First, To LPC In Lieu of Restricted Comments, Then to My Day In Pop Culture

LPC, your comments are restricted, so I hope this finds you. A dense question: how do I hyperlink words, movies, etc, as you have so that I may direct my (sparse) readers to things of note? I am fairly computer illiterate and your explanation and instruction has always made more sense to me than any research I could do.

Yesterday I spent time doing what I love most: surrounding myself with, learning about, and obtaining pieces of pop culture. Here is what I have to report:

My So-Called Life
While dated (see previous posts), still rings true. For a show I've watched many times over, I found myself getting teary at the strangest moments and still swooning over Jordan Catalano. The swooning didn't occur so much for myself as for Angela, for which I felt every pang of joy, lust, hurt and awkwardness when they interact. For a show steeped in reality, I now have a few issues with her feelings toward Jordan, at least from my own personal experiences in high school with crushes. First, I almost wish Jordan wasn't so good looking. When I look back on my crushes, many of which I still know today, none of them would stop traffic, but that doesn't mean I didn't have the same obsessive, painful feelings that Angela had. The issue of him being SO good looking would, in reality, cause another problem that is not addressed on the show, being that someone that obviously beautiful would be swarmed with girls all the time. The show presents Angela as unique. Girls are not throwing themselves at Jordan regularly, perhaps because he's too aloof, too poor, too rough and tumble. In my experience, this never stopped girls from falling in love with a pretty face.

Another interesting observation is about the episode entitled "Guns and Gossip", in which a gun is brought to school and fired, and only Brian Krakow saw who may have done it. The parents are horrified, the school takes on the role of harassment to find out whodunnit, and the episode is littered with passing scenes of police officers rifling through lockers and patting down kids. This in itself is not so interesting: a typical topic for a high school show. However, what made it interesting is the fact that this episode was aired 5 years before Columbine and 7 years before 9/11. The final scene of the episode shows the kids silently walking into school and seeing metal detectors have been installed. This was a NOVEL idea then. Now most large schools have metal detectors and heightened security as a regular fixture. MSCL was definitely the product of a time concurrent with Kurt Cobain and Bill Clinton. Now teen dramas smell of W. and fear and terrorism, or the fantasy of escaping such fears (see Gossip Girl, 90210).

Charlie Bartlett
I liked this movie more than I expected to, perhaps because it reminded me, in ways, of three other movies that I love: Pump Up The Volume, Rushmore, and Harold and Maude. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to die-hard fans of any of the three, but it had elements of all of them.

Pump Up The Volume has the most similarities, although CB is much less...dark, or harsh. The main character becomes an uncomfortable spokesperson for the rights, lives and feelings of an entire high school. They begin to look to him and depend on him to make the right decisions and follow him in whatever insane (or not so insane) idea he comes up with, even if it results in anarchy. There is the element of teen suicide caused (or almost caused) by the advice given by the main character. There is just the general feeling that teens rights are being violated by the awful and brutal tyrants in charge.

CB is not similar to Rushmore in any stylistic or comedic sense. It had more to do with the attitude of the protagonist and the transformation from private school dweeb to public school sensation. There was the small element of student-written plays being performed, even starring the notorious bully.

Harold and Maude is the hardest to describe. I was already thinking of H&M (ha!) before Charlie and Susan sat at the piano and sang one of the Cat Stevens songs from the film (If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out). The similarities mostly stem from the fact that, in both films, the main characters are insanely rich and live with their kooky mothers. Neither seem to have a strong affinity for their wealth and a deep inner struggle with themselves. The comparison probably ends here.

Even if CB is ripping off some or all of these films, it does so with a sharpness and wit that I appreciated. I only detected one totally cheeseball moment, when Susan sings the aforementioned Cat Stevens song in the school play. This seemed like an unnecessary confirmation of many facts that we'd already learned about the characters.

Movie Trailers
I sat and watched a few trailers online. The first was for Where the Wild Things Are. I cannot stress enough how amazing this film looks. Even the trailer made me teary eyed, but this may just be because of the swelling of the music and the scrawling lettering informing us that "In all of us there is HOPE...In all of us there is FEAR...In all of us there is a WILD THING." Cue tears.

I also watched the trailer for Transformers 2: something something. I was a huge fan of the first one and this second one looks...alright I guess. It looks like more of the same, and I still don't think Megan Fox is all that.

Last, I found a trailer for a little film called How To Be. I admit, I found it while seeing what my Super Crush Robert Pattinson was up to, besides the Twilight Saga. I was actually really surprised by how good this little film looks. It seems very awkward and British, which also happens to be how RP looks in the film. As of yet, it doesn't have a release date on Netflix and it appeared to be an IFC film, so I don't know if it had an actual theatrical release. Either way, I wish to see this as soon as its available somewhere. Check out the trailer on imdb and let me know what you think.

Lastly, I'd like to thank Amazon.com for finding me the cheapest possible price on all four Twilight books (in hardback no less). I essentially paid $11 a book for a boxed set that cost twice that much in stores. A pop culture shopping coup.