High School Sucks

Every time I watch Heathers it blows my mind that a film with all of the gratuitous violence, bullying, school shooting, building exploding, suicide vest wearing ever got made. I mean come on, JD brings a gun to school, draws it on the two jocks, and fires blanks in their faces and all Veronica says is he may get suspended for a couple of days and she laughs it off imagining the two jocks soiling their drawers. Now a days, especially since Columbine and every other school shooting that has happened, a kindergartener can't even play cops and robbers with a finger gun with out getting a SWAT team called on him. I just wish I could have lived in a time when people weren't so up in arms about every gosh darn thing these days. Everyone has to be nice and politically correct and if you are not you are publicly scrutinized until you release an apology and sent to some reeducation program for your misconduct. It makes me sick that we live in a world where we can't offend anyone anymore. What's the point of living in one of the "freest" countries in the world if you can't speak your mind every now and again.

The plot of Heathers was something that I am almost 100% sure everyone who saw it in 1988 and even today has thought about doing at least once or twice. Murder all of the kids that mess with you and then you will be free to roam the halls of high school in piece. And the way most of the characters were portrayed was fairly accurate to every high school in America. They showed the brutality that was High school. Like the article says, "it’s the superficially flip manner with which it treats those subjects that really stands out. Heathers doesn’t do heartwarming messages. Glee is modeled on Heathers in so many ways — from the evil of the popular people, to the zingers, to closeted bully Karovsky — but when the TV show is held up next to its forerunner, the feel-good Glee feels like a tour through a Hallmark card factory." Nothing these days could even come close to what Heathers did back in 1988 because if it did it would get cancelled or picketed by some organization against something pointless and stupid. Heathers was in your face and honest and that is what I loved about this film. Like JD says, "The extreme always seems to make an impression."

That statement is the best way to describe this film. In a film with dialogue like "fuck me gentle with a chain saw" and where mineral water makes you gay this film keeps rolling out the punches and you're sitting their with your eyes glued to the screen taking the hits because you want to see what they are going to do next. We as students now especially do not see things like this on a daily basis in films these days. It is invigorating. I really loved this film and how it tackled issues that we fight so hard to keep quite these days. Bullying especially. My mom works in an elementary school and kids throw the word "bullying" around FOR EVERYTHING! A kid won't get off the swing for another to use and it's "teacher, teacher I'm being bullied." I would love to see these kids end up in High School where the Heathers were because I'm sure it would be very interesting.

Everyday I'm Shuffling

Finally a movie I have not seen yet! Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle really played with every level on my emotional scale. I mean there was laughter, there was anger, there was sadness. I couldn't deal with all the feels. I really enjoyed with how Townsend portrayed the stereotypes he saw in media and in Hollywood through comedy. I'll admit, being white I wasn't sure if it was okay for me to be laughing at some of the jokes that Townsend was making. But I think that is why this film works, these jokes are supposed to make you question and think and with comedy you're seeing how absurd these stereotypes are and you're breaking them down with laughter.

In the reading Ellen Seiter notes, for example, "that Brechtian aesthetics has encouraged arguments "that the deliberate use of stereotypes may be preferable" to the supposedly neutral style that pretends to an absence of stereotypes. In this scenario, the deliberate use of stereotypes triggers audience recognition of the directors strategy and adds to an appropriate response." (pg. 12) Townsend is throwing you into the deep end with his bombardment of the stereotypes Black actors face in a media filled with predominately white people. This in your face attitude works because it makes you laugh. There's no room to question what Townsend is doing because it's comedy. There is no way this film could be considered racist or prejudice because Townsend foregrounds the stereotypes leaving the audience able to watch the film in its entirety in no doubt as to how Townsend intends us to read the images he has put onto the screen. These stereotypes aren't be jammed down our throats to the point where we're rolling our eyes. Townsend used comedy to keep the audience engaged and to show that these stereotypes are very real and absurd and they should be laughed at because of how absurd they are.  

All though I laughed a lot in this film its ending still made me really upset. As someone who is moving to LA in the fall to follow my dreams I had real hope for Bobby Taylor to achieve his dream, but then the age old question comes into play of how much are you willing to compromise to obtain your dream. I took what both Bobby's Uncle and Grandma said to be valid points and I still don't know what the best choice was for Bobby to do. Yes, the film Bobby was in was super stereotypical of what black people are portrayed in films, but it was his first acting job. You have to get your foot in the door somehow. And after time maybe he would be getting the roles that Eddie Murphy was getting back then. But is compromise good when it is portraying your entire race in a negative light? Was it good for Bobby to get everything he loved to go work a shitty Post Office job? I don't know what the right choice was, but I guess both was would have lead to a sad ending. I guess I'll just have to watch Zombie Pimps to get my spirits up.

Viet-God-Damn-nam

As we all know the Vietnam War was one of the greatest military failures in United States history. We went blindly into a country with our big bad America image thinking we would help to liberate a country from the evils of communism! Well guess again America. It turns out we were wrong, so very, very wrong. The war went on for a decade killing thousands of Vietnamese civilians and United States Soldiers only for us to leave the country with our tail in between are legs. It was a smack in the face to our country and our military.

With the negative opinion for the War in Vietnam we of course have American propaganda to bolster support for a war the majority of American's disagreed with.  In Lawrence Lichty and Raymond Carroll's essay Fragments of War: Oliver Stone's Platoon they discuss the films of John Wayne's The Green Berets and The Boys in C Company as being two such films to come out about the Vietnam war that tried to show the lighter side to the war, by adding their own spins on it. Lichty and Raymond describe these films as, "Many Hollywood combat films begin with the training of a single unit and follow it into battle. American troops are depicted as heroic; the enemy fanatical. Our men are portrayed as reluctant soldiers more interested in the girl back home, their families, and baseball than they are in international politics." These same tropes can be seen in both the films mentioned in the article, especially the John Wayne film, and this was not what the American public wanted to see which is why they were given such bad reviews.

No one wanted to see s sugar coated film about Vietnam, especially when the war was still going on and you could see more horrific events on the nightly news then on the silver screen. This is why Oliver Stone's Platoon was such a refreshing change of pace for those who lived through and experienced the Vietnam. Stone was in the Vietnam war, he experienced what this war was really like and you can see that in his film. In Platoon there are still the same tropes as the cookie cutter films before it, like the girl back home, but those tropes are crushed when they fat Pvt. who talked about his girl back home died in the next fire fight. The men in Elias' group of men are shown smoking marijuana to escape the real hell they were living in. Soldiers are raping, pillaging, and murdering innocent civilians. There's soldiers cutting ears off for trophies, men wounding themselves to get a free ride home, and even instances of soldiers hiding instead of fighting to survive in a war that everyone thought was pointless.

This WAS Vietnam told through the eyes of someone who was actually there. Oliver Stone saw these events in real life and he showed the world through his film to tell the tale of what these men went through. The men that America deemed unwantable, worthless, or criminals. These men fought for something they didn't believe in, but what the American government told them to believe in. Platoon is real Vietnam and it is why it kicked the ass of all other Vietnam films before. This was the real story, not a John Wayne embellished piece of American propaganda.

"Get Away From Her You Bitch!"

James Cameron's Aliens is one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. There's spaceships, kick ass Space Marines, Androids, acid blood killer Aliens, and of course the most bad ass of them all, Ripley. I find it very interesting that in a huge portion of James Cameron's films he has a strong female action heroine lead character. Ripley in Aliens, Sarah Conner in Terminator II: Judgement Day, Zoe Saldana in Avatar, and even Rose in Titanic makes it to the end after all of the male characters are killed off. It's interesting to see James Cameron use so many strong female leads in an industry that tends to look down on female action stars. In Aliens I don't see Ripley so much as an action hero, but more a kick ass mother. This is where I have a problem comparing Ripley, or Fembo, to Rambo because they are two different characters in my mind.

In the Director's Cut of Alien there is a scene that shows that because Ripley was in hyper sleep for 57 years her daughter that she was trying to get home to in Alien dies of old age. This sets up an important precedent for the rest of the film and why Ripley acts the way that she does. You have a mother who lost her whole world and she will never get it back because her daughter is dead. She missed all the years of being a mother and it hits her hard. She lives in a shitty space apartment, working a shitty job, and in my mind it looks as though she is just waiting to die. But of course things aren't that simple and Ripley in fact ends up back on planet LV-47 where she encounters the one thing that took away her whole world, the Xenomorph! So first we see a tale of a mother's revenge to get those who took everything from her. She doesn't necessarily take charge in doing so, but she sends the Marine's in to do the job. Then Newt comes into the equation.

When Ripley meets Newt for the first time she is dirty, terrified, and alone. Her mother and rest of her family had been killed off by the Xenomorphs much like Ripley's daughter was loosely because of cause and effect. Ripley goes after Newt and she hugs her until Newt stops struggling and accepts Ripley. A new mother daughter relationship is born! Ripley is now back in mother mode and she will do anything to protect Newt from being harmed like she couldn't do with her real daughter. Ripley is being a mother and mother's will do anything to protect their children like go into a Xenomorph hive den with loads of face huger eggs to rescue that said child from almost certain death. This is why I find the end fight with Queen Xenomorph to be so interesting. In class I listened to a lot of arguments between whether or not the Queen Xenomorph was actual being a mother or was it all just for plot sake. For me I absolutely feel that what Cameron was going for was to show that the Queen and Ripley were both similar beings, they were both mothers who didn't want to see harm come to their "children". That is why the Queen backs her soldiers off to let Ripley go because she didn't want to see her baby eggs get lit up like the 4th of July. I don't think it was a trap, I think it was just two mothers with a common interest. To protect their young. Of course that's not how it works out and Ripley torches the eggs which I'm not going to lie makes me feel bad for the Queen with her screeches of agony as she sees her offspring murdered right in front of her. But a mother's got to do what she needs to do to protect her young and in any world it always comes down to survival of the fittest.

Ripley does bring more to the table for mother's than most do so I can see where there is that correlation of being the action hero. Like the reading states, "Ripley had more in common with the usual male action her than the typical screaming woman was well noted by the press. in a feature article lauding Aliens as the summer's megahit, Time magazine reported that "in action pictures, women are supposed to swoon or retreat to a safe corner while the male lead protects them and defends Western Civilization as we know it. In Aliens, it is the guys who are all out of action at the climax and Ripley who is in a death duel with evil." (pg. 58) I do love that at the end of the film that it is just mother vs. mother. All the men are dead, hicks is passed out in the spaceship, and even Bishop gets torn apart. You don't see many female battles at the end of an action film and it is always refreshing to see when it happens and can be taken seriously.

Blue Velvet

As a film student David lynch is one of the great film makers of all time. He ranks up there with the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Jean Luc Godard. He pushes the boundaries of film making by making his films some of the weirdest things ever to be put up on the silver screen. I mean you don't even have to watch 5 minutes before realizing that Blue Velvet is going to be a bumpy ride and your out a seat belt.

One of my favorite things about this film was the postmodernism style used by Lynch to play with the time period you were actually in in the film. On the outside Lumberton is the perfect all American town. Some of the first images you see in the film are the smiling fireman on the 1950's style truck with the spotted dog, the cross guard waving skipping children across the street, and the WHITE picket fence with the RED roses and the bright, sunny BLUE sky. RED WHIT AND BLUE! AMERICA! Lynch shows us all this picture perfect 50's esq. town where it seems as though the American dream is alive and well, but then the film takes a drastic turn and the man tending his lawn in suburbia collapses in pain as a little toddler giggles up to him, super creepy. Then we have the push into the grass which shows the beetles crawling all over one another and the sounds of them moving carries over into the next scene making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. This is Lynch postmodernism at full swing. Lynch shows us this perfect 50's looking American small town with American values and the American Dream,  but underneath the perfect is the truth. There is a dark, ugliness to this place called Lumberton and this way of thinking about a perfect America. Lynch is showing us his skeptical interpretations of the culture and philosophy at this time period.

The reading goes in depth with Lynch using the artifice of the 1950's to screw with his audience's heads. "... closer scrutiny reveals that things are not what they seem. The slick, picture-perfect surface of the American Dream in icons that are as one dimensional as Hollywood movie sets, Lynch begins to weave a thread of ambiguity through the tightly woven web of America's self understanding." The idea of the American dream is just a mask from preventing others to truly see what America really is, a dark place. Look at the town of Lumbertown and Dorthy's apartment building. Much like the shots previous in the film the town and buildings look normal or almost too perfect, but upon a closer look into Dorthy's apartment we seem the elevator is busted, there are flickering lights, and her apartment is very unsettling. It feels fake and unsettling like the forced ideal of the American Dream. The rooms color scheme doesn't make sense, where everything is laid out in the room makes zero sense, and it's dark and ominous. Like we were discussing in class it feels like we are looking at a painting or a set in a sitcom on late night television.

The ambiguity is not only in the town, but also with its residents. Look at Jeffrey for example. He is by all accounts a boy scout in superman proportion. He's a college lad who comes home to help his sick dad out at the local small town hardware store. He is at first glimpse a perfect individual, but then like Lynch does we get a closer look at Jeffrey much like the lawn in the beginning with the beetles there is something dark underneath. After Jeffrey discovers the ear he changes and you see his true nature. "With these incidents, Lynch propels the viewer into the menacing, nightmarish underworld of Lumberton which coexists with the world of white picket fences." He goes from a good proper boy to a pervert watching Dorthy change because he wants to solve some sick mystery he has no right to solve. This leads him into a world that is terrifyingly strange, but he likes it, he craves it. That is why he keeps coming back for more of Dorthy, why he hits her when she asks, why after Frank kidnaps him and makes out with him listening to Candy Colored Clown he just rolls with it because like the small town he has a darkness hidden inside him that is kept from the real world. The same goes for almost every other character in the film.

I really enjoyed this film and I absolutely loved what Lynch created in order to take a look at the falsity of what we as American's think is the golden age of our country. The idea of the American Dream and the happy small town is a lie because underneath there is always a darkness we don't see. And also this may be my new favorite film quote of all time so thank you David Lynch.

The Breakfast Club

Nothing says the 1980's like a John Hughes film. You would probably find it very difficult to find someone who hasn't seen a John Hughes. Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, and The Breakfast Club are iconic films for not only the 1980's, but for teenagers all across America to this day. I mean John Hughes really does seem to capture the way ALL teenagers seen their parents and cliques in High School, right? Parents suxx, my life is hard, you're a bully, blah, blah, blah. This might have been true back when Reagan was President, but for me I never had a problem in High School with how I got along with people or how I got along with my parents. This is why The Breakfast Club does nothing for me and I kind of really dislike the film because I can't relate to any of these characters because my home life wasn't shit.

All these kids had the stereotypical cliques, the jock, popular girl, nerd, badass, and the loner. You see these stereotypes in every movie that shows High School students, but for me in High School I never was really apart of a set clique. I played football and was the Captain of the wrestling team much like Andy in the film, but I got good grades like Brian, and I hung out with a lot of the loners in school who are still some of my best friends. So on the John Hughes scale where do I fit in?

This film really angers me because I see no point in it. These 5 kids send an entire day discussing their shitty home lives, how their parents are bringing some of them to their breaking points, how they thought about suicide, the effects that bullying, teenage sex, drugs, the whole shabang. This is usually deep conversation that many only have when they are around the ones that they truly feel safe and comfortable with and these 5 share their inner most secrets with complete strangers! Then none of them even learn anything from these deep emotional conversations! They leave and go their separate ways and will continue to be the same fucked up individuals they were from the very beginning of the film. Bender will still be the trouble maker, Brian will still get good grades, Claire will still be rich and popular, Andy will still wrestle, and Allison will still be weird even after her charity Claire makeover. No one changes and I don't see how that is good for a film. These five will continue to talk shit about one another and be terrible people like none of their thought provoking conversations ever took place so then why did this film need to take place?

I was also very bothered by the Claire and Allison makeover at the end of the film. It really grinds my gears when you have an outcast like Allison change into something she is not because that is what society says a girl needs to look like. I mean why couldn't they focus on her awesome drawing skills? Why does it always have to come back to lipstick and eyeliner. Like the reading says, " However rather than tolerating or celebrating the differences between the women of different classes, the film actualizes the promises made by the ads aimed at women in the 1980's, saying that anyone can become a member of the upper class as long as she acquires and correctly uses the right stuff." Allison is probably my favorite character in the film because she is less like any rel clique in High School. She knows about the world, like when she talks about running away, she's free spirited, she isn't tied down to the pressures that the other cliques have, and she speaks her mind. But as soon as she gets that makeover she is just like all the other pretty girls out their and her identity is erased by of course, THE RICH UPPER CLASS!

I don't get this film, I don't know why people like it, and I will probably never watch it again. On a completely unrelated rant why is it called The Breakfast Club? They never eat breakfast! And why is Andy, a wrestler who needs to maintain his weight, eating 3 sandwiches, a bag of chips, a box of cookies, a gallon of milk, an apple, and a banana if he has a meet in a week?  Anyway I can see what John Hughes was going for with the 1980's social classes, but for me it just came out all wrong.

Sincerely Yours,

Someone who does not enjoy The Breakfast Club

Desperately Seeking Susan

Desperately Seeking Susan was a film that I will probably never watch again in my life. Romantic Comedies  never really did anything for me and there's always too much coincidence in these films to draw me in because at times they are just frustrating to watch. This film is especially hard to watch because we all grew up with cell phones and if all of the characters just had the latest IPhone none of this would have ever happened because they all could have just Snapchatted, Vined, Instagramed, Tweeted, Face Timed, Facebooked, and Texted where they all were. This film really bugged me. All of the characters seemed dumb. All they had to do is sit down Madonna with Gary and post amnesia Roberta with Dez and explain what they hell was going on using their adult vocabularies, but no Dez just thinks Roberta is being funny and Madonna is crazy doing whatever she wants by not telling Gary a god damn thing. But I guess that is the allure of Madonna and why this film is so popular in giving her more street cred.

I can see the argument that Madonna is a third wave feminist in the fact that she doesn't need a man to help her and she lives on her own. She dresses how she wants, does what she wants, takes what she wants, sleeps with who she wants, she is a strong independent woman. And where I am all for that and for other women to be doing those exact same things, seeing Madonna's character still aggravated me. In the film she just felt like I AM MADONNA AND I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF! I mean she was with a guy who got killed after she left his hotel room and she was like, "Well this sucks, but whatever." I mean you should show some sort of emotion especially at the end of the film when you probably figure out that you are the reason that that man was murdered because you felt you could just steal things from anyone you want. And then Madonna meets Gary and goes through all of Roberta's things and wrecks his house and takes his car. Who does she think she is wrecking other people's homes and just shrugging it off. I did not see Madonna as a feminist in this film. She was more of thug. She bossed people around, stole, cheated, and ruined everything she touched.

I did however really like Roberta in this film. Life shouldn't be a drag like her life was. I mean her life with Gary looked to be like it would have been more fun to watch paint dry on a house than to be stuck in that relationship. Roberta took it upon herself to get out and to find a little adventure in her life even if it meant stalking someone from the personal ads. She got out there to get some excitement and that's what she got. She transformed into a version of Susan that wasn't personality wise like Susan and it changed her spirit. It allowed her to get out of a boring shitty relationship and lead her to get out there and find a new love. Good for you Roberta!

I understand that Madonna is supposed to be like she is because of the Virgin/Whore archetype, but I just couldn't get behind that. i understand she was acting, dressing, and doing all of these things in the film because that was who Madonna was and it shocked a lot of people. And like the saying goes "sex sells", so if Madonna and her record company are making money based on this persona that she was putting on then more power to her.