Sixteen Candles

Sixteen Candles is a 1984 American coming of age comedy starring Molly Ringwald, Michael Schoeffling and Anthony Michael Hall. It was written and directed by John Hughes.  John Hughes also directed The Breakfast Club and Ferris Buller's Day Off.  With the occasion all but overshadowed by her sister's upcoming wedding, teen angst-ridden Samantha (Molly Ringwald) faces her 16th birthday with typical adolescent dread.  She loathes her body, as it isn't like the popular girls, she loathes life, and is pretty much the typical American teen dealing with high school problems.  Samantha pines for studly older boy Jake (Michael Schoeffling), but worries that her chastity will be a turnoff for the popular senior.  She thinks that she is invisible to him, because to her, he's the definition of a god!  Meanwhile, Samantha must constantly rebuff the affections of nerdy Ted (Anthony Michael Hall), the only boy in the school, unfortunately, who seems to take an interest in her.  Which also does not help with her low-esteem and confidence. 

To our dear main character, Samantha, her life is going downhill fast. The soon to be 16-year-old has an impossible crush on the most popular boy in school, and the geekiest boy in school has a crush on her. Her sister's getting married, and with all the excitement the rest of her family forgets her birthday! This just puts the cherry on top of the sundae for her.  She feels even more invisible and unimportant than before.  Add all this to a pair of horrendously embarrassing grandparents who bring a foreign exchange student named Long Duc Dong to her sister's wedding.  He brings a lot of comic relief at different points of the movie, and experiences first hand fast American love and the party life of high school.  Other funny moments helped to make this movie so popular.  My personal favorite was when Sam gives dorky Ted her underwear to help him win a bet at the school dance. 

She attempts to get through all of these unfortunate events.  In the end, Sam has a heart to heart with her father, and in a twist of events, her crush, Jake, picks her up at the end of her sister's wedding to celebrate her birthday.  The movie concludes as they kiss over a cake with 16 candles.  In the end we get a hilarious movie on the journey of one quirky girl to womanhood! This is just a classic you can't pass up. 

MR. RYAN MURPHY: PROOF THE AUTEUR THEORY IS CORRECT?

Mr. Ryan Murphy has created many shows that have entered the popular culture zeitgeist, many of which are treatments of various groups of outcasts and misfits navigating their ways through the judgements they face. Mr. Murphy's career began in 1999 and continues today, with his production of both movies and television that have achieved both popular and critical acclaim. Mr. Murphy's television resume is as follows....

THESE ARE IN ORDER BY THE DATE OF CREATION

Not only does Mr. Murphy have a long and industrious career in the television industry, he has also made his mark on the feature film industry as well. Those films are as follows....

THESE ARE ALSO IN ORDER OF CREATION

Additionally, Mr. Murphy has a multitude of films that are being developed. Those are....

1) Dirty Tricks, a political comedy.

2) Face, a plastic surgery thriller

3) Need, an erotic thriller

4) In 2014, Murphy was developing a feature film that was based on the life of a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, who lived to be 104 and whose will was a subject of much controversy. He is planning to base the adaption on the number one, bestselling book Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune.

5) Mr. Murphy is also developing a remake of the 1976 cult-classic horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown. It is set to be directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. 

However, I don't want you to think that this week's blog post is just going to be a biography of Mr. Murphy's work, you can go to wikipedia for that, but rather I want to use his body of work to discuss the auteur theory and how, although his work seems disjunct and not unified by a common thread, in fact, it is unified by its celebration of the underdog and the outcast. 

According the Encyclopedia Britannica, the auteur theory is a theory that was first put forward by French New Wave film magazine Cashiers du Cinema. This theory advocates that the director is the author of his films and that across that director's body of work there will specific characteristics or stylistic choice that can be observed across it. With that definition of an auteur, I would like to submit that Mr. Murphy is an auteur because there are both stylistic and characteristics that are shared across his body of work. One characteristic that is shared across all of Mr. Murphy's work is that he uses the same actors across a multitude of different project. For example, in American Horror Story, the actor Sarah Paulson has played different characters across all the seasons, in the first season she was a medium. in the second season she was a lesbian reporter, in the third season she was a witch, and now in the fourth season she is playing a conjoined twin. Mr. Murphy is not the first director who is known for using the same actors across his films, as another of example of this practice includes Spike Lee. Another thing that points to Mr. Murphy as an auteur is the subject matter that is treated across all of his work. In all of the titles that are presented above, exposure is given to people that are typically on the fringes of either society or the social ladder. With this through line in his work I believe that therefore it is appropriate to refer to Mr. Murphy as a true auteur. 

CollegeHumor: Real humor for real people

CollegeHumor is one of the most popular channels on all of YouTube, and for good reason. Like the channel's name suggests, the videos which the group of comedians post mostly pertain to and are directed towards humor for college students. How convenient! We're college students! For those of you who have watched any of CollegeHumor's material, you understand what I mean when I say that the videos are hilarious--most of them, anyway.

What CollegeHumor does that most other YouTube comedy channels don't do is it perfectly displays so many situations that happen oh too often in our everyday lives. Arguing with your smartphone is always a pain, and while the comedy is blown a bit out of proportion, viewers still understand exactly what the actor is feeling, and can just as easily laugh at his pain and suffering.

This video is even a better example of the kind that's made specifically for college students. Have you ever had a terrible roommate? A strange one? A scary one? Luckily, I haven't had to deal with most of the six roommates which are depicted in the video, but I certainly know people who have. I'm sure you do, too. My current roommate is The Ghost. I don't usually see him from when he leaves for class in the morning until he gets home around 11 o'clock at night. There are A LOT of strange people out there (Not saying that my current roommate is strange. He's actually one of my very good friends), many of which you will encounter at some point or another in your life. It may not happen for quite a while, but there's a very good chance that at least one of you will The Zombie.

"POV: Gym" is by far one of the most accurately comedic videos CollegeHumor has ever made. I can sadly but honestly admit that the large majority of occurrences in the video have happened to me while going to the gym. I've told myself I'll start going to the gym every day. I've seen the naked old man in the locker room--there's always one. I've walked past the enormous guys and made some sort of excuse to explain why I'm not as big as them. And yes, I've bumped up the weight on machines to the point of complete ridiculousness to try to impress the girl working out next to me (come on guys, we all have).

CollegeHumor portrays such realistic humor that you can't help but watch it. Yes, 99% of what they do is exaggerated beyond belief, but most topics they cover have, in some way or another, affected you personally. It's really just fun to see that you're not the only one who deals with the things that happen to you.

The Final

So I watched a very interesting movie this weekend. No it wasn't a romance, chick flick like The Notebook that I wrote about for last week. This week I watched a movie called The Final. This is one of those movies that looks super scary but ended up not being as scary as I thought. However, it reminded me of Saw; a lot.

This movie was about a group of nerds who were always picked on in high school. They felt as if it was a sign from G-d to get back at them. Needless to say, they took all of the knowledge that they learned from the horror movies that they had watched over the course of their lives and decided to make it into real life. They all got together and planned this Halloween party at this house in the woods so no one can find them. Once all of the popular kids came to the party, they drugged them all so they would fall asleep. While everyone was asleep they chained them all up to the floor so no one can leave, obviously. Once they woke everyone up, one by one the nerds tortured them so they knew what it was like to deal with all of the making fun. So the tortured in high school became the "torture-ist" at the party. These torture acts were sick. For example, they used a gun that they shot cows with on one kid. Another, they did extreme acupuncture on someones throat. And it just gets worse from there. Bear traps, burning faces off, cutting off tongues and fingers, paralyzing people. It was very gross, but I won't lie, I did find it to be a really good movie.

So if you're into Saw like movies and all that sick stuff, then check out this movie HERE.