An Introduction

This blog is maintained as part of an ongoing project for a Film Studies course on the production and marketing of Teen Movies. Seeing as how it's a blog and not, say, an academic paper, my adherence to any kind of grammatical/linguistic/remotely sensible format will likely be tenuous at best. In addition to some vaguely theoretical content, I'll also probably be using this blog as an outlet for creative meandering when I'm bored and have free time, or when I'm entirely intoxicated (see if you can notice a substantial difference in the quality of my writing during those particular periods).

If you're interested, you can also follow my (entirely unacademic) Twitter, or read my (slightly more academic) record reviews at CokeMachineGlow.

This is a surprisingly entertaining sequence from the otherwise-lame Not Another Teen Movie:



Satirizing genre films makes for pretty pedestrian comedy, doubly so when your target is the overwhelmingly banal She's All That. And while the observation that the 'ugly outcast' is quite obviously a knockout to begin with is self-evident, the execution here is terrific. It works. I like when trite Hollywood productions critique other Hollywood productions for being trite themselves, like when rap videos make fun of rap video cliches or when celebrities mock celebrity culture. These superficial "deconstructions" appeal to the viewer's desire to be respected for elevating themselves above mainstream material, to be congratulated for being in on the joke against the vacuity of popular culture. A teen enjoying Not Another Teen Movie is invited to pat themselves on the back for seeing through the contrived nature of the 'average' teen movie, and by extension the average popular culture artifact, the irony being that these congratulations of individual thought and liberation from the homogeneity of normative conventions come from the very production companies who rely on the predictable marketability of their audiences. In short, they sell you contrived shit and then sell you some other contrived shit that makes fun of the earlier contrived shit. Y'know, I think these movie moguls are smarter than we give 'em credit for.