Never Been Kissed", so I think slowly I've been working my way into somehow becoming the target audience for THIS film, the one that parodies all the others. If I hadn't seen "She's All That", though, I might have missed out on many of the references, so really, this turned out to be the perfect year, the perfect TIME to watch "Not Another Teen Movie".
Now, to be fair, I haven't seen "Varsity Blues", where some of the football humor comes from, nor have I seen "Bring It On", which is the inspiration for the cheerleader jokes, and I've somehow managed to avoid the entire "American Pie" franchise, though I think I'm none the worse for wear in all these cases. Maybe someday, someday, someday on those films - we'll see, I suppose. But all high-school films are essentially the same, and I dare say that I've seen more than my share, maybe even more than the average person, over the last x number of years. In the same vein, now that I finally watched the "Scream" films last October, then perhaps the "Scary Movie" franchise is a possibility in the future. Again, maybe someday.
I guess what I'm saying is that I really needed a laugh tonight, the last few romance films just took themselves, and the topic, WAY too seriously. What a bummer "The Last Kiss" turned out to be, and if you consider that a happy ending then perhaps you should re-define your terms. This one's not serious at all, not one bit, and that's really refreshing after all the drama and the cheating and the navel-gazing with everybody single fretting over not being married, and every married person wondering if they'd be better off single. With high-school students, at least nobody's worried about THAT. This film just really wanted to turn the whole genre on its ear, and find those things that stood out from previous teen flicks and poke fun at it all, and I can really get behind that sort of thing for once. Ensemble comedy flicks like "Movie 43" and "The Onion Movie" haven't received very high scores from me, and obviously there's a reason - they're all over the place and just generally not very funny.
Ah, but parody, that's its own animal. You have to REALLY understand something to properly make fun of it - the bet that somebody can turn a homely girl with glasses into prom queen. The football quarterback who's unsure of himself. The girl who's secretly got the hots for her step-brother - wait, was that a thing? Oh, right, "Cruel Intentions". The older journalist who goes undercover as a high-school student, that was "Never Been Kissed" - see, I'm hip! The hot girl who walks into the room in slow-motion as an 80's pop song plays, that's from "Can't Hardly Wait" and the teen serenading his intended girlfriend from the bleachers is straight out of "10 Things I Hate About You".
Then there are the jokes about the casting - that teen's father also played the father in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", the principal was the same actor who played the principal in "The Breakfast Club", one kid acts more Asian than "The Karate Kid", even though he isn't, there's a weird kid with a video camera that spoofs "American Beauty", plus the angry paperboy from "Better Off Dead", and so on. The teens here all attend "John Hughes High School", where the cafeteria is called the "Anthony Michael Dining Hall" and the football team plays in "Harry Dean Stadium", and so on.
Yeah, I guess I was just in the right frame of mind for this one - this whole genre was ripe for parodying, everything from pointing out repeatedly that there's only one token black character in the whole school, to the horny kids trying to spy on girls in their locker room. Geez, I would have bet that tall kid was played by Paul Dano, before he became super famous, but it's NOT him, it's another actor named Sam Huntington who looks a LOT like him. (Twinsies!) Now that I think about it, Paul Dano does mostly art-house and indie films like "Little Miss Sunshine", I should have known that a silly parody would be beneath him. That's NOT Freddie Prinze Jr. either in the fake clip from "She's All That", though - it's a look-alike and they made the TV image look like it was getting bad reception - like we wouldn't be able to tell?
Sure, not every joke lands - like I totally didn't know why there was an albino folk singer, or what that even was a reference to, but I guess you can't win 'em all. Same goes for the broken toilet falling through the ceiling into the class, it's just not the kind of thing that I think is funny. Since this isn't meant to be taken seriously at all, there's no real point in complaining about the fact that the film depicted a football game, then went straight on into the prom season - when football is played in the fall, and proms takes place in May. I find this funny because I once got into an argument over the exact same structure with a noted film director who made the same mistake. When I told him he was probably confusing "prom" with "homecoming", which DOES take place in the fall, he insisted that proms happen in the fall, and then he hunkered down, and refused to ask anyone else to confirm this, or even look it up, he was so SURE that proms take place in October in November, and I kept telling him he was WAY off base. For some reason, this exchange still bothers me, because the completed film still depicts this calendar-based mistake.
This was Chris Evans' film debut - before he was Captain America or even Human Torch, he made this little high-school parody film in 2001, that took all of the 90's teen movies to task. Who knew? I only put this on my list because it popped up on Netflix a couple of months ago, once again I put my faith in the universe, it didn't allow me to even consider watching this film, not until I was ready for it. Proof that my system, such as it is, actually works sometimes.
Also starring Chyler Leigh, Chris Evans (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Jaime Pressly (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Mia Kirshner, Deon Richmond (last seen in "Scream 3"), Eric Jungmann (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Ron Lester, Cody McMains, Sam Huntington (last seen in "Sully"), Joanna Garcia (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Lacey Chabert (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Samm Levine (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Cerina Vincent, Beverly Polcyn (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Nectar Rose (ditto), Ed Lauter (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Randy Quaid (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Samaire Armstrong, Riley Smith, Jeannette Miller, Michael Ensign (last seen in "Down With Love"), Josh Radnor (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Joy Bisco, George Wyner (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Joy Gohring, Sean Smith (last seen in "Spanglish"), Lyman Ward, Julie Welch, James Read (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Jackie Harris Greenberg, Rob Benedict (last seen in "State of Play"), Jay Johnston, Kyle Cease (last seen in "10 Things I Hate About You"), Jim Wise (last seen in "Love Liza"), H. Jon Benjamin (last seen in "Dean"), Paul Goebel, Sean Patrick Thomas (also last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), with cameos from Molly Ringwald (last seen in "Betsy's Wedding"), Paul Gleason (last seen in "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper"), Mr. T (last heard in "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"), Melissa Joan Hart (last heard in "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), the band Good Charlotte, and archive footage of Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Lucky").
RATING: 6 out of 10 pairs of thrown panties
No comments:
Post a Comment