Let’s face it. Midterms are starting, and some of us just don’t have the time for full-on cultural revolution. Yet even in the downtime of a revolution, we must still try to keep the hearts and minds of the people. To keep the spirit alive this week if you are too tired to head out to a rock show or check out a museum, hit up a local video store and check out some flicks that have been wrongfully ignored by the masses. I recommend two college-themed movies, Slackers and Kicking and Screaming, to pull you through these weeks of tests and papers.
Slackers hit video only a few months ago for those of us who foolishly underrated this movie while it was in theaters last February. The cast is led by Devon Sawa, who you may remember as a wee lad in Casper, and Rushmore powerhouse Jason Schwartzman. Schwartzman plays Cool Ethan, who catches Sawa’s Dave and his friends cheating on a physics exam and blackmails them into helping him win the heart of Angela (James King). Even though this is college and you should “bag your own bitches,” Dave and his friends (one of whom is played brilliantly by Michael C. Maronna, better known as the elder Pete on the old Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete and Pete) agree to help Cool Ethan out. Granted, on paper the cheating high jinks of this movie sound idiotic. But in practice it makes for sheer comic genius. The dialog is fantastic, and Schwartzman’s delivery is terrific. Do not delay in checking this movie out.
Kicking and Screaming (1995) tells the story of a group of college graduates during their first year after school. Grover (Josh Hamilton) starts hooking up with first-years to replace the girlfriend who left him to study in Prague. Skippy (Jason Wiles) re-enrolls to be near his sophomore girlfriend (Parker Posey) while Otis (Carlos Jacott) goes back for his second interview at Video Vender. Chet (Eric Stoltz), a bartender who still hasn’t graduated after over a decade because the third tome of his thesis is taking longer than he thought, gives the group advice like, “I don’t mean to paraphrase myself here, but if Plato is a fine red wine, then Aristotle is a dry martini.” Watching this movie as a first-year made me laugh at the accurate representations of college bars and Euro-trash guys, but as a senior it hits a little close to home when I imagine myself in a scene similar to one in which Max (Chris Eigeman) looks at himself in the mirror and says, “What do you do? Oh, I do nothing. That’s right, I do … nothing.”
So if you, like Max, want to get nostalgic for events that haven’t even happened yet, or want to learn great one-liners to constantly bombard your friends with, go rent one of these two movies. They may revolutionize the way you look at college, or at least help you forget about those tests and papers for a little while.
