Don't You Forget About: Classroom Comedies

We all feel down this time of year. Hot summer evenings are gone and early chilly mornings are back, heavy textbooks and bulky backpacks in tow, as you begin to the dread the endless nights of cramming and coffee. Aside from school getting cancelled until the end of time, there's not much that can cheer you up. But I can try with this line-up of hilarious forgotten school-themed comedies.

5) Orange County

If you haven't seen Orange County, you cannot profess to be a Jack Black fan. This film is Black at his best: stoned and insane. Shaun Brumder (Colin Hanks) would have gotten into Stanford, even despite a grade transcript mix-up, had it not been for his underwear-frolicking older bro Lance (Black) and his unlabelled drugs. As if that weren't enough, Lance also seduces the admissions secretary and sets the building on fire with their post-sex cigarettes. Yeah, Shaun, your moronic bro just completely ruined your future. And your relationship with your girlfriend. And your entire life.

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4) Never Been Kissed

Josie Gellar (Drew Barrymore) has "never been kissed." Now she's got the chance to re-write her high school life and try to win over Mr. Right. Cliché? Well, yeah, but it's also one of the sweetest rom-coms ever! Josie Grossie (as she was referred to back in her real high school years) is copy-editor who wants out of the mundane crossing Ts and dotting Is, so when she gets assigned the task of reporting undercover at a high school, she's more than ready to return to school and face her frightening brace-faced memories of her own time there. But this time, she's determined to make it different. She's going to be cool this time. Except her mistaken conception of cool is white jeans with a feathery frock, getting every answer right in class and calling her gal pals "girlfriend." You also know it's bound to be good when it fits into the Barrymore filmography right after The Wedding Singer and Home Fries.

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3) Election

Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is madly obsessive. Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) is a complete idiot. Tammy Metzler (Jessica Campbell) a rebel who just wants revenge against her brother for stealing her girlfriend. And they're all running in the high school election while poor Mr. McAllister (Matthew Broderick)  has to monitor it all. Like the two previous films, this film is heightened to awesomeness thanks to one actor and in this case, it's Witherspoon. As the uncontrollable, out-of-her-mind main character, Witherspoon delivers what may be one of the best performances in her entire career. She's so perfectly psychotic as perfectionist Tracy, who is determined to win the election because she can settle for nothing less than the best. If you don't believe me, just watch the scene when one of Tracy's campaign posters won't stay pinned to the wall so in a burst of frustration and madness, she runs rampant through the school tearing down Paul's posters until her hands are bloody. Crazy much?

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2) Saved

Saved takes place at all-Christian school where the convo through the halls is all Christ-love and de-gayification. It's all satirically hilarious fun in a film where friendships fall apart, teenagers fall in love, sexual identities are questioned and loyalty to the Lord is reconsidered. Like I said in my column in June, it's a film brought to life by characters. Jena Malone plays Mary, the girl whose boyfriend just came out of the closet this summer so she decided to try to "help" him by having sex with him to revert him to heterosexuality. Mandy Moore plays Hilary Faye, the leader of singing ensemble the Christian Jewels, who is secretly a Bible-pitching bitch. There's also Patrick (Patrick Fugit), the sweet, understanding new guy who's smitten with Mary. Then there's couple paraplegic Roland (Macaulay Culkin) and badass Cassandra (Eva Amurri), freely defying all rules. As I said before, it's a film all about that "mucky mess that is adolescence."

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1) Billy Madison

Until his most recent letdown of films (see, or rather don't, Funny People and Growns Ups), I was convinced an Adam Sandler film could be nothing short of hilarious. Yeah, I know, Mr. Deeds only had a 17% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and most of his other films only did marginally better than that. But I like to think Sandler films are an acquired taste. Because if you ask me, anything from Billy Madison to You Don't Mess with the Zohan more than rocked my silly socks off. For me, this back-to-school film was the one that started the Sandler saga. In this film, he plays a rich guy who flunked school and has been given the chance, thanks to a little green, to do a crash course through school again to get his degree. I cannot do justice this film's hilarity by explaining. I can only say that if lines like "So hot. Want to touch the heiney." and "Billy's not here. I'm a dog." do not get you then you are missing out on some hilarious, numskull humour.

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Don't You Forget About: Saved!

Sure, it's fun to catch the latest flick at the multiplex, or grab the newest release at a video store, but sometimes you just gotta say, "Out with the new, and in with the unknown." There are plenty of older flicks out there that are worth a rental, but never registered on your radar. In Don't You Forget About, we remember the long-gone gems, so you don't have to.

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Her name is Mary and she's pregnant. And she's a virgin. Kinda. Well, she thought God would restore her because she only did it because Jesus wanted her to save her gay boyfriend. But now he has a boyfriend. And so does she.

Saved! is just the perfect teen flick, incidentally, about not being perfect. Mary (Jena Malone) is a devout Christian, attending American Eagle Christian High School with her Christian best friend Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore). The two, along with Christian friend Veronica, are part of a Christian girl band call Christian Jewels and their lives are full of Christ-love. It's all Bible studies and prayer groups until the summer before her senior year, Mary's boyfriend Dean (Chad Faust) confesses to her underwater that he's gay. After a divine vision from the Lord, Mary realizes that she must do all in her power to return Dean to his straight state. This means make-out sessions, boob-groping and having sex.

It all proves useless when senior year begins and Dean's parents send him to Mercy House, a Christian treatment centre that drug abuse, alcoholism, unwed mothers and apparently, "de-gayification."

The year begins. Cassandra (Eva Amurri), the only Jewish girl and bad-ass at American Eagle, starts dating Hilary Faye's brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin), who lost the use of his legs as a kid and now uses a wheelchair. Patrick (Patrick Fugit) is the new skateboarder with a Vespa and a crush on Mary. Tia (Heather Matarazzo), the geeky chick with too many part-time jobs, just wants to be a Christian Jewel and when Mary starts straying from the clique, Tia gets her dream.

It's really the vibrancy of the characters that make this film come to life. Take Hilary Faye. She's the angelic bitch in the oddest combination possible. She leads prayer circles, yet pitches the Bible at people like a weapon. Oh and she's played by Mandy Moore, the "Candy"-ing singing goldilocks turned Walk to Remember dorky sweetheart. She is the complete anti-bitch and yet in Saved!, no one could have played Hilary Faye better.

Then there's Cassandra. She was rumoured to be a stripper before transferring to American Eagle and she's covered in more smoke than Mary Poppins. What is the Jewish girl with the rotten potty-mouth even doing at that school anyway?

Behind these lively characters is always something deeper. Like Tia, the loser-geek who just wants to be popular, she has serious issues at home. The film never directly explores them but it's tough not to hold a soft spot for her untold stories.

What also keeps the film rolling are its hilarious one-liners. To Hilary Faye, Roland isn't disabled, he just has "different abled-ness." And Pastor Skip's (Martin Donovan) illusions that he's actually cool lead to some gold. He amps up the students at the assembly, "Are you down with G.O.D?!" You almost expect him to answer "Hells yes" but that just wouldn't be appropriate. But by far, the awesome-line trophy goes to Tia. Her first line in the film: "I think Jesus appeared to me in my fish tank!" The real winner though is when she finds out that Dean is gay and says to Mary, "Sorry to hear about Dean's faggotry."

Underneath it all though, it's a film that teens can relate to. Everyone in the film is going through that confusing adolescent faze, the one when you deal with sex and relationships and backstabbers and God. In its exaggeration of two extremes - the perfectionist who crashes hard and the lost girl who finds pure happiness - everyone else seems to fit in somewhere. It's OK when things go wrong, it's OK if you're confused and it's OK if you're gay. It's only part of that mucky mess that is adolescence.