There is a good reason Hollywood continually makes Animal House wannabes and avoids producing films that actually focus on academia. Kids prefer their college movies to be about the fun stuff. And so a movie like Old School grossed $75 million while another Luke Wilson comedy called Tenure currently lacks a distributor. The latter film may also be hilarious, as a satire of the tenure process, but if it doesn’t concentrate more on beer bongs and naked co-eds, it won’t attract as big an audience. And according to some scholars, it may not even resonate with them, because it couldn’t possibly be what the process is really like. Film blogger and associate professor Chuck Tryon was quoted about the film last year as saying, “my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
And evident by the scathing reviews from Sundance of John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it appears another film about academia has failed to make a strong case for the subject matter. Too bad for the late David Foster Wallace, whose stories were adapted for the film, that Gus Van Sant wasn’t at the helm. A decade ago, in an interview with Van Sant, Wallace pretty much gushed that Good Will Hunting is the most accurate film about academia ever made. Do we agree with him? Let’s just say there’s not a whole lot of competition for such an honor. But in our attempt to recognize the ten best films about academia, Good Will Hunting doesn’t quite make the top spot. …Read more
I never went to a normal college, never lived in a proper dorm or experienced fraternity hazing or even rush week from an inside viewpoint. I went to an urban art school and then a commuter school. And though I grew up in a college town and later worked on the campus of another college I didn’t attend, I feel like I don’t have the proper perspective with which to judge most college movies and college kid characters as being true to life. This probably explains why I enjoy so many bad movies set in colleges and/or involving college students. I bet I could even check out a double feature of The House Bunnyand College and have a good time at the movies.
Of course, I do have some semblance of good taste, and I also recognize that none of the following movies are anywhere near the quality of my favorite college movies (including Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathersand the Frat Pack’s Old School), or even the beloved Animal House, which I regrettably find to be highly overrated (no, that doesn’t mean I dislike it or think it’s bad or unfunny). The ten movies on today’s list are merely guilty pleasures that I can’t stop appreciating no matter how hard I try or how old I get.
Leave it to George Clooney to make a football movie that actually looks good to people like me. And by people like me, I mean people with no interest in American football whatsoever (I attend Super Bowl parties exclusively for the 7-layer dip). Yahoo! is hosting the trailer for Leatherheads, Clooney’s much-anticipated directorial follow-up to Good Night, and Good Luck, and the romantic sports comedy looks like the most appealing football flick — particularly for women and also guys like me — ever produced.
Part of the appeal for me, though, is those old uniforms, which bring me back (cinematicaly — I’m not that old) to the football fields of Horse Feathers, Harold Lloyd’s The Freshmanand that famous still of Ronald Reagan from Knute Rockne All American. Then, of course, there’s the appeal of Clooney in old-timey clothes, ala O Brother Where Art Thou? Considering how much Clooney resembles Cary Grant in both appearance and acting style, it’s no wonder that I prefer him in stories that take him back to periods in which Grant was a big star. Okay, so Leatherheads is actually set in the 1920s, before Grant and his silly accent made it to the big screen, but I’m willing to ignore that little historical inaccuracy (just as the Coen Bros. ignored a lot of historical fact with O Brother). Had sound films come about earlier than they had, Cary Grant could have been wooed by Hollywood much sooner than he was.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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