by Amelia G : September 8th, 2006
I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.
The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.
The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?
Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of …
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by Amelia G : August 20th, 2006
Universal’s Accepted Keg Party Photo Gallery
Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.
Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.
So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly …
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