In my defense, the nonstop listmakers at Moviefone and Entertainment Weekly are presumably full time, paid professionals, and the content there is equally inane at times.
Onto today's inane list of things. I'm going to start with my hatred for The Breakfast Club. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not a bad film. It's even pretty great at times. But let's get one thing straight- in high school, I was a nerd. Not a Revenge of the Nerds pocket-protector nerd (although I was on the Chess Team and the Math Team), but just a normal, relatively smart kid that had all male friends and didn't get invited to parties. As such, unless it's an over the top depiction of glasses-wearing, high-socked social introverts, I usually identify with nerdy characters in movies- Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club is quiet, shy, and the smartest gu
y in most rooms- pretty much me for the first two years of high school.And of course, he ends up alone, and doing everyone else's work for them. Thanks John Hughes, thanks. Hey, for your next trick, why don't you write a movie where Matthew Broderick manipulates his nerdy sidekick into stealing his father's car, convinces him to leave it with two federal convict-looking parking lot attendants, and then comes up with the idiot idea to leave it propped up on a cinderblock in reverse, resulting in the wreckage of his nerdy friend's house? And just to rub it in the face of nerds everywhere, make sure that Matthew Broderick and a coked-out Charlie Sheen get some action, while the nerdy guy just gets to work on his daddy issues. In fact John Hughes, if you could just make sure that your only pro-nerd vehicle, Weird Science, is pretty much your crappiest film (that anyone remembers), then your cinematic nerd-bashing will be complete.
So by now you might've guessed that all of the "classic" high school eighties movies don't really speak to me. I guess I like Fast Times at Ridgemont High well and all, but really it's more of a pop culture reference and "that movie Sean Penn made when he had a sense of humor" than a film to me, personally. Probably because I graduated high school in 2002.
So these are the five movies that speak to me about high school. My girlfriend would absolutely have The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, et al. on her list somewhere, as do many other listmakers extraordinaire off in the vagaries of this glorious series of tubes we all share together.
5. Angus (imdb)
This is the only triumph against bullies movie that I ever really identified with, mostly because of a great soundtrack and an excellent cast that includes Kathy Bates and a surprisingly endearing George C. Scott (who I imagine would have been terrifying to actually have as a grandfather).
Also, if you also had a sister who stole the remote from you to watch "Dawson's Creek" every week, you'd also have enjoyed seeing James Van Der Beek get his nose broken about five times over the course of this film. Good times. Apparently this isn't even available on DVD yet, which is a shame.
4. Pump Up the Volume (imdb)
I know I said all the classic teen movies from over fifteen years ago aren't my thing, but seeing as you can find this for $3.99 in the bin at Wal-Mart, I don't think it ever reached classic status. For me, when I finally saw this, it reminded me of something very specific from my early high school years:
In 1998 my family moved to Wisconsin before I started ninth grade, and we had AOL on our home computer around the time that instant messaging became really popular, or at least started to. So I found myself able to express something like a personality online, talking to strangers, and even girls in my school with a little bit of confidence. But in person, I found myself with nothing to say without the shield of a keyboard in front of me.
Christian Slater's teenage rebel starts a pirate VHF radio station in this 1990 film, and disrupts the social balance of his high school, and community at large, with controversial views and on-air antics. But when a girl fan figures out his identity and seeks him out, he hardly even knows how to look at her, let alone interact.
It gets pretty crazy near the end, but it always reminds me of the way Web 1.0 brought shy wannabes like me into contact with the world, through a sheen of comforting technology- something that seems ever the more specific in retrospect, especially now that every fourteen-year-old with half an hour of free time has about a million different networking sites that do all the work for them.
3. Election (imdb)
Part of me would like to think that this is a sequel to the aforementioned Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and that Matthew Broderick's character is paying the price for his manipulative, careless high school ways. But really he's just a former high-school nerd himself, forced to put up with the same variety of over-achievers and dumb jocks like he used to. (Also, if you do watch these two movies back to back, Broderick's wife in this movie (Molly Hagan) looks uncomfortably like his sister in the previous one (Jennifer Grey))
But this is a great film, if only for its portrayal of relatively under-portrayed, but still recognizable high school types. Chris Klein plays a dumb, but surprisingly thoughtful and sincere jock, Jessica Campbell plays a sexually confused female outcast, and of course Reese Witherspoon is the most memorable as the Type-A, over-eager class president we all voted for but hated behind her back.
As Broderick's teacher has his life wrecked by a series of mishaps and bad decisions, and everything continues to work out fine for Witherspoon's conscienceless rung-climber, we all identify with the sense of frustration we felt in high school that continues for the rest of our lives- sometimes, like at the very end of this movie, there are people that just make us want to throw whatever we have in our hands at them, for reasons that we can't really explain.
2. Donnie Darko (imdb)
This is partly because this movie nails all the incidental parts of high school- the meaningless health class activities, the motivational business-meeting-type assemblies, the fact that some teachers are awesome and some teachers are insane- while making up its own supernatural mythos of time travel (an obsession of mine), dead people in bunny costumes, and plane engines.
As a side note, this is the first time that a theatrical cut has been so far, far superior to the follow up "Director's cut" version (which was actually released in theaters, to cash in on the film's growing cult status). And judging by the pushed-back release dates and rumors of poor test screenings surrounding director Richard Kelly's next effort, Southland Tales, it seems like he might actually need a studio head somewhere to reign him in.
1. Brick (imdb)
I took a class on pop culture, and for my final grade I had to give a presentation. I chose to claim that this genre experiment by director Ryan Johnson, fusing hard-noir dialogue and plot with a modern day high school setting, made this movie feel like high school more than anything else.
Near the end of my high school experience, I somehow managed to date a couple of girls, and when those relationships ended (I got dumped), it certainly felt worse than, in retrospect, it actually was. And there are times even just maintaining friends and navigating the school day is hard enough. So the introduction of drug dealers, murder, brutal beatings and other high stakes into the world of high school seemed like a natural fit- sometimes high school was like a brutal world of mystery and shadow, where everything word you said was important, and you never knew what decisions would come back to haunt you.
A lot of people, and a lot of movies, compare high school to a light-comedy soap opera, or some sort of bizarre comedy of errors, but at the time we knew: it was a matter of life and death.
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