I am coming up on my 10 year high school reunion...I feel old!
For one reason or another I only became a huge fan of Animal House about 5 years ago. I never quite caught onto the hype of it all when I saw it for the first time about 17 years ago. I am going to be 31 in a few months and have seen both movies...let me put it this way...Will Ferrell is hilarious and so is the movie.
But nothing...and I mean nothing that has come out in the last 10 years can compare to Animal House...and yes that goes for the American Pie trilogy which is funny as hell too. There is just something about the dialouge in AH that is timeless and movies like that and Blazing Saddles could never be made today because of the PC police in this nation.
"True love is hard to find, sometimes you think you have true love and then you catch the early flight home from San Diego and a couple of nude people jump out of your bathroom blindfolded like a goddamn magic show ready to double team your girlfriend..." -Mitch Martin
Yet, this article illustrates well why he's of little consequence or interest.
Animal House or Old School?
I absolutely loved Old School. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that movie. I laugh so hard that I cry everytime I hear that Wedding Singer do his rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart. Priceless!
There was a great list making the rounds a few years ago that reaallly made feel creaky. It including things like "skates have always been inline" and the "no idea what a broken record is" reference.
I'll have to go find it....
I know several comic book fans that said that they could have written most of it. And, of course, one noted that the piece was even funnier if you read it using the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.
TS
"Kids going to college this fall were born the year I graduated from high school. Which means that I was going to bars three years before they were born."
So, this guy was going to bars when he was a sophomore in high school? And this guy is only a couple of years older than me, since the kids who were born when I graduated high school are getting their drivers' licenses now. I don't remember it being legal to go to a bar at the age of 14-15 back in the '80s.
I was born in 1963, four months and 10 days before Kennedy was killed. I also spent several years as an arts & entertainment reporter, and got to meet and interview a lot of famous people.
Here's when I started to feel old(and this was nearly 10 years ago) I was trying to explain to my class how to do face-to-face interviews, including preparing for, conducting and following up. I told the students that interviewing often required you to think on your feet and ignore what you had prepared to ask, primarily because you never know what the interviewee might say. I used an example from when I had got a last second opportunity to interview Mick Jagger when he was in town as part of the Steel Wheels tour.
One student raised her hand: "Who's Mick Jagger?"
I tried to keep the look of astonishment off my face, but I said, "Mick Jagger? The Lead Singer for the Rolling Stones?"
"Who are the Rolling Stones?"
I should have stopped at this point, but went on: "Rolling Stones...part of the British Invasion..came to the US a few years after the Beatles..."
"Who are the Beatles?"
Granted, this was not a pupular culture class, but I was amazed that anyone in the United States would not know who the Beatles were.
"Old School" was just another lame attempt by Hollywood to produce a college comedy that rivalled "Animal House". It follows up on other wannabe flicks such as "Road Trip" and "Van Wilder" (which was even produced by National Lampoon). Other films from the 80's such as "Real Genius" and "Revenge of the Nerds" also aspired to the level of Bluto and D-Day. These films failed because their basic "Animal House" plots (a group of social misfits taking on the collegiate establishment and winning) applies to the 60's and not to today. The story line of a binge drinking fraternity trying to gain acceptance in college isn't funny becaue binge drinking fraternities no longer dominate the social scene at major universities. They are there, but their members are outnumbered by the students who are not interested in binge drinking fraternities (or sororities). Likewise, spoofing dorm life doesn't work anymore because more and more freshmen live in off campus apartments or modern campus suites.
A good plot line for a modern college comedy would deal with a group of friends trying to navigate the immense beaurocracy to register for classes and graduate. "Road Trip" comes closest to this, but it still doesn't come all the way.
How times change.
Bbwwuuahahahaha!!! I love that guy! Best one-liner in any movie, EVER!
(She's a cutie-pie, too!) ;-)
I have no great profundity to offer ("as if you ever do, jack**s" — quoth the Couch). But I think this is a particularly important perspective for conservatives to keep in mind, if not necessarily to obsess about. As the party that believes human nature has no history and the holder that certain truths remain immutable, it's useful to realize how fast the world is changing before our eyes. This is a very old theme of mine — that technological changes pose a constant threat to the conservative project even as conservatives shouldn't be ideologically anti-technology. Cars, the birth control pill, the Internet, and television have all done more to dissolve the iron chains of community and tradition than most of the acidic ideas of dangerous philosophers.What can conservatives do about this? Well, a lot and nothing. We cannot and should not adopt some sort of anti-change platform. This isn't to say I'm always pro-change, but conservatives are also realists and we should know that change can't be stopped. And spare me references to the Buckleyite proposition that conservatives must stand athwart history yelling "Stop!" I agree with that, but the context of that statement was narrow and historically contingent on the proposition that the Soviets were eating our lunch. After all, William F. Buckley has spent his entire life yelling stop so he could change things, not so that he could freeze them. What we can do is what we've always done. Recognize and point out that change and progress are not synonymous, that materialistic advances are often merely a changing of the garb of humanity and not a change of humanity itself and, of course, that anyone who thinks Old School is superior to Animal House needs his head flushed.
SAY LOUD: "Progressives" aren't for progress; they are for socialism
The Amish are not "anti-technology" because technology is "inherently wrong", they are against adopting most of these devices because the question comes, "where do you draw the line?"
Something to note with all of this discussion of "looking back" in time is that largely the history of post-WWII America has been written by the left. That is a HUGE chuck of societal change and lets them dominate the social agenda. How will school texts handle the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the 2000 election hassle, or even the "issues" of the 2004 election? Should more focus be put on the irregularities in the 1960 election? Should students learn of "box 13" that put future preseident LBJ in Congress?
Should Senator Joseph McCarthy's history be clarified? "The Crucible" was written before "McCarthyism" (or to put it another way, McCarthyism came before McCarthy). Should we now be teaching students about the left wing Pravda like propaganda machine? Zogbyism tried to sway an election with bogus poll numbers and forged documents and forged abuse photos. The funniest joke of the 2004 election is that some on the left tried to say that the election was "stolen" because the poll numbers showed that Kerry would win; they believed their own BS. When you cook the books, ALWAYS keep a set of the real numbers so that you know how much you stole.
Whenever I go to clubs these days and see the kids bumping and grinding on the dance floor, I feel like an old man (I was born in 1976, btw). To think these kids missed on on Family Ties (Michael J. Fox as a sex symbol?), Parachute Pants, and Pac Man. ;-)Yeah, but they get to do dances that even I often say look like dogs [bleep]ing. I card people that were born in '76...LOL.
-Eric