Monday, April 16, 2007

I'm a boy

And just to prove it, here's a link to an article on the sex/gross-out comedies of the Classic Eighties Teen Movie era. It appeared in last week's Entertainment Weekly, but it reads as though I could have written it myself:

If Porky's had the advantage of being first out of the gate, Fast Times quickly established itself as the classiest of the breed — it was the Citizen Kane of teen sex comedies — thanks to Sean Penn's dazed-and-confused star turn as Jeff Spicoli (''Aloha, Mr. Hand!''), the easy-on-the-eyes Cates [and] Jennifer Jason Leigh's Stacy.


By Reagan's second inauguration in 1985, the party was over in more ways than one. There was a runaway deficit in Washington and a president who could barely bring himself to mention the word AIDS, much less make it a national priority. And the once innocent sex comedies of just a few years earlier were starting to develop a nasty, malicious aftertaste. With the exception of 1984's truly classic Revenge of the Nerds


(the Ambersons of teen sex comedies to Fast Times' Citizen Kane), disposable knockoffs like The Big Bet, Loose Screws, Fraternity Vacation...and Hardbodies 2 seemed to regard women more and more as the enemy. There was nothing romantic about ''losin' it'' anymore; these women were suckers to be lied to, drugged, and otherwise shanghaied into having sex. That's not just a buzzkill, them's felonies.


Ladies, go read if you want to know how we thought then and be honest, think now. Fellas, reminisce.

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