happy birthday jesus over merry christmas

[lostcosmonaut]

Th overs-generating machine was rusty, but it still cranks

1. Patrice Lumumba Malcolm O'Neal over Andy Kaufman
   
   

Comments

[glazomaniac]

i largely agree, though #21 is a bold claim that i will need to explore further. (i went to add make way for tomorrow to my watchlist and discovered it was already there.)

#s 23, 27, and 30 are all right on. the only one i outright disagree with is #19. weird science is smarmy. pee wee (the movie, not the person--the person is kinda smarmy) is just silly and dark.

i see a darkness

[lostcosmonaut]

weird Science and Pee-wee are both retarded power fantasies; th former's more transparent about its escapist idiocy; th latter's more immersive; what it comes down to in a nutshell is WS's horny teenage boy stuff vs PW's narcissistic teenage girl stuff. Both have a decent grasp of their respective worldviews, but WS's vision of power admits that power corrupts. In PW we're asked to trust that Pee-wee is a benevolent dictator

http://mubi.com/wall_posts/373443

Let's chat about Make Way for Tomorrow after you've seen it. Hell ah'll even watch It's a Wonderful Life again in th interest of science

--mza.

[glazomaniac]

i'll make make way for tomorrow a priority then!

it's been a long time since i saw either of the films in question, re: PW and WS, but i don't recall how PW would be a power fantasy. he finds his bike and comes out on top, what with the film in the end, but he mostly seemed to wander aimlessly and stupidly through most of it. refresh my memory?

[lostcosmonaut]

he invents his own laws of physics a few times along th way

--mza.

[glazomaniac]

fair enough.

[bad_juice]

i think this is an interesting argument, but i think pw's ba is detached enough to let us see pw as foolish and not exactly a character to look up to or relate to. weird science, on the other hand, commits to its characters with very little irony and was likely single-handedly responsible for the tidal wave of chinless dorks dating beautiful women in teen movies that continues to dominate the teen comedy genre

forty one million dollars over twenty four million dollars

[lostcosmonaut]

b., judging irony is a tricky matter. For instance, you have reversed th polarity on my assessment of Burton's/Reubens' and Hughes'/AMH's respective commitment to their protagonists. What makes you think it's not th other way around ? It's not a given. If th audience isn't meant to relate to Pee-wee, his antiheroism loses its flavour. He becomes a superantihero to whom nobody can relate and who has no worthy supervillain and never is in danger

[bad_juice]

the diff i think is that molly ringwald, while dressing audaciously and "not fitting in," was still a real good looking woman. amh isn't exactly bad looking, but he's very below-average when put on the hollywood scale. so if the ringwald of pretty in pink is supposed to be the female-version of amh, that's a terribly unbalanced scale regarding frump empowerment.

i don't have particularly strong affection for either movie, but i would put weird science in my bottom 10 movies ever.

threaded commentary over facebook cacophony

[lostcosmonaut]

on th Hollywood leading lady scale, Ringwald's far below average, too. Correct me if this is a misinterpretation: yr requirement for a high school movie is that it give power to those you want empowered (frumpy girls) and take power away from those you deem unworthy (frumpy boys). That's not social justice; that's political correctness. Both movies might be terrible for a lot of diff reasons, but this particular social justice argument contradicts itself given th context of both directors' work and th nature of power fantasies in general

--mza.

[bad_juice]

yeah that is completely not what i am saying. i think you've misinterpreted my argument from the start. in the scene i mentioned above, the joke is not on amh and compadre for being shallow, it is on the frumpy girls. we are invited to join in the boys' disgust. and those two boys end up with the hot girls. they get what they want. there's no ramifications for their shallowness, which would back up your argument about the dangers of giving horny dorks superpowers. meanwhile, those two frumpy girls are non-entities, and disappear once they have served to be the butt of hughes' joke. my issue is not that i want frumpy boys' power taken away and bestowed on frumpy girls, but that hughes would never do the same thing if the genders were reversed. he identifies too strongly with male dorks to ever make them a one-note joke character (he reserves that for popular boys). it's telling of hughes' obvious biases that he has no compunction making fun of women he deems unattractive, but would never be so superficially cruel to a male

th socratic method over soliloquy

[lostcosmonaut]

basil, thank you for clarifying. 1) You're right that Hughes' heart is w/ th nerdy boys, especially AMH. His heart's also w/ Molly Ringwald, whose relationship to Hollywood female beauty standards is similar to AMH's relationship to Hollywood male beauty standards. Yr argument depends on acceptance of th premise that AMH is so much less attractive than MR that their respective successes w/ th opposite sex in Hughes' films constitute an injustice. Yr evidence is what -- a photograph. If you had selected a photograph of AMH in Tiger Beat -- of which there have to be a few -- yr argument wobbles. For th record, I think she's cute and he's a gnome, but what I think is mostly irrelevant to their respective power fantasies. Th question is what does th high school quarterback think ? What does th head cheerleader think ? In Sixteen Candles, MR & AMH take unlikely paths to get what they want from th h.s. quarterback and th head cheerleader, respectively. It's arguable that that is an egalitarian ending, power-fantasy-wise, even if