Heathers: colour me impressed

Heathers is running in the Lighthouse cinema all this week as part of a major 30th anniversary re-release that’s also playing at the BFI Southbank.

“Dear Diary, my teenage angst bullsh*t now has a body-count”. If Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the teen movie that represents the boundless self-actualising optimism that Ronald Reagan wanted in an America where it was always morning in America, then Heathers was the counter-punch of Generation X cynicism and pessimism. There are three girls called Heather and an adopted member Veronica who rule the corridors of Westerberg High till a betrayal from within leads to a violent disintegration for the in-crowd. A film this biting and such a glorious one-off in the careers of writer Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehmann (who moved into script-doctoring and TV directing respectively) could only have come from deep personal bitterness. Winona Ryder stole Beetlejuice from the grown-ups and Christian Slater did the same in The Name of the Rose before they teamed up. Heathers is that rarity, a teen film with teen leads, who are an electric pairing. Winona lived off her performance as Veronica Sawyer for years and Slater did the same off his portrayal of JD, an inch-perfect impersonation of Jack Nicholson.

All the stock characters are present for this dark trip through American high-school life, which takes place in the pre-Columbine ear as is obvious from the muted reaction to the stunt played by JD in his memorable introduction. The stoners, the jocks: “Hey Ram, doesn’t this cafeteria have a no fags allowed rule? JD: Well, they seem to have an open door policy for assholes though don’t they”. The nerds, the airhead bitches: “God, aren’t they fed yet? Do they even have Thanksgiving in Africa? Veronica: Oh, sure. Pilgrims, Indians… Tator Tots. It’s a real party continent”. The hippie teacher, the deranged principal: “I’ve seen a lot of bullshit… angel dust, switchblades, sexually perverse photographs involving tennis rackets”. But these familiar elements are served up in the most vicious teen comedy ever. Instead of putting up with the ritual social humiliations JD and Veronica, after an initial accidental death, begin killing their enemies and make it look like suicide (courtesy of some underlined meaningful passages in Moby Dick, or in one memorable case simply the enigmatic word ‘Eskimo’.). Comedy doesn’t get much blacker than the interior monologues of the various characters. At the first funeral Heather Duke speaks to God: “I prayed for the death of Heather Chandler many times and I felt bad every time I did it but I kept doing it anyway. Now I know you understood everything. Praise Jesus, Hallelujah”.

Anyone who’s ever been picked on in school knows why Heathers is such a cult classic. This film is almost a proto-Fight Club. Superficially Veronica is happy with her life as one of The Heathers. However secretly she hates it, and herself, and when JD arrives at the school he offers Veronica a violent outlet for all her darkest impulses. She writes in her diary: “Suicide gave Heather depth, Kurt a soul, and Ram a brain. I don’t know what it’s given me, but I have no control over myself when I’m with J.D. Are we going to prom or to hell?” Just like Tyler’s Project Mayhem eventually JD’s plan to blow up the school after sneakily getting a petition for mass-suicide signed by everybody proves too much for Veronica to go along with. JD could be like Camus’ take on the ultimate excesses of nihilism: it is not enough to kill myself, everybody else has to die too. And that’s where Veronica rips up the ticket and gets off the ride, because Generation X were damaged romantics not nihilists. If you thought Mean Girls was the sharpest high-school film ever then you like, so need to watch Heathers. Your reaction should be something along the lines of JD’s legendary final words: “Colour me impressed”.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part VII

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

Dead Sparrow

When a movie has its release date shifted repeatedly, when its trailers shout about how many Oscar nominations and actual Oscars its cast and crew have, and when its studio eventually abandons it in the betwixt Oscars and between blockbusters wastelands of March you can draw your own conclusions. Jennifer Lawrence could really use a hit about now, after Passengers and mother!, to prove she can top the box office when not Katniss, and it looks like this creepily hyper-sexualised retread of Nikita is not going to be it. So, far from her deigning to return for another X-Men movie in November, as it initially appeared, it now looks a lot more like the X-Men are doing her a solid by putting her in a big movie guaranteed to achieve a review-proof basic level of box office gold.

 

“You should pick a name that is not my company”

It’s hard to get very excited about the commercials for summer blockbusters that used to be such an attraction of the Superbowl. Too much CGI, too many comic-book movies, too many remakes, reboots, and spin-offs. But if like us you are less interested in the football than in seeing if Justin Timberlake does or does not do a Prince tribute in the Mini Apple, there is one bizarre series of ads this year that will be right up your alley. Check out Keanu Reeves advertising website builder Squarespace via the emotional rollercoaster of creating the website for his own motorcycle company, Arch Motorcycle. Click through for the longer version: https://www.maxim.com/entertainment/keanue-reeves-super-bowl-commercial-2018-1

 

“It’s meant to be ironic” “Excuse me, you need to go back to grad school”

Just over a month after a lengthy piece hereabouts on the Roger Moore Bond movies, occasioned by ITV 4’s absurdist week of nightly 007 outings, comes depressing news. Netflix has put up the Bond back catalogue and the snowflakes, or Generation Wuss as Bret Easton Ellis dubbed them, are not impressed. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5315501/Millennials-watching-old-James-Bond-not-impressed.html) So of course they are performing their displeasure in public, online, as always. I’m not tackling those comments here, but the flap instantly made me think of this scene in Donnie Darko, and how those of us who grew up watching Bond and didn’t turn out moral monsters are now in the role of Drew Barrymore; being hectored not by an uncomprehending older generation, but by youngsters. The ‘you need to go back to grad school’ jibe is also strangely relevant, as these hurlers on the ditch utilise a Newspeak of academic jargon to bludgeon anyone who disagrees with them. Poor old 007…

Enjoy

The work of Rough Magic SEEDS participants Zoe Ni Riordain and Cait Corkery is showcased at the Project Arts Centre in this off-beat Japanese story.

I’ll freely admit defeat in being able to remember the character names, but I’m in good company; the New York Times gave up on them too. There are three older workers in a comic-book cafe in downtown Tokyo (Gerard O’Keefe, Dylan Coburn Gray, John Doran). Two of them are in crisis because a new part-time worker (Ashley Xie) is dating the other member of their Gen X trio. And this girl is only 22. Which blows their minds. The younger workers at the store (Emmet Byrne, Daryl McCormack) don’t care that much, they’re more concerned about one of the Gen Xers melting down at them for their treatment of a homeless guy trying to shuffle into the store. And that’s a whole other story, involving that Gen Xer and his thirtysomething girlfriend (Erica Murray) breaking up with no small bitterness.

It’s kind of hard to keep track of the characters anyway, as playwright Toshiki Okada (translated by Aya Ogawa) mischievously has them narrate what other people say and conduct dialogue on someone else’s behalf to the point where you can momentarily forget whether or not someone is speaking as themselves. And that’s before you add in the disconcerting pre-recorded voiceover of the character’s thoughts which the actors loop into onstage. It’s quasi-reminiscent of Neutral Hero at the 2013 Theatre Festival, down to the long monotone pastiche Bret Easton Ellis narrations; but this is far livelier. John Doran’s long drones are played for huge laughs, his ability to keep going on nigh-endless tangent-heavy qualification-ridden over-elaborate interrogations of the simplest of actions like a Pinter character mashed up with Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim spectacular. Oh, plus the third act is largely karaoke.

Dylan Coburn Gray seemed on the brink of corpsing, hardly surprising given that he had to perform lyrics about mundane blanking by old friends to ‘With or Without You’ and societal pressure to ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby,’ but his was the stand-out performance as the most complicated Gen Xer. Alongside Murray and Breffni Holohan he imparted a growing emotional charge to the karaoke as ‘Someone Like You’ sound-tracked a brutal break-up injunction to just die already, before he revealed his character’s fear of the future. Corkery’s set sadly eschews any comic-book touches, but her costume designs delineate the characters’ attitudes: sharpness for the thirtysomething women, sober matching colours for the twentysomething men, and hipster colour clashes for the Gen Xers. Numerous flubbed lines suggest Ni Riordain could’ve used more rehearsals, but it also made the Cube feel like Dramsoc.

UCD Dramsoc at its best, in the old LG space, a clique of people passionate about theatre crowded into an over-heated cauldron to see a production give it everything.

3.5/5

Enjoy continues its run at Project Arts Centre until the 5^th of December