I'll write you a letter tomorrow. Tonight, I can't hold a pen.

Can't Hardly Wait — 4/5 (rewatch)

At this point, feels like I'm just rewatching these things to create better context for why I love 'Not Another Teen Movie.' And I think it comes down to NATM not making fun of bad things, but making fun of good things—just the sillier parts of them. 'Can't Hardly Wait' is a banger, the last of a breed of movies about last nights matched with good music and distinct characters wholly identifiable from a yearbook photo alone. (And I think it's got a film-making trick that NATM caught onto which is to bridge transition scenes with off-screen chatter, creating energy where there isn't, which is a trick I think other movies could lean on.) But the cardinal sin lying in the center of it, which NATM pokes at with a knife, is its sincerity. Which it wears well! Ethan Embry embodies a type of guy, in love with the high school beauty, despite the awful things they did to her hair. But the sincerity is something to point at and say "that's stupid" (because it's sincere). I think when people say "they don't make movies like this anymore," I think they are referring to the fact that a movie can be both fun and sincere. CHW came out in 1998 and NATM came out in 2001 and somewhere around here, sincere became the most awful thing you could be. That cynical sentiment was bubbling up in the '90s and so it feels like it's associated with that decade, but actually may have only been cemented until the Y2Ks. The '80s had it in spades, the '90s had their fair share, but the teen comedy boom rusted over during the 2000s and 2010s, yeah? Something was missing in the water. Things like 'Easy A' came along and proved that they could still exist but they felt more like a fluke rather than a sign that the dam was leaking, preparing to burst back open. Ugh anyway, what's my point? I don't have one. This review really went off the fucking rails. "Artists who are hurting, who take knife to skin: it is okay to bleed sincerity onto the screen. It will ruin you. It will make you immortal."