There will not be regular bloggage for a while yet. Malc and I are hitting the road on Friday for a week, culminating in the excitement of NZ’s biggest music festival, the Big Day Out. I’m rather excited by this, because I haven’t been for years. In fact, the last time I was at the Big Day Out was so long ago, the headline act was Rage Against The Machine!
Oh, I see.
So there’s been a lot of news-spreading the past week. I’m not nearly caught up on messages about it. Still rather nice to think about. There will be some discussion of this in due course.
Also some reflections on 2007. It was an interesting year, that one. While 2008 promises to be interesting for an entirely different set of reasons – elections in the US and NZ, for a start.
But for now, let me just say: the film Sixteen Candles by John Hughes is way, way weirder than you remember it being. As previously discussed, the Breakfast Club is actually still very watchable, but 16Candles is incredibly bad in a very odd way.
The best example: the movie is about MollyRingwaldGirl, who turns 16 but no-one remembers! And she loves a boy who doesn’t notice her! Halfway through the movie, she steels her nerve and approaches the boy – but she wimps out and runs away without saying anything to him. Oh no! What will she do now? Here’s what she does: she goes home to bed and spends the rest of the movie asleep. Yes, seriously. Then she wakes up, goes to a wedding and the boy turns up inexplicably infatuated with her, roll credits!
Let’s do a second take on that: the main character is at home asleep for the second half of the film.
The reason people remember 16Candles fondly is because of the one scene where MollyRingwaldGirl and AnthonyMichaelHallGeek have a moment of genuine communication in the front seat of a car. And yeah, that’s a good scene. The renaissance in teen comedies in the late 90s owed a lot to that scene – e.g. American Pie (not the sequels). You can even, maybe, draw a line from that scene to the greatest teen comedy of the Zeds, Superbad. But it’s a tenuous line.
Anyway, I’m rambling, and I’m allowed because I’m engaged and going to the Big Day Out. Everybody explode!
2 thoughts on “2008 And All That”
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We’ve got a ‘sploder here!
The thing that I’m most uncomfortable about with 16 candles is the geek/drunk girl date rape scene, and the fact that the ‘nice guy’ who Molly Ringwald wins ‘gives’ his girlfriend to the geek while she’s comatose, he has sex with her, and she’s OK with it the next day because, although she can’t really remember it, she *thinks* she might have liked it!