Note! This blogpost was taken from my Substack. I plan to just do blogs *here* from now on, but this guy was sort of a testing ground for porting content over. That has no relation to the contents of the actual post, but, well, I put the time into doing it, so you're going to put the time into knowing it happened.
Okay! On with the original post:
Alex Goes To The Movies
Or, a bitter rom com, a coming of age flick, and a school shooting.
I spend a lot of time on YouTube. A genuinely concerning amount.
It’s the first app I open when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I hear as my provider of background noise for me to asleep to. I’ve been on a mission recently to purge as much social media as possible from my usage (he says, writing on Substack) however. A few months ago I deactivated my Twitter account, and completely stopped using Reddit; I realized I was spending most of my time getting mad at random people I never meet (and were more likely than not, an AI agent designed to farm engagement).
In my mind, it’s all about information retainment. If I listen to a song on shuffle and I completely tune it out, did I even listen to that song at all? Well, watching YouTube, I wasn’t retaining anything. Do I enjoy watching someone go through and rank every episode of The Simpsons in chronological order? Yeah. Is that in any way enriching my brain? Probably not. That seven hours listening to someone talk about a cartoon from the 90s could be better spent just watching the frickin cartoon from the 90s.
This all culminated a few weeks back. One night, I was fed up. It was 10:14pm, and I had a few options. I could try and get some work done on BLIGHTWRECK, The Scheme (more to come on that, stay tuned), any number of musical projects I’m currently tied to, or, more realistically, I’d stare at my monitor and do nothing for 10 minutes before switching to YouTube. Feeling done with the vortex, I declared to myself that I was going to turn my laptop off and go consume some long form media! So, I ran upstairs, brewed a cup of tea, sat down, and queued up some movies.
High Fidelity
My household is a very pro “John Cusack” environment. Star of classics like Say Anything, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Hot Tub Time Machine (a movie that is significantly better than it has any right to be), Cusack is best known by me as the guy my Dad wanted to play him in a Go Four 3 bio pic (until Cusack got too old).
Disk Jockey!
High Fidelity is an interesting blend of bitter and sappy. Cusack plays Rob Gordon, the owner of a record store, who’s latest break up drives him to look back on all his previous relationships to find out what went wrong. The needle drops are great, and it’s fun to watch a bunch of music geeks nerd out (no weezer mentions, frustratingly), but where this movie really shines is it’s snappy dialogue. Friends fight, break ups are ugly, and the romantic chemistry in the film is sweet without feeling sickly. The dialogue has a real sense of authenticity to it, striking a great balance between weighty monologues and sharp quips.
The screenplay was adapted fairly directly (baring the location changing from Manchester to Chicago, a decision my Dad still hasn’t forgiven) from a novel of the same name. Cusack monologues at length to camera, which gives him plenty of opportunities to deliver great monologues. Significant screen time is given to the meaning of someone saying they “Haven’t seen Evil Dead 2 yet”, which while hilarious to watch, never comes at the expense of the drama. The banter between Cusack and his co stars Jack Black and Todd Louiso is excellent; all of them inhabiting their characters beautifully.
One of the funniest scenes in the movie, Cusack stares down the self help guru who his ex-girlfriend is sleeping with. A great example of how exercising restraint earlier in a screenplay can pay off when things go really off the rails.
I’m hesitant to even call this movie a romcom. There is romance, and there is comedy, but the lens High Fidelity filters this through is so incredibly bitter that it sucks the sappiness out entirely. Refreshingly, Rob stays an asshole throughout the entire film’s runtime, and while most of the characters go through some sort of arc, their rougher edges aren’t completely sanded down by the time the credits roll. If you’re looking for a beautifully shot hilarious film that isn’t afraid to pull it’s punches, High Fidelity is a great time.
The Breakfast Club
Don’t You Forget About Me by Simple Minds is the needle drop that opens and closes this film, and one of the songs I need to learn before my gig later tonight! Made by Ferris Bueller’s Day Off writer/director John Hughes, it follows five students who are stuck in a day long Saturday detention, and inevitably get up to various hijinx.
A delinquent, a jock, a goth, a prom queen, and a geek. Surely their differences will keep them separated, and four of the five won’t end up in a romantic coupling!
There’s been a lot of complaining about the “Marvelfication” of dialogue in movies and games in the past 10 years or so. Characters dodging death by the skin of their teeth and following it up with, “Well, THAT just happened!”. And you know what? Yeah! It fucking sucks! I miss when serious moments weren’t always undercut with a joke, and The Breakfast Club strikes a great balance between insightful monologues and teens sounding like actual teens.
I wasn’t alive in the 1980s, so I can’t comment as to how accurate any of this was at the time, but these characters feel like actual teenagers. They swear, call each other slurs, and don’t hesitate to absolutely tear into each other. The friendship they walk away from by the end of their detention feels (mostly) earned; the movie even directly tackles the absurdity of one day together in detention completely changing their lives.
The gang smoke a bunch of pot and call each other posers.
The Breakfast Club isn’t perfect. The famous misstep of the goth girl being de-Robert Smithed is pretty well known, and the ending wrapping things up in a slightly-too-neat bow with some bizarre romantic pairings, but I can forgive its missteps because the relationships between the characters and dialogue are just that compelling. Even the film’s villain gets something of an arc, though its kind of left up to interpretation if it’ll stick.
While not perfect, it was delightful to watch a drama that wasn’t needlessly depressing or dark. The film’s colour palette is delightful, the music choices, while undeniably period, set the tone perfectly, and sometimes it’s just nice to watch a bunch of characters give interesting monologues, ya know?
I was going to go out partying after a night at Shameful Tiki, but my tummy hurt so I went home and downed a bottle of cider instead. Fantastic evening.
It might’ve helped that I was absolutely hammered out of my mind watching this, but I like to think I’d have enjoyed it either way.
The Dirties
This movie is very much the odd one out here.
An independent feature created by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson (Nirvanna The Band The Show, Operation Avalanche, Blackberry), The Dirties is a simultaneously hilarious and absolutely soul-crushing film about a school shooting.
Matt Johnson, the film’s co-star, and director. He’s just here for the bad guys.
In an interview, Johnson mentioned how he likes to make movies that “trick you into giving a shit about them”. The film looks amateurish, by part out of necessity (it was made on a budget of $10,000) and by part by design. Filmed entirely with two handheld cameras and wireless mics, it follows Matt and Owen, two film students who try to make a movie called The Dirties about the kids at their school who bully them. A rift starts to form between Matt and Owen as the film goes on, when Matt starts to take things a bit too far.
Matt and Owen line up a shot. “Aim for his balls!”
This movie was largely shot in actual high schools, with most of the students there being completely unaware who was and wasn’t part of the crew, and what the movie they were actually going to be in was. I’ve talked a lot about how the last two films had dialogue that felt natural, but The Dirties wins this by a massive margin, simply because most people in the movie aren’t aware they’re in a movie.
It’s certainly rough around the edges. Some scenes so perfectly portray social awkwardness that it’s near impossible to watch, but the film’s slow, unnerving escalation inspired a real feeling of dread I’ve never experienced when watching a movie before. I’m not sure if I’d recommend the dirties to everyone, but if you’ve got the stomach for it, it’s an amazing watch, both for its storytelling and the fact that it exists at all.
What now?
This post was about movies, but give me a moment to stand up on my soapbox and encourage everyone reading this to adopt some behavioural change.
I cut Twitter and Reddit out of my daily diet a few months ago, and my mental health has improved spectacularly. I would argue that YouTube is not as harmful for my mental health as those two, but it was equally, if not worse, for sucking up my free time. We’ve all had the paralysis of looking for the perfect video essay to chuck on while doing the dishes. I don’t want to stand here and tell you to abandon social media, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the depressing two hour morning I spent in bed last year scrolling through TikTok. I can however, tell you about the third act twist in High Fidelity that had me yelling “NO!” in the middle of the night.
If you, like me, spend a concerning amount of your day on YouTube, I wanna encourage you to take 30 minutes out of that daily vortex, and go watch even just the start of a movie. Maybe you don’t feel the same constant temptation to constantly look at your phone, or check Discord. Maybe you’re able to use YouTube and TikTok and reels responsibly, and don’t get sucked into an infinite scroll.
In this scene a customer tells the record store clerks that they’re a bunch of pretentious asshats. This is a reference to how you, the reader, would be right to call me a pretentious asshat.
But, if you’re like me, then I can’t recommend sitting down with a cup of tea and watching a movie highly enough. Maybe start with High Fidelity. Work your way up to The Dirties.
