twoply said:
klezmer electro-thug beats said:
I read a big article about Robert Altman's insane attempt at satirizing the teen movie genre, O.C. and Stiggs. I loved it as a teenager and it still holds up to me. When it was made it got shelved for three years and released for one week to DOGSHIT reviews at the time, but I think it was light years ahead of every other 80s comedy. It's almost nihilistic, and every character is somehow simultaneously three dimensional but also aimless and empty in the way that as a kid I was starting to see white middle class America as. Phony, I guess you'd say, if you were into Catcher in the Rye. But yeah, the movie took aim HARD at that culture and its main characters were chaotic balls of calculating rebellion against it. While the movie's probably a failure to most people, to me, it's like a rough proof of the potential that teen movies had to go beyond like, will she get a date or will he make the football team or whatever. It's a satirical hallucination of upper middle class suburbia like you can't make in Hollywood now, and barely could even then.
I dunno, even though it's dumb and weird, it's kinda better than all the 80s teen shit that made it into the canon.
I found a copy of this last summer and had to try three times to get all the way through. The soundtrack and cameos are worth sticking it through for, but it's clunky. I watched part of an interview with Altman where he talks about being asked to do a teen comedy and how he attempted to lampoon the genre itself, but I think the studio tried to undo all of that with the cut that released.
Yeah, I mean no question it's a failure of a movie by all the normal measures. I still think it rules though, for capturing what it does.
The original issue of National Lampoon that it was based on was waaaay more mean-spirited and nihilistic, and you kind of get that this was a watering-down of a watering-down of something that would've been kind of horrific to adapt to film faithfully.