Thursday Movie Picks - College Movies

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through The Shelves. Join us by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and saying a bit about them - it's fun! Promise.

COLLEGE!!!!!

Sorry, guys, I'm just back from a long weekend in the woods off the grid and I had such an amazing experience that I'm not quite ready to come back to the land of the living yet. So we're gonna do this quick and dirty style.

Pitch Perfect (Jason Moore, 2012) Fat Amy is a legend, and even now none of us are ready for that jelly. Best college movie in YEARS.

The Rules of Attraction (Roger Avary, 2002) I love every second of this angry, energetic, playful mess of a movie. It's a blast of fresh air every time I watch it, despite Bret Easton Ellis's nihilism. My college experience was nothing like this, but this movie still FEELS like college to me.

Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997) How this movie ended up being even half as good as it is given the production history (the script was one of the first victims of an internet leak, prompting instant, on-set rewrites and multiple versions), I'll never know. But it's pretty damn great. Maybe even as great as the original Scream, only one of the greatest horror films ever made. Neve Campbell's Sidney Prescott is now in college, and the movie about the events of the first film has prompted a string of copycat killings. Can she and her friends survive? It's a horror movie sequel. What do you think?

Thursday Movie Picks - Summer Camp

Written as part of the weekly blogathon hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves. Come and join the fun by picking three movies that fit the week's theme and saying a bit about them!

It's summertime, y'all! And you know what that means....

SUMMER CAMP!

For two summers when I was a teenager (plus a third which was spent abroad with the same kids), I went to sleepaway camp, and I can honestly say they were formative summers for me. That was when I finally started to "come into my own", and it might have taken a stronger hold if the friends I made at camp hadn't lived so far away. I still remember practically every bit of those summers even now so many years later, mostly with fondness.

Which is more than the kids in these movies can probably say...

Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1993) I really can't with how brilliantly funny this film is. I love the first Addams Family movie a lot, but this is the rare great sequel that works precisely because it dials everything great about the first one up to eleven. Paul Rudnick's script is chock full of gags and laugh lines, and the entire cast is gold. None more so than Joan Cusack as the demonically nice "Black Widow" who sets her sights on Uncle Fester, and of course Christina Ricci, who is so brilliant as Wednesday that I knew even as a nine year-old when this came out that she was a great actress. The scenes at the moronically chipper summer camp are for the ages.

Camp (Todd Graff, 2003) I will say this about Camp: This is a movie that, on paper, I should love. I mean, the whole thing is about a musical theater camp and it deals with issues of sexuality that would naturally arise in such a setting, and deals with them in very adult ways. But I don't. Something about it never quite comes together for me... maybe too much of it is too obvious? Maybe too many of the actors are too green? I don't know. But the musical numbers are pretty damn good, and Anna Kendrick is KILLER as the (probably criminally) insane Fritzi, delivering a ridiculously age-inappropriate, unbelievably good "The Ladies Who Lunch". Basically, when Camp is good, it's VERY good, but when it's not, it's terrible.

Stage Fright (Jerome Sable, 2014) I know what you're thinking: A musical comedy slasher flick? That sounds AWFUL! And make no mistake: Stage Fright is so bad it's AWESOME. The musical numbers are (mostly) a blast, the acting is 80s-slasher-flick level bad, and the whole thing approaches a level of camp not usually seen in a horror film (let alone most modern movie musicals). Above all, this is a movie that knows it's pretty bad, and has a LOT of fun with that. It should be a guilty pleasure, but I don't feel guilty about liking this one at all.

A Tale of Two Sequels

The summer of 2015 saw the release of two sequels to films not many people expected to be huge hits, and which couldn't possibly be more different from each other: the a capella comedy Pitch Perfect and the Steven Soderbergh-directed Channing Tatum male stripper flick Magic Mike. It's strange that there was a time when people were worried about these films being successful, especially since both had low budgets and positive word of mouth to go along with the fact that they were both actually great movies, in their own way.

Pitch Perfect is a perfect specimen of an 00s teen comedy - endlessly quotable with a cast of breakout characters/actors, and memorable scene after memorable scene after memorable scene. Plus, a performance element that allows for a pretty stellar soundtrack (and surprise Billboard hit!). Magic Mike, meanwhile, succeeds largely because when you say "Channing Tatum stripper movie", even with the appended "directed by Steven Soderbergh", you would never in a million years think of anything that resembles what the movie actually is: Smart, sophisticated, and relatively low-key, with revelatory performances from Tatum and Matthew McConnaughey.

So I guess it makes perfect sense that their sequels are, respectively, a pale photocopy of the original and a complete and total surprise in how it flips the script on the original.

Does anyone know what film set the template that Pitch Perfect 2 follows? You know, the plot in which our heroes get thrust onto an international stage where they get too big for their britches and are beat down by hardcore European perfection before rallying using good old-fashioned American pluck and ingenuity. It's a well-worn sequel plot by now, and this isn't a particularly good version of it: Due to the arcane a capella competition rules, the Barden Bellas are stripped of their championship promotional tour after a Fat Amy-led wardrobe malfunction happened on a national stage in front of the President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama. The tour is filled by the reigning World Champions, a German group named Das Sound Machine. But the Bellas are still able to perform at the World Championships, and if they win, they aren't disgraced former champions anymore. Or something.

Elizabeth Banks directs Pitch Perfect 2 after having produced the first one, and Kay Cannon is back on scripting duties - if you can even call it that. This sequel is slavishly devoted to the original, right down to the placement of plot/character beats and specific jokes. And when brazenly calling for comparison in that way, it comes up severely lacking. BUT, individual moments do land - Rebel Wilson and Hana Mae Lee are still hilarious, the riff-off is still absurdly clever fun, and a mid-film group sing-along to "When I'm Gone" (in the place of the first film's "Party in the USA") is very affecting. But the original Pitch Perfect was a film that was so much fun it practically demanded several viewings. While it's clear that everyone involved in making Pitch Perfect 2 had lots of fun doing so, I can't say that I had much of any fun watching it. Still, the Bellas sound amazing singing Jessie J's "Flashlight", so I guess it was all worth it?

Magic Mike XXL, on the other hand, is a shockingly great sequel in that it makes me want not only another sequel, but a prequel as well. Most of the "Cock-Rockin' Kings of Tampa" were mere sketches in the original Magic Mike, but here they all come into view in ways both small and large that make me want to know more. And that's before we get to the HOT AS FUCK dancing. And Jada Pinkett-Smith as the world's greatest hype (wo)man. And Andie McDowell's one scene wonder. And Matt Bomer singing D'Angelo's "Untitled (How Does It Feel)" (SWOON).

Magically, XXL feels totally of a piece with the original film despite being completely different in tone and overall feel. Nothing here is as brilliant as the sequence in Magic Mike where Cody Horn's Brooke first watches Mike in his element, but well, not many films do. And the sequel more than makes up for it in sheer entertainment value. I certainly laughed much more during this than I ever did in the original. That said, though, when it comes to the sex, Magic Mike XXL was perhaps a misleading title. The film is certainly bigger, but whereas the first film proudly put all the goods out on display, in this one there is a marked decrease in the amount of bare ass. There's much more of a focus on strippers as "male entertainers" that empower women in some way, which feels a bit inauthentic, at least to these characters as we knew them in the first film. But then, the growth of these characters is a big part of the film, and they have always been slightly (self-)delusional about their position within their profession. So why am I complaining? Well, because Magic Mike XXL is good enough where I have to nitpick in order to come up with any criticism.