Category Archives: WATCHING MOVIES WITH EMMA

Watching Movies with Emma: The Edge

Posted on by

My 13 year-old daughter indulges my strange movie-watching habits. For instance, I almost always choose a movie I’ve seen and liked over one I’ve never seen. And I often watch the same movie over and over again until I know all of the dialogue. One such film of these is The Edge. It’s written by David Mamet and stars Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins. Every line of dialogue in this thing is brilliant. It’s hard to pick my favorite scene because they’re all good. I even like the cheesy death-by-bear scenes. But when Hopkins and Baldwin speak to each other that’s when it is at its absolute best.

Like this whole bit:

And this….you just have to excuse the bearskin outfits.

Whenever The Edge is on TV I almost always watch it, which means I’ve seen it at least 20 or 30 times. My daughter Emma has also now seen it several times and can quote lines of dialogue from it, “never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.” And “What one man can do another can do.” I try to impart upon her the importance of great dialogue. I am hoping she learns to love Mamet as I do, even if he became a conservative.

“Our Love is God. Let’s Go Get a Slushy”

Posted on by

It has been a while since I’ve seen Heathers. There have been a few “burn down the high school” about girls since then, Juno and Mean Girls to name two. It seems like this young generation, though, doesn’t know or remember Heathers, which is too bad. It seems to have been born out of a time when things when dark humor was appreciated and welcomed. Now, it’s so easy to offend, so hard to go dark.

I showed my almost-13 year-old daughter Emma Heathers. And yes, while it has lines like “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” it is pitch-perfect in its tone, sarcastic, deep, right-on and funny as hell. My daughter was hooked immediately. Now all she can talk about is Heathers, Heathers, Heathers. She appreciated the elfin charm of Christian Slater (someday I will show her True Romance but not quite yet) and found in Ryder’s character a funny, smart, interesting, strong, rebellious HERO.

Love the shoulder pads, bulimia jokes, scrunchies, Swatches, busy eyebrows, The Limited, the constant repetition of “Oh the humanity!”

Heathers is about the horrors of high school, popular girls, yes. It is also about Winona as ballsy heroine out to make the world better – we need more Veronicas out there in high school land. First, she hooks up with a bad boy whom she cannot resist. Then people start dying, “my teen angst has a body count.” You don’t think they’re actually going to die but they really do start dying. That’s what is so funny, and so unusual about it.

Another reason people don’t revisit Heathers, probably, was untimely end to Winona Ryder’s career, which is hopefully back on track with her appearance as the aging dancer in Black Swan. But when Heathers came out, Winona was the IT girl. She seemed to have it all — and whatever it was she had was sucked up and owned by Julia Roberts a short while later — she looked like a pinup girl but talked like a boy. I guess that is what is meant by having it all. In the movies, anyway. For starlets anyway.

According to Ryder, there may be a Heathers sequel in the works — sounds like a weird idea but if it brings newer, younger peeps to revisit the original Heathers, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Seems to me it’s not unlike Mean Girls, though, only without the murder and mayhem. Heathers took no prisoners. It didn’t try to be PC or worry about offending whole groups of people. Mean Girls, as funny as it is, want to be too nice to everyone. And that is really what the transition from the 1980s to the 2000s has been about: not offending.

I hope they make Heathers into a Broadway musical, if they haven’t done it already.

Watching Movie with Emma: Mean Girls

Posted on by

Every mother of a 12 year old girl should sit down and watch Mean Girls. It is the fictional representation of the great book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by way of Tina Fey, who morphed it into a really funny, penetrating movie.

Mean Girls doesn’t preach hatin’. In fact, it does anything but – it even sympathizes with the mean girls rather than indulge some of our need to take down the pretty and popular girls. All the same, there are mean girls in high school. It is just the way things are. Boys are silly and immature and girls tend to get mean. This meanness isn’t something they understand. But it is there. It is partly the power that comes along with being really beautiful. In the teenage world, being pretty elevates you to the top of the tribe. Having eyes on you, girls copying you, boys drooling over you – you have to hold back or else everyone would want everything you have.

Nonetheless, there really is no excuse most of the time for how mean girls can be. Mean Girls takes this on by having its heroine, Katy (Lindsay Lohan), go from being an innocent homeschool kid morphed into a “plastic,” one of the “popular” girls. She discovers how easy it is to become one of them.

By the end of the film, though, there is much understanding. The bad girls take responsibility for how mean they’ve been, and Katy realizes that being herself is the better road.

All in all, a great way to send my daughter into 7th grade.

The acting is perfect across the board. It’s interesting to see how Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried launched soaring careers after this film. Lindsay Lohan had it all. But she steered that car right into a tree. And poor Gretchen Weiners. Things didn’t take off for her.

Watching Movies with Emma: The Breakfast Club

Posted on by

When the Breakfast Club first came out, I was a teenager myself. I was just a year or two out of high school. I don’t even remember where I was or what I was doing. I probably was commuting to Santa Barbara, attending the city college up there, and had some involvement with a theater group. I remember this because I was given an assistant director position and quickly began dating the lead actor. The play had something to do with Henry David Thoreau. This is neither here nor there except that I vividly remember no being pretty enough to be cast as either of the two lead. One of the actresses who was pretty enough, told me she’d been trained at the Los Angeles Theater Academy. Not too long after my relationship with that actor ended (how could it go? I was 19, he was 31), I fled to Los Angeles to attend the Theater Academy. Much fun, that. But that is a story for another day.

I remember The Breakfast Club not being a very cool film to like. If you hung out with my crowd, John Hughes was lame and the Brat Pack were a group of entitled, talentless hacks. The worst of the bunch, to us, was Ally Sheedy. For some reason, she was the object of our scorn. We didn’t like the character she played in the film, none of it rang true at all. The only slight uptick from the film for us was Judd Nelson, the object of our young girl fantasies.

Continue reading →

Watching Movies with Emma: The Bad News Bears

Posted on by

When did the message stop being, “it’s not whether you win or lose it’s how you play the game” and turn into “everybody’s a winner”? I’ll tell you when. When money started being the primary reason for making kids films at all. They have become so narrowly focused grouped, so formulaic that a hard lesson, like the one learned in the Bad News Bears, would be deemed a “bummer ending” today. And it would probably never get made (even if it did get made into a respectable remake with the Billy Bob).

Continue reading →