Your favorite guilty pleasure movie doesn’t have to be a cinematic masterpiece. It can be embarrassing, weird, and problematic.
What is your ultimate guilty pleasure movie?
The favorite movie where you can appear and forget the world as you quote each line. You look at it at least once a year and usually alone, because you belong, at some point, to a feeling.
And best of all, it doesn’t even have to be a great movie or a pop cultural canon classic. It doesn’t have to be Casablanca o Star Wars o When Harry met Sally.
It can be as stupid as Freddy Got Fingered o tan naff com 27 Dresses or as stupefied as Jupiter ascending. Maybe you tell people you spent a rainy Saturday doing The godfather trilogy but I was actually watching High School Musical, Baccalaureate in Music 2, Musical Baccalaureate 3: Baccalaureate i Sharpay’s fabulous adventure.
Okay, it’s your guilty pleasure movie, so you can accept the “guilty” part, no matter how embarrassing your choice is.
Mine is Cruel intentionsthe 1999 adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 18th-century novel Dangerous relationshipsturning the insensitive French aristocracy into excited high school students on New York’s Upper East Side.
Filmmaker Roger Kumble took the story of De Laclos ’moral failure and put a different, yet relevant, brilliance on it. It’s Manhattan’s teenage elite: they still can’t vote or drink legally, but their immense riches make them immune to decency, humanity, and scruples.
The story of the sisters of incredible beauty, Kathryn and Sebastian, manipulating their peers through psychosexual games. Cruel intentions he was ready for me.
In 1999, he was 14, obsessed Buffy and Sarah Michelle Gellar, and by association, was quite in love with Ryan Phillippe because he had been there I know what you did last summer with my favorite vampire hunter (sorry, Faith).
I remember the promotions so clearly. Phillippe’s diabolical smile only surpassed Gellar’s greasy knowledge, as he bet his brother he couldn’t seduce the new school virgin, accompanied by the rhythms of Sneaker Pimps ’“ 6 Underground ”.
But there was a problem. At 14, the film, with its brazen sex, drugs, and shocking immorality, was considered too much for my young, impressionable self. He had received an MA15 + score.
There was an attempt to “sneak in” during the last day of school, frustrated by a belligerent usher in Sydney’s now-defunct George St Village cinemas. He wouldn’t let us in without the cardboard transport concession card issued only to students 15 years and older who we had temporarily hired to buy the tickets.
My friends and I watched She is all of that instead, in a movie theater full of teenagers who should have all been to school. Although Gellar made a cameo She is all of thatI hated it and often wondered if it was because it bothered me to watch this movie instead of what I really wanted.
Two days later, I convinced a 19-year-old family friend to take me, and that was all I wanted it to be. The erotic tete-a-tete between Kathryn and Sebastian, the way she showed teen sexuality, THIS kiss in Central Park. I was still a year away from my first kiss, an awkward swing in the back of the bus, so everything on the screen was intoxicating.
It may seem relatively chaste now, but that was four months earlier American Pie and eight years earlier Gossip girl – and almost two decades since the era of the most casual teen movies Porky’s i Fast weather in Ridgemont High.
It was quite a thing that Cruel intentions not only did it include high school students who spoke openly and engaged in sex, but used it to manipulate and gain power. Dolly The magazine never told us about it.
Not in vain, when I told my American uncle Cruel intentions it was my favorite movie, I was horrified to have seen it at all, talking about how inappropriate it was.
A live video sequel, Cruel intentions 2it was actually a cut from the first three episodes of a prequel spin-off series that had been ruled out because executives found it too risky for television.
When a colleague and I made the trip west a week later to Parramatta’s also-defunct Roxy Cinemas, where it was known they weren’t reviewing IDs, for a second viewing, it had established itself as a piece of pop. culture that would accompany me forever.
I played the soundtrack so many times that the CD jewelry box (which I still have) broke to pieces. I looked for anything that looked like Kathryn’s tops. Oscar de la Renta and Donna Karan were not on my budget.
Fast forward to 2022, about four dozen revisions later, and the Cruel intentions musical is touring Australia. Is good? May be. Sort of. It is much more cheesy and larger than its pointed predecessor. He often approaches parody, but it was also obvious that the audience laughed at it and not at it.
But nostalgia is an incredibly powerful thing, it can transport us to a moment we never let go at all. At the State Theater, in the Sydney stretch Cruel Intentions: The 90s MusicalI was 14 again, deeply obsessed and loving every moment.
The production is a jukebox musical that includes only a few songs from the film’s soundtrack, but is full of ’90s pop hits, ranging from N’SYNC and Britney to Meredith Brooks and Mandy Moore.
The song list surprised me at first (how dare they get into it ?!), confused why Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” was here when it was so strongly associated with She is all of thator “I Don’t Want to Wait” by Paula Cole, which was used as Dawson’s Creek main theme of the second season (I actually preferred “Run Like Mad” by Jann Arden, sssshhh).
This fusion of nostalgia for 90s pop culture was exactly why the musical was so stimulating. It evoked all the goodwill of a different era, taking advantage more than just the Cruel intentions film.
When the cast exploded into a rendition of “Lovefool” by The Cardigans (of which a small excerpt was found in the original film), it brought back memories of playing the Romeo + Juliet The soundtrack was repeated as Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” returned to the audience City of Angels.
Ditties from Boyz II Men, Ace of Base, No Doubt and Marcy Playground, all perfectly incorporated into the story and rhythms of the characters, had the same effect.
But what happens with nostalgia is that you have to be honest about what it really was. Was it a better time? And don’t we just remember and cling to the best moments of any point?
The danger of nostalgia is that it ignores the parts of history that we do not want to remember, but that are essential to understanding who we are right now on a personal, local, and global level.
For many, the current obsession with the 1990s can be attributed in part to the fact that it was a time before 9/11 when the world seemed less frightening and uncertain. But the fear of Y2K wasn’t funny, nor was John Howard’s hug to Pauline Hanson and her racism. And minority groups faced much more open discrimination.
At 14, with furious hormones, dramas at school and at home, my life was not perfect.
And neither was he Cruel intentions, the movie. Not all the performances were consistent, some of the line-up deliveries were creepy, there’s something weird about editing that suggests a couple of scenes were meant to be in a different order, Sebastian’s Hero Journey it is not entirely convincing and some of the sex policies are definitely problematic.
But if you are honest about all this, about what is causing this strong dose of nostalgia and about the ways in which the present also has its ups and downs, then stepping back in a moment, a feeling, an obsession, can be intoxicating and fun. .
Go with him.
Cruel Intentions: The 90s Musical is currently playing in Sydney, followed by Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra