Two things. 1) Could you start linking to imdb at the top? I haven't really heard of any of these movies except Barbarella. 2) Are you ever going to start reviewing half-decent/semi-famous movies? Just wondering. 3) Why do people make so many goddamn movies about high school? It's all been done. Every trope. Every type of movie you can possibly make about high school has been made (this was also true 20 years ago). Give it up. Please. Actually just give up making movies about one particular age group at all. (This movie you are writing about, for example, just sounds like that shitty movie Thirteen, which was about sex, drugs, and either high school or 8th grade, depending.)
1. Sure 2. I'll actually be reviewing movies that are out in theatres from time to time. I will do whatever movies are on netflix. I like to mix the good and the bad. 3. Because high school students are a lucrative market. Shows that attract high school students can have TV spots that are worth millions. If you attract the high school crowd you can make a shitzillion dollars.
My take: 1. Good call about IMBD
2. He did review Man in the Moon which was a pretty high profile movie
3. That's like asking why people make movies about "work". Ebert interviewed Scorsese once and they both agreed that anyone that says I don't like movies about __ are idiots. It's about the character, not the situation. I don't like bad movies about high-school, sure. But there are plenty of good ones yet to be made, I'd wager.
Hmm. What they have in common, though, is that they aren't high school movies. No Cusack, no Hughes. I really do think the high school movie's time has come and gone. Maybe I'm being narrow-minded, but I just don't see Hollywood breaking away from the American Pie framework anytime soon.Ebert interviewed Scorsese once and they both agreed that anyone that says I don't like movies about __ are idiots.
Obviously, yeah. But ... my problem is people just make the typical high school movie. It's awful. I do tend to forget (which is a good thing, because it means I was focused on plot and other stuff) that Donnie Darko is a high school movie, sort of. So is 21 Jump Street. Etc.
American Pie is essentially a recent version of the Porky's franchise. These movies have been around for many years and will be around for many more. It's not the setting, it's the character arc. Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Poets Society, Rushmore, Napolean Dynamite, and nearly all John Hughes Films are all "high school movies". There will be many, many more that are interesting because the story is interesting. Saying "high school movies time has come and gone" is literally like saying "movies about the workplace" have come and gone.
movies about the workplace have come and gone. who can top Haiku Tunnel?
When I say "high school movies," I basically mean '80s high school movies. I honestly don't think you can make a Ferris Bueller or a Sixteen Candles today "unironically" -- or what have you. (Ironic is in, on the other hand -- see Superbad, Napoleon Dynamite, 21 Jump Street, Clueless.) High school as a setting isn't going away ever, though I wish we all could at least take a sabbatical in order to come up with some original plots. Transformers was sort of set in high school, at least the first one was. And so on. But high school as a memetic (keep in mind I originally mentioned the high school trope, not the high school movie; different animals -- realistically I know it won't vanish but I don't think we'll ever see the Porky's style again per se.
Garden State was basically Ferris Beuller's Day Off done for millenials. When you say "the high school trope" you're basically talking about "coming of age romances" which are not going to go away. I would argue that Boy's Town was as much a part of "the high school trope" as Breakfast Club and it was long enough ago that Mickey Rooney played a 15-year-old. You want original plots? Go watch Brick. Report back for science.
Yeah, I've seen Brick. Falls into the movies set around high school but not "high school movies" (coming of age romances, sure) category. It seems to me that what's largely replaced the sort of movie you mention is the mid-twenties rom-com, the Adam Sandler/Jennifer Aniston/Ashton Kutcher stuff. My main problem with arguing this is that I watch good movies almost exclusively. So my data set is incomplete.
3a) because the 18-24 market is far and away the most desirable to moviemakers
3b) because "high school" is the time when our emotions are at their most raw, our need to belong at its most acute and our sense of adventure as it relates to our personal lives at its most advanced
3c) because relationship movies about people who still make dumb mistakes and can't figure out that the girl likes them are easier to execute than relationship movies about people who have it all figured out. Breakfast Club was in development at the same time as The Big Chill and St. Elmo's Fire. The three movies are identical, for all intents and purposes - one deals with teenagers, one deals with 20-somethings, one deals with 30-somethings. The only difference between the movies are the problems faced by their protagonists - as they get older, their problems get more nuanced. The elephant that won't light up in shop class becomes dealing with coke-addled sheiks becomes getting your best friend to impregnate your wife because you can't conceive. Which of the three has the most fans? People are going to be making "movies about high school" until the sun is a cinder.
You know a lot more about this than I do, so let's move on to a new question -- have these coming-of-age high school movies gotten actively worse? In the late '70s/early '80s came most of the acknowledged classics of the genre (exceptions like Rebel without a Cause [or the period piece movie based loosely on A Tale of Two Cities the name of which escapes me] aside, this is when I would guess the concept of the "high school movie" came about?) So if high school coming of age romances are still being made, are they not being made well anymore? I'm not talking about Brick or Donnie Darko style, I'm talking about American Pie etc.
This will not be as short an answer as you might like. John Hughes was the king, no doubt about it. But you'll note - he wasn't making Porky's. He was making Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty In Pink and movies where they lead with heart and let the humor fill in around it. You could say the same about Goonies or Stand By Me - they're funny, but they aren't just funny. They're about people who care about each other and believe in things. They are not Animal House or Better Off Dead. Those movies do still exist, but they're less common. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a funny coming of age movie. It's also one of the first things written by Cameron Crowe, who also did Almost Famous. Almost Famous is a movie that cares about people and is a coming-of-age film (that is also about Led Zeppelin). It was not sold as a coming-of-age movie, though. Not really. Boys and Girls is also a coming-of-age movie. It's squarely in that "teen" "high school" territory - it's about college freshmen. Yet if you watch the trailers, they're trying to sell it like Porky's... or American Pie. And there's the trick. The genre was pretty much dead until American Pie came out, which was raunchy by any standard. So everyone attempted to remake American Pie. Even when what you had wasn't American Pie, you sold it as American Pie - 10 Things I Hate About You is The Taming of the Shrew. Legit. Straight up Shakespeare re-cast in High School. Yet watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWmjzCZr0Jw ...*American Pie.* It didn't take long for people to decide that, rather than pretending their movies were American Pie, they might as well make them American Pie. Because raunch sells. Consider: Judd Apatow really broke out with Freaks and Geeks, perhaps the most heart-filled "coming-of-age" TV show in a generation. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It legitimately leaves My So-Called Life in the dust. But it lasted one season and was cancelled. From there, he went raunchier, but with still a little heart - he made The 40-year-old Virgin. From there, it just got raunchier - Knocked Up. Pineapple Express. Dewey Cox. All the heart went out of it, and into that void jumped fucking TWILIGHT. So now your teen coming-of-age movies are at a nadir. It'll get better. But yeah. There's a cycle to everything. One of my friends pointed out that the landscape is ripe for a decent, well-written, well-acted, well-directed romantic comedy because we haven't had one in almost a decade. It's all The Hangover and Bridesmaids and other crass bullshit that is completely without any heart. The most romantic film we've had in forever is Sideways and even that gets fucked up by Paul Giamatti not being gay.
You know, for someone my age or a bit younger, it's almost impossible to imagine good romantic comedies coming out on a semi-regular basis. There just hasn't been one since I've been cognizant of movies. I mean, audiences actually put effort into enjoying 50 First Dates and Hitch for that very reason. They desperately wanted to meet the genre halfway. Zooey Deschanel breaks hearts and sells movies/shows/albums because her life seems like some kind of rom-com. What a joke. Give me another Intolerable Cruelty at the very least, which is clever in a sort of obvious way. Give me Clueless. It's a crying shame, because romantic comedies are "easy listening" in a way not approached by anything currently except the vapid Marvel movies. A good romantic comedy has staying power. /opinion or whatever. I just like smart movies and lately films have to pick only two out of romance, comedy and intelligence.There's a cycle to everything. One of my friends pointed out that the landscape is ripe for a decent, well-written, well-acted, well-directed romantic comedy because we haven't had one in almost a decade. It's all The Hangover and Bridesmaids and other crass bullshit that is completely without any heart.
A guess: Rom coms can't be "event" movies. They aren't "must sees." Now that the average movie release, with P&A, costs $100m, there isn't any way to get people to go out to see a movie that isn't a "must see." You can make a $150m sci fi epic that everybody has to go see. You just can't make a $150m romcom. Something I've been dealing with personally is the propagation of tiny little movies that just go directly to Netflix. I think we'll see more of that as the studio system continues to lock out anything that isn't a nine-figure pre-existing property. It'll be a while, though; it's really tough to make a decent movie for under $300k of a quality that will be accepted by the average audience.
It's happening with tv shows, so I assume movies are next -- but I don't know how the money works there. I mean, what do a few episodes of Arrested Development cost compared to an independent film? What exactly can Netflix afford? Not a movie with George Clooney in it, surely. And until then it'll be a limited market. (Hell, maybe Netflix can afford that shit -- I saw a statistic bandied about a while ago that claimed that any given evening X percentage of bandwidth is being used on Netflix streaming, and it was an insane number.)Something I've been dealing with personally is the propagation of tiny little movies that just go directly to Netflix.
It's nothing compared to porn and spam. Netflix's bandwidth is high, but considering their traffic rides on Amazon's servers, it's hard to say for sure. As to the rest of it, read this.
For the record, Porky's was brought in to this conversation by me. I want to make it clear that my point was that Porky's was a T&A franchise, much like American Pie. These types of movies aren't going anywhere. Thoughtful coming of age movies like Sixteen Candles aren't going anywhere either. But I was not comparing Porky's to this genre.