THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2002
FILM
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 5
School-spoofing movies help beat stress
As the semester approaches its end and professors pile on projects and finals, few things are greater stress-relievers than a good movie. And what better way to forget about school than watching a flick that replicates, mocks or exaggerates the high school and college experiences? So for some stress relief, try watching these movies — the best school movies as chosen by journalism students in an opinion & commentary class.
National Lampoon's Animal House By Cal Creek
Over quoted? Definitely. Overplayed? Possibly. Overrated? Never.
1978's Animal House might seem like a trite, ridiculous sex comedy with jokes and actors that went out with the mid-'80s. But, had there been no Animal House there would have been no Road Trip, no PCU, no Porky's — although that might
have been for the better — and no American Pie.
Animal House was one of the first movies to reflect the lives of students outside the classroom, to portray students as people with vices and downfalls. It was the first movie to feature a grown man spitting a mouthful full of cottage cheese all over a cafeteria.
The story is pretty simple. Larry Kroger, played by Amadeus' Thomas Hulce, and his roommate, Kent Dorfman, played by Class Reunion's Stephen Furst, are freshmen at the fictitious Faber College in 1962.
The movie opens with the guys trying to join a fraternity. They quickly find that the only fraternity that will accept them is the Delta House, the worst house on campus. Through the Delta House, the guys meet a variety of over-the-top, almost cartoonlike characters.
There's rush chairman Eric Stratton, played by The West Wing's Tim Matheson; his best friend, Donald "Boon" Schoenstein, played by The Mask's Peter Riegert; and the disgustingly hilarious John "Bluto" Blutarsky, played by the greatest fat man of comedy, John Belushi.
The Delta house has rivals in the strictly upper-class Anglo-saxon Omega house. The dean of the school, Vernon Wormer, played by Airplane II's John Vernon, looks for an opportunity to kick the guys out of school.
Less concerned with life in school so much as the social life of school, Animal House has proven itself through time, as an outrageous screwball comedy with just a touch of real emotion.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off By Laurie Harrison
Judging by its title, Ferris Bueller's Day Off may not seem like a school film. But the movie is all about school: skipping school, manipulating the school system and living life outside school. During the
movie, Bueller does all this and then some.
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Matthew Broderick shines as high school senior Ferris Bueller, who skips school one day to see the sights in Chicago with his best friend and girlfriend. Thirteen years before his brilliant performance playing the scheming, cheating high school civics teacher in 1999's dark comedy Election,Broderick plays a scheming,cheating,yet lovable high school student.
The movie mixes comedy with drama, provided by Bueller's angst-ridden best friend, Cameron Frye. Frye is played by Alan Ruck, best known for his recent stint as Stuart Bondek on the ABC comedy, Spin City. Frye's torment and pain over a father who loves his Ferrari more than his son provide the movie with its most touching moments.
Mia Sara plays Bueller's cool-underpressure girlfriend, whom Bueller is sure he'll marry someday.
Bueller's charm and spontaneous personality win over his parents, teachers and classmates. They believe this habitual truant is truly sick, despite the fact that he has been absent nine times his senior year.
Viewers can easily relate to Bueller's need to escape the dreary halls of high school and its dull teachers like those played by Ben Stein.
The freshmen even start a "Save Ferris Bueller Fund" for a new kidney, the English department sends flowers and delivers a prostitute to his doorstep, and "Save Ferris" gets plastered on his Chicago suburb's water tower.
The comedy is written and directed by John Hughes, the man responsible for documenting the angst of 1980s teenagers in movies such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High By Sarah Hill
Some school-based movies make people remember the fun times they had in school. Fast Times at Ridgemont High can fulfill the same function and remind adults or even those just out of high school about the growing pains of getting through high school.
Fast Times, set in southern California, is a classic coming-of-age story that describes in exact details the high school time when teenagers magically turn into adults.
Audiences can thank
author Cameron Crowe, who also wrote and directed Almost Famous, for his researching skills. Crowe spent time at a high school in California shadowing students and wrote the novel — and later the screenplay — based on his experiences.
Crowe's teenagers and their environment are true to form.
With the exception of a few brief appearances of parents, the only authority figures in the film are teachers and guidance counselors.
When they're not at school, these teenagers hang out at the mall, languish at their minimum-wage jobs, most of them in the mall, and display all the elements people remember about 1980s pop culture: big hair, music made by people with big hair and a generation of kids left largely to their own devices.
The plot is simple yet full of action. A few weeks in the lives of these teenagers whose characters are developed chronologically, provides enough story development and resolution to leave viewers with a sense that something was accomplished during the movie.
Don't watch Fast Times to relive the high-school days of yesterday. Watch the film to reflect on what it's like to grow up. Then, be thankful those years are far behind.
The Breakfast Club By Jenna Goepfert
In high school, life is often about seeing people in the simplest terms, by conventional definitions — brain, jock, basket case, princess and criminal.
But as king of '80s teen movies, director John Hughes saw the similarities people shared and never pigeonholed his predominantly teenage audiences into those terms.
The Breakfast Club came at the height of the Brat Pack and more than a decade before today's era of American Pie and teen gross-out comedies.
And although the
And although the movie is often predictable, it's effective because it's emotionally true.
The Breakfast Club is a dialogue-driven comedy/drama about five seemingly drastically different high school students sentenced to serve nine hours of Saturday detention. As the group spends a day together at the library of a Sherman, Ill., high school, each member's glaringly apparent, traditional stereotype begins to break down.
Andrew Clark, a then-22-year-old Emilio Estevez, is a star wrestler who's high up on the social spectrum.
He's driven to succeed by his father, who is pressuring him to get a college scholarship.
Molly Ringwald, who stars in her third Hughes film, is spoiled, popular Claire Standish, who struggles with the pressures of her parents' divorce and the demands of peer pressure from the crowd.
A 24-year-old Judd Nelson is a bit of a stretch playing young high school rebel John Bender, an overlydefensive, insecure punk trying to earn his family's acceptance.
Brian Johnson - played by puny Anthony Michael Hall, a Hughes film regular after playing Farmer Ted in Pretty in Pink - is a late-blooming geek who's feeling pressure to succeed academically.
Ally Sheedy's character, Allison Reynolds, is an unbalanced outsider and pathological liar.
Although her issues and motivations are never resolved for the audience, she fills the role as token high school outcast.
The group accepts one another's jeers, taunts and insults at first, but as the commonalities of the pressures of high school life and teenage angst come to the surface, the teens set aside intolerance and judgments, laugh together, cry together, smoke pot and learn something about one another.
They accept the possibility that the everyday pressures they face won't guarantee that the friendships they're forming will last any longer than the nine hours they spend together.
— Goeppfert is a Kansan staff writer