Is any movie more 1995 than Clueless? With a movie as witty, colorful, and fashionable as the nineties themselves, Clueless is one of those movies that I doubt will ever age.
Normally something so anachronistic would age, and badly, but Clueless taps into the same essential core of human existence as Emma by Jane Austen with an extremely effective modernized adaptation. I don’t think Jane Austen adaptations will ever die either (I sure hope they won’t).
Young women have always been something magical, which is really one of the many delightful things that Jane Austen captures in her stories. Girls can be smart, observant, funny, feisty, and opinionated, when the circumstances and adults in the vicinity allow them to be, and she’s so good at giving us women who have been indulged by a loving parent to the point where they blossom into their fullest selves.
That’s Cher here, indulged by her dad, born into a position of privilege (a lawyer’s daughter can afford to be fancy). Is she spoiled? Maybe a little bit, but Cher has such principles that you have to respect it. She will argue her way to getting anything she want. She isn’t afraid of making demands. And her demands are kind because she is kind. Try being Paul Rudd and *not* falling for your adorable sister with spicy social justice aspirations.
Wait, did I mention Paul Rudd? The man who gave an entire generation a fetish for the hot older step-brother we never had?
It’s so cute to see him here, looking only slightly shinier-faced than he does thirty years later. He’s supposed to be the kinda cool college guy. Paul Rudd is a lot of things, including adorable, but I don’t think coolguy stayed in his brand as an actor, and that’s why we love him. Well, and because the faces he makes when he’s falling for Cher are to-die-for, and we all want Paul Rudd to make those faces at us.
I guess it says a lot more about me, and where I am in my life, that my main reaction to *this* watch of Clueless was, “Oh my God everyone is so cute.” Because that’s my reaction to everyone and everything! It’s so cute!
Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd? OBVIOUSLY cute.
Donald Faison? So! Cute!
The grand Nagus marrying his nerdy teacher colleague? CUTE!
I can’t talk about how cute Brittany Murphy is without breaking into tears!
The fashion? Cuuuuuute.
Speaking of fashion, let’s talk 1995. What a year for cinema! I didn’t realize Clueless was the same year as Sabrina at first. It’s funny because I referenced the hot older step brother in my review for Sabrina. I thought that Linus should have been cast to feel like an older brother figure to Sabrina, and failing that, the script rewritten. What was in the water in 1995? Hot brother/daddy figures? I guess that explains where all my weird fetishes came from. Thanks 1995!
Anyhoo, 1995 also gave us Strange Days (very notable if not a GREAT movie), To Wong Foo, While You Were Sleeping (it’s on my to-watch list), Showgirls, Braveheart, and one of the disappointing favorites of my childhood, Pocahontas. What a vibrant year for memorable media.
Clueless stands apart from its release-year peers by being an especially wholesome embrace of girlhood and friendship and hot stepbrothers. May it never lose its shine.
My whole body hurts. What did I do this time? I’m thirty-five years old. For all I know, I committed the cardinal sin of turning the wrong direction too quickly.
I’ve been taking it easy on my hands/arms by limiting crochet for a few days and mostly just starting to weave a strap for a bag. I got stuff to do leatherworking, which I’m excited to start on, but I wanna finish this one slow detailed bag I’ve got going first.
I’m going to curl up and turn off after this. Hopefully my hips will forgive me for whatever sin I committed after I pray to saint tylenol.
The new round of Madison Avenue exits comes as the White House and the European Commission also took a hard stance against X on Friday. “We have seen an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks, and X is certainly quite effective of that,” the Commission said in a statement. A White House statement on Friday said that “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”
Much less significantly, I’ve stopped posting personal content on X and now do my train-of-thoughts elsewhere, like here and Bluesky.
~
The USDA adjusted the plant hardiness map. I’m not in an area that has seen significant change between 2012 and 2023. How about you?
The shifts in the Midwest and Northeast are jarring. And Florida. And Texas. Okay, I guess it’s most of the country. Oof.
Didn’t this surge around 2014 too? I remember that specifically because that’s when my second baby was born. I can’t imagine vaccine resistance has improved since then, unfortunately.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes an unfathomable amount of time setting up key points of relation to the originating trilogy, often in a manner so obvious that it winds up comical. There are mockingjays all over District 12, and Snow doesn’t seem to like them. Lucy Gray sings “The Hanging Tree” at several portentous moments in the film, and possibly also wrote it? Look at all the imagery and symbolism!
It’s not that I don’t want people to discuss what an authoritarian he is. I do. I’ve just seen so many people mention this language usage, yet I can think of a million authoritarian actions he actually performed during his presidency, and we don’t talk about most of them. Avoidance as a symptom of shared trauma? Too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of nonsense we suffered to pick it apart?
We already know the majority of people don’t want this guy. But enough want him to jump on the system’s cracks until they snap. I’m not sure what we’ve done to bolster the integrity of our elections. We still have that electoral college. We’re going to see how rugged American democracy is in 2024.
But okay, yes, let’s talk about his authoritarian language.
I don’t often love movies, TV, or books earnestly. It does happen occasionally – my obsession over Scavengers Reign is intense – but I’m someone who gets the most enjoyment out of critical dissection.
I’ve grown up in an era of American anti-intellectualism where I can’t go five steps without meeting disdain for anything with literary aspirations, and people often defend stuff *for* being brainless rather than despite it. Sympathy for the palliative effects of mindless media should subsume other concerns. Hence, folks have always said that if you don’t like the popular thing, you are [insert various insults here]. Elitist? Sexist? A jerk? Whatever.
With these influences, I used to think my preference to engage with media critically is because I’m a big snooty crank who doesn’t want people to have fun.
The experience is a little more complicated.
With recent autism diagnoses in the family, and seeing neuropsychologist analyses of the exact pathology of our brain miswiring, it’s become obvious how much of my disability is social. Humans are social animals, so disrupting social functions (like emotional regulation, filtering one’s language to be appropriate, and bonding with a social group) is kind of a big deal, and it manifests in multitude ways.
You might have already noticed my vocabulary trends over-formal or -complicated on one end of the spectrum; on the other end, I can get extremely crass, un-punctuated, and messy. I switch based on the tone in which I intend to speak rather than situational appropriateness, which I find difficult to meter.
It also means that I struggle to “hook into” popular things. Something that is very popular socially (say, Taylor Swift) will generally clear a bar on quality where there’s no big criticisms to be made on craft, so it’s easy to fall in love with the work because everyone you know loves it. It’s fun! Everyone’s having a good time!
Because my personal tastes skew esoteric, and I can’t feel part of any in-group, I don’t get pulled into the fervor. And then I get frustrated because everyone is talking about something I can’t genuinely enjoy.
With repeated exposures to something popular – Barbenheimer, the TikTok book du jour, American football – I find it difficult to avoid having *any* opinion about something that was not intended for me, does not appeal to me, and sometimes is overtly offensive. Billions in advertising dollars have been spent to make sure that certain things remain in my face.
Likewise, the conversations are omni-present. The internet water cooler always wants to talk about something I don’t like, and I live on the internet water cooler. Nobody likes having something they love criticized. But as a social animal, any sort of social interaction is better than none, even if it’s a bit antipathetic.
I’d live and let live if all that stuff would let me go. There are fewer places to escape these advertising machines than ever. It makes me wonder if I belong on the internet at all anymore, sometimes.
~
Another fun feature of autism is moral rigidity. Also, a rigid adherence to rules, which may or may not be rules that anyone other than the autistic individual is familiar with.
One of my Special Interests is the intersection of media analysis with social justice. I believe fiercely that stories are one of the oldest social technologies that humans have, and must be wielded consciously for the good of humanity; I take my art very seriously. I’d prefer to think of myself alongside the likes of radical author-activists of previous generations than think of myself as a content creator for the internet.
While I want to entertain foremost (since that’s core to the technology), I also have a whole lot to say, and I find that I say it best in fiction. I like people. Humans are my favorite animals. I hate systems and hierarchies. I want to help other people see how the problem is always a ruling class, not the individuals, and how working together can save us.
I receive negativity expressing these ambitions, too. Because every feisty opinion I share *feels* like it’s In Defense of Humans, Opposed to Hierarchies, I’m always baffled and wounded by the reactions and find myself incapable of communicating context effectively.
Somehow, this does nothing to discourage me. My brain has welded together art and morality. I’m wired to love this much more than I would love acceptance.
It also means I have a negative reaction to media with lower ambitions, sometimes. I don’t mean that the project aspires to be simpler. I mean lower ambitions, like making a project so bland as to appease a fascist model. I mean putting no hint of soul into something humans spent hours of their lives creating, and will spend hours more consuming.
When people are Just Having Fun with the Popular Thing, it’s pretty offensive that I would be Mister Buzzkillington about it because I think the creator has (say) a painfully white heteronormative lens in subservience to the capitalist machine of advertising.
I get why people don’t like that I do that! I don’t love it either.
And yet here we are.
~
These priorities have put me into a place where I can sometimes *love* media that is badly made, in poor taste, and broadly disliked, but somehow interesting to me. But might have nothing good to say about something very popular that treads extremely dull ground.
Sometimes, I can jump in on bandwagons by engaging critically. It allows me to pick apart a given piece of media and say, “These parts work for me. These parts don’t. This is why.”
The effort it requires to tease apart creator intent and execution, meaning and impact, and all those other elements that go into a finished product–that can be fascinating to me regardless of the finished product. Every single story has a story behind it. No movie is produced in total isolation; no book is published without cultural influence and without responding to some call from another book.
Which might help answer the question nobody was asking: “Why do you have such developed opinions on something you don’t like?”
Because reaching the opinion is the entertaining part. Sometimes the *only* entertaining part.
But hey, I’m enjoying the thing you’re enjoying, too. Just from a different angle. Isn’t that kinda nice?
~
The cover of the book Twilight, for no particular reason.
Sometimes something I find terrible for xyz reasons will be *so* interesting that I’ll get hooked and become a Hate-Fan.
I could write essays about the terrible things I’ve loved before.
Hate-fanning might not be ideal, but I see no harm in the practice with healthy boundaries. Getting wrapped up in the criticism is no good if the criticism makes you feel bad.
We’ve got a toxic outrage culture surrounding pseudo-criticism right now, especially on YouTube. If you want to talk about places that eviscerate low-intensity media in bad faith, you can go type the name of any movie starring a woman and “review” into the search bar and catapult yourself into algorithmic Hell.
Toxicity is great for clicks. It’s really bad for your soul.
Well, my soul anyway. I’m basically just a weird lil crochet mummy these days. I don’t want anything but good vibes in my zone.
I defend the ability to find joy in dissecting media. I don’t defend being aggressive about it, or any part of the algorithm machines to which the internet is enslaved, but I defend the value in taking an intellectual approach to all the art we engage with. An intellectual approach should never delegitimize the emotional approach; we don’t harsh others’ mellows, kinkshame, or diminish folks for enjoying something no matter how problematic it might be.
There is a difference between “this is a terrible, racist movie” and “everyone who loves this movie is terrible and racist,” and we’ve completely lost that nuance in the clickbait era of the internet.
There is room for grouchy, snooty, intellectualist cranks like me.
Having an opinion isn’t a big deal. You know, with boundaries.
The year is 2145. Neflixxar releases The Princess Switch 30X: Princesses In The Tenth Dimension. You can only view it by downloading it into your processor and the processor of your seven clones, which will allow you to act out the plot in real-time. Such is the Prophecy of the Switching Princesses: As the Switches gain more episodes, so too must the convolution of the Switches intensify.
Sounds good to you? Then I’m sad to say the third movie in this franchise will disappoint you.
The third Princess Switch actually gives us zero new princesses and I *think* there is less mistaken identity than in the second one.
I thought our over-the-top villainess Hudgens in PS2 might have been like the thunder before a real camp storm. Sure, my ideal logarithmic growth of Hudgens isn’t realistic, but shouldn’t TPS3 have included at least *one* more Vanessa Hudgens? I mean, really pushing this concept of a family that squirts out Vanessa Hudgens clones into the next century.
Instead, PS3 is a very low-temperature and low-stakes romantic suspense story about Villainess Hudgens slowly losing her camp potential to the march of heteronormativity and the hivemind-like placidity of the Hudgens Multiverse Family.
I wish that they would lean into the fun, fanciful elements of the franchise rather than trying to give us Emotions over the complicated childhood a wealthy, never-sees-prison villain feels toward her mom. The silly accent doesn’t offer much room for a nuanced performance, though Hudgens tries. My God does this woman try.
The element of this whole Switchery franchise to which Netflix committed is the fact that they evade anything interesting, giving us no more than the barest glimpse of more exciting ideas. If you’re on medically mandated bed rest, this is the franchise to keep that heart rate low.
It almost frustrates me *more* to have a fun sequence like Third Hudgens dodging lasers paralleling Second Hudgens doing the tango. She/they is so hot. And the easy cuts between scenes to create a simple visual metaphor reminds me that there are actually talented people making these movies, who totally know what they’re doing, but someone from Netflix is standing over them with a sandblaster ready to fire if they start enjoying themselves too much. “No! We saw her thigh! Someone’s eyes widened when she wore a wig! We have met our sexuality cap!”
I get impatient with movies that are *almost* good because I kinda wish they’d either commit to batshittery (hence: more fun) or shoot lower (like A Christmas Prince, which gave me almost no emotions whatsoever).
Everything in this franchise would be redeemed by making up one excuse for two Vanessa Hudgens making out. That’s my Christmas Wish.
I’m currently getting my dopamine pathways hijacked by writing movie reviews, but I also love rewatching movies in quick succession. So what do I do when I watch something like 9 to 5 once, write a review, and then watch it again the next day? My initial review was sort of a recap, so going into the meatier themes that made me love the flick seemed about right.
I’ve been having my dopamine pathways hijacked and re-hijacked a lot lately. Earlier this year I got hijacked by a project in Adobe InDesign; that was knocked out of place by an abrupt obsession with crochet on July 31st; I was seized by an interactive fiction project in September that I now have minimal motivation to finish; modding Skyrim took over my dopamine pathways when I lost the novelty of drawing dragon flong.
Hence I do recognize that my desire to write movie reviews, and blog posts in general, especially the kind you’re reading right now, is just another rollercoaster ride for my poor stupid golden retriever dopamine pathways.
Since we’ve established this relationship is frail and will vanish at the drop of a molecule, let’s get into the RSS reader.
Is it a classic if it was published 13 years ago? It was everywhere 13 years ago. But that was the beginning of my career, and that feels like old-timey days now.
I wonder if deciding to remove dog meat from South Korean menus is as good as it sounds, or if it’s a complicated expression of the increasing Westernization of the region. I’ve never eaten it. That would be insane from my cultural perspective. Is it from theirs? I wonder what is lost when a traditional food source is banned.
That said, despite my frequent threats to turn my French bulldog into French onion bulldog soup, I still like dogs better than people and I’m not sad to think of more living dogs.
Parts of this article seem like they might be worthy of consideration, particularly when the opinion comes from outside the article.
Brit Bennett, in her 2015 Paris Review essay on Addy, asks, “If a doll exists on the border between person and thing, what does it mean to own a doll that represents an enslaved child who once existed on that same border?” Such complexity, even uneasiness, was how the brand thrived.
But other parts of the article get my eyebrows lifting.
Almost all dolls prepare girls to perform womanhood. Baby dolls ready them for mothering; Barbies for being sexual objects. Rowland’s twin innovations—a multifaceted, highly detailed consumer universe paired with a doll that was herself a girl—invited girls to perform themselves.
I never once mothered a baby doll in my life, but my baby dolls used to make out with other baby dolls in the closet a lot. My Barbies were up to some weird brainwashing scheme. I really, really don’t think I’m unusual in this experience. One weird assumption like this makes me disengage, honestly.
Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that everyone loves nostalgia, American Girl dolls are easier to buy once you’re a grownup, and some Millennials are at the point where we can get fancy frivolous things for ourselves.
Since I mostly played with 12- and 18-inch fashion dolls as a kid, the sheer size of American Girl dolls was the main source of my interest. They take up a lot of room. I ended up buying a custom boy American Girl for my kid when he was small and the creepy thing lurks in a closet somewhere.
Very specific rules around breastfeeding videos mean they can be monetized on YouTube again. I don’t even know how to start unpacking the levels of Bothered I am about this whole entire subject. I breastfed for over six years straight between two children. There’s a major rift in intergenerational knowledge surrounding breastfeeding which communities are still trying to heal. So yeah, folks need videos to help them. But we still have to get really specific about what kind of videos can get compensated for views, just in case there was some nipple and someone might be able to fetishize that? Oh, and make sure there’s a child in the shot. That helps somehow.
In his 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl depicts the iconic Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmy people. […] In Dahl’s 1973 revision of this text he depicts the Oompa-Loompas as white.
Cocoa’s production is troubling, so there’s some cognitive dissonance in seeing a wealthy English actor pout over someone stealing his cocoa beans.
Not to mention that changing Hugh Grant’s proportions means they didn’t cast a little person. Here’s a statement made in regards to a past movie:
A rep for “Little People of America” tells TMZ, the entertainment industry should be actively casting little people.
The rep adds, “This means both casting people with dwarfism as characters that were specifically written to be played by little people … and other roles that would be open to people of short stature.”
I’m not sure how many people were actually at risk of seeing yet another Willy Wonka movie, but I’m not, and this doesn’t change the maths.
Aside from providing us with one heck of an ear worm, Nine to Five remains equally relevant forty-three years after it hit movie screens. Well, maybe not as relevant in regards to the sheer volume of perms, but we forgive the Eighties. (Banner image credit: 20th Century Fox)
So much could be said about the enormous talent of the actresses leading the ensemble. Lily Tomlin is so good at doing that thing where she looks harmless while murdering you. Jane Fonda’s physical comedy gets me cackling every time. And Dolly Parton. Oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly… The word effervescent was surely coined to describe the way she fizzles like the inch of air above a fresh pour of Coke.
The three of them together are so talented. There’s no excuse for the volume of entirely un-feminist thoughts I have in their direction. But I am basically a useless sapphic who will find excuses to praise any cast led by women (I’m just being honest here), so what really gets me revved over Nine to Five is the politics. Those juicy, delicious politics.
You could only get such a powerful, radical message befitting THE Jane Fonda if you drape it in enough silliness to pass muster. Like Chaucer, Nine to Five is here to show us a thing or two while having fun. Labor reform driven by the working class has never been such a hoot.
1. Don’t believe the lies that divide us.
At first, Parton’s character is isolated by rumors she’s mistress to the boss. It’s easy to believe a woman so beautiful is easy, right? That lie is spread by her boss, who likes the appearance of masculine virility and doesn’t give a crap about a married working woman’s reputation, much less her dignity.
Doralee is being predated by Hart, but he’s stripped her of any protection she might enjoy from coworkers. It’s a shame because Violet also rankles at his harassment. Only once they let the walls down and realize they’re on the same team can they get up to the good shenanigans.
2. Bravery is contagious.
Nobody likes working in a miserable place, afraid of being noticed by the boss, constantly on edge in fear of a verbal dressing-down. Small missteps can mean major upheaval, like losing one’s entire job for holding the wrong conversation. On a day-to-day basis, everyone is just trying to get along and pay the bills.
Yet as soon as one person throws down with the boss, she meets another willing to do the same, and another. Our three heroines can be braver after seeing the bravery of one another. And they’re admired by other coworkers for this, too.
The instant they connect and start talking, they get stronger.
3. Women (and labor) should stand in solidarity.
Every woman in the movie is pretty rad, aside from the pick-me Roz, who commits a mortal sin: she is not on Team Women. She is the eyes, ears, nose, and throat of The Boss. Like Marthas and Aunts, she serves to enforce an abusive status quo, hoping it will earn her favor.
Roz busts the faintest hints of a union by getting a woman fired for discussing salaries in the bathroom. She also reports our heroines to the boss. Still, the worst the other women do to Roz is help her get a French lesson.
You can learn a thing or two about narrative approval from this. The screenplay itself totally lacks misogyny. Hart’s wife is a genuinely nice person who has her whole heart in an undeserving place. She praises Doralee’s beauty and expresses such gratitude for the flowers. Too bad Doralee seems to stay with her husband because I was feeling the vibes between the two of them.
4. A more livable workplace benefits everybody.
The movie wasn’t spinning tall tales with those memos showing the many benefits of workplace support, like day cares. Accommodations for flexible schedules make it easier for people with disabilities, families, or a life outside work (the audacity) to contribute productively. And yeah, this kind of thing shoots productivity through the roof, which businesses should love.
A world where people have jobs that respect their humanity is beneficial to the people and the jobs.
Yet the bosses in this movie rankle against such measures. Clearly it’s not statistics they’re worried about. They like having the power.
5. Cruelty isn’t the entire point, but it’s a lot.
Getting to act cruel is one of the rewards of a system that provides few pleasures. Does Hart really seem happy to you? Has all that money left him contented? I mean, does a happy man have reason to dread his wife, assault his secretary, and plan his schedule to avoid his life outside work? No, Hart has leapfrogged up the hierarchy specifically because he likes the sadism. He is bettered by trying to make others worse.
Masculine power plays are razor-edged veils for deep insufficiency.
You’ve probably seen a boss act like that at some point in your life.
Beautifully, gorgeously, 9 to 5 also reminds us that punching up isn’t cruelty. Threatening the man who sexually assaults you with a gun isn’t cruelty. Hanging a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot from your garage door opener when he misbehaves isn’t cruelty. And that might be the greatest lesson of all.
Now that I’ve entered the world of the Netflix Christmas Cinematic Universe, there’s no point extracting meaning from narrative paucity. If you watched this lady switch with herself once, and you want to watch her switch with herself again (and again, and again), then you’ve signed on to get what you get, and may Hathor have mercy on your soul.
What you get here is a playful extrapolation of the original concept. Literally, it’s like someone sat in a room with some other guy and said, “The numbers on this lady switching were good. Let’s see how many switches we can do before we reach diminishing returns on viewership.”
Within the rigid framework of putting many Vanessa Hudgens into a single room and finding excuses to pretend they are flip-flopping between one another’s lives, there is plenty of silly fun to be had, but not a lot of development for characters who seem important.
Somehow none of Vanessa Hudgens personalities feel like realized humans. They are all Vanessa Hudgens doing a voice with a costume change. The Third Personality for Hudgens is my favorite because she’s a Disney villain who basically asks to escape a prison sentence on account of being “cuzzies” with the queen.
Meanwhile, our Baker has been married to King Edward since the end of movie 1, yet I hardly know the guy. In both outings, he mostly shows up to look earnest and perform the trope where a commoner helps make a king better by connecting him to his people. I can’t tell if the Daddy Friend hero is better developed or if I just find him a lot more attractive. I do appreciate every opportunity TPS:SA gives me to look at him.
The fact that a whole regent abduction plot can be played so lightly seems entirely appropriate given the givens.
Like maybe the problem with the first movie was that it didn’t go far enough. This movie is going, and going, and going. Maybe the executives stopped caring once an appropriate level of Switches were met. “How many switches? And it’s a good ninety minutes long? Send it to the website!”
