"Enough Wool You Could Knit A Sweater With..."

      It's not much of a secret that Doctor J has an inexplicable fondness for the naughty and the goofy. After all, when Dr J was growing up, movies like Porky's and Revenge of the Nerds were as much staples of adolescence as Star Wars or E.T. Call it a soft-spot, call it a lingering strain of immaturity, call it a remaining aspect of the boy inside the man, but there's a kind of soporific joy to be taken from some of these sorts of movies, a pleasure to be taken in crude, base humour. I don't think this is an unnatural thing, and very often the joy to be taken in such movies is rooted in a refreshing of one's innocence, when sex was "the big thing" and gross-out jokes were tests of what our imaginations would tolerate. You know the sorts of films about which I write-- Animal House, American Pie (but NOT American Wedding, a film so horrible it should have been released with automatic refunds), Old School and the like. Such films, when well done, re-time us to adolescence, when the world was as immature as we were.

      It's equally interesting to me now watching the reviewers of such films respond to these sorts of films, of which the latest is Eurotrip. These sorts of films are basically critic-proof: very often it doesn't matter a whit whether or not the film is well-acted or well-scripted or well-directed; the test is about proving that the critic can still allow him- or herself to indulge in adolescent prurience with a good sense of sport. Most of the reviews of Europtrip have been pretty negative (you can catch a survey of some of the major reviews at Metacritic), which is to be expected: it hardly matters whether or not the film is any good, because most of the critics are entering the film with a kind of cynical distaste, with their lexicon of critical pejoratives at the ready ("xenophobic," "misogynistic," "lascivious," and so forth). Such films end up not only testing jokes on us, but testing our capacity to take things as jokes: sure, they may not be funny, but there's a larkishness written right into the premises of such films that we either accept or reject at the outset, and from there on mark us for who we are and who we are not (and, sometimes more tellingly, who we no longer are). It's the limbo-principle of the movies: how low can you go? Such films dare critics to put on their togas and drink until they puke to see if they'll go along for the ride; and the others, well, they're just spoil-sports. Or so the logic goes. Despite what I've said above, some films of this ilk-- There's Something About Mary, American Wedding, the Porky's sequels, Say It Ain't So--- are just so bad, and so cynical and manipulative, that they're not about this sort of relatively-innocent partying; the kegs in these parties are spiked. But again, perhaps that's enough reason I have a soft-spot for such films: they stick their tongues out at critical pretense, and so put all of machinery of analysis and judgment on the defensive, and the movies end up judging us more than we really judge them. This I enjoy, thoroughly; as much as I am part of a critical heritage, I cannot help but savour those opportunities to watch that heritage get picked up by its jockey shorts and turned upside-down. Is there a degree of schadenfreude to this? Definitely. Is that wrong? Perhaps a bit. But it's also a hell of a lot better, and a hell of a lot healthier, than confronting culture with an attitude of defensive superiority. We have nothing to fear but our Malvolios.

      That's why this review of Eurotrip strikes me as being quite good, and quite right, though I'm not speaking in relation to the quality of the film itself (which, of course, I have not seen, and probably will not see until it comes out on the dish). Sometimes we need to have the mickey taken out of our pretenses, or, in more colloquial terms, to have the sticks taken out of our collective critical butts. Sometimes we need to be reminded that "juvenile" isn't necessarily a bad thing, or that, at the very least, the world of juvenalia can still be a nice place to visit even if we wouldn't quite want to live there anymore. And, sometimes, we need to allow ourselves to remember the comical aspect of sex and sexual desire, especially through the ridiculously-serious eyes of relative innocents (the result there being akin to characters deadpanning it in farce, as Leslie Nielsen did so beautifully in the Airplane movies). As a young woman I used to know once put it, "Sex is hilarious. You can be walking down the street one day, and meet up with someone whose privates you had your face buried in the night before." (And I won't even rehash the old observational-joke about what people's faces turn into when they're having an orgasm. One comedian compared males to braying mules, and females to castrato werewolves mid-transformation.) There's something to be said for indulging in the craven, the crass and the crude. (Ooooh, alliteration!) Trust no one, this blog insists, that has, or intimates to having, no filth in his (or her) soul.

      This leads me, though, to a more (personally) troubling thing, realizing that little Michelle Trachtenberg-- formerly Harriet the Spy, and Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer-- is growing up. There's just something sooooo wrong about this... She can't be that old yet.... *shakes head incredulously* Oh, crap, now I'm remembering that I'm an adult again, more conservative than I used to be. Damn. God, I just hope there's no scene with her going on about this one time in band camp...