Kendra Brea Cooper
They are supposed to be the best years of your life but high school is more like a society with its own order and version of reality. Much of the time it’s a dystopian universe where cliques are tribes and there’s a constant struggle for power.
Take the cliques out of the high school and cram them into a house and see what happens. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Lauren Ambrose, Seth Green, and Ethan Embry star in this movie about the hurricane of fate and cleaning up the morning after. High School feels like its own little world where nothing is going to change and social standing is the only thing that matters. The house party is like limbo before entering another stage of life. Except this limbo is like a social blender that shakes their identities and spits them out in different directions.
Aliens take over the school and plant themselves in the heads of teachers and students. Six kids from different cliques fight them off in order to save humanity. The dilapidated high school is a stand in for a broken society and the alien is an allegory for a destructive ideology that sets out to make everyone conform. Maybe it's just a movie about aliens that take over a school. However you see it, I'm sure we can all agree that it’s nice to witness the outcast save the day.
The picturesque Cradle Bay is a small town where the high school students are forcefully encouraged to rid themselves of that pesky teen angst. The force is a brainwashing technique done by the school psychologist. Once more we see a movie that plays with the anxieties of the social order and how high school is a filter for society. The brainwashing is almost perfect except for the relapses and violent fits that follow. That’s because repressed desires always find a way to the surface and society is all about sinking the unwanted.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Lead Character Leanne (played by Katie Holmes) has a shot at Harvard because she has always followed the rules. The only thing in her way is the hard to please Mrs. Tingle who seems to want to punish her for her potential. A hostage situation takes place and a struggle for power transpires. Leanne will not be held back from her well earned place in society while Mrs. Tingle holds on to the only power she’s given in life as a high school teacher.
Pop culture and all that ideology sitting in the blind spot. Also crafts.
