Road Trip

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Blockbuster Video jewel cases
• Tom Green (specifically this scene):

When American Pie was released, in 1999, it was hailed as the rebirth of the “post-teenage gross-out genre” of the 1970s and 1980s. The ancestor it was most frequently compared to in particular (by, among others, the New York Times) was Porky’s, the 1982 comedy about horny high-schoolers desperate to sneak into a strip club. And why not? Both featured a pact of teenagers pledging to rid themselves of their virginity with humiliating, terrifyingly sexual results. And both featured a handful of tent-pole hard-R scenes designed to firmly cement the movie as a gross-out classic. (Porky’s had its hole-in-the-girls’-shower scene; Pie its pastry-fucking shot.)

But the comparison isn’t totally correct. Unlike Porky’s, which was a fun-but-nihilistic romp, American Pie had heart. Granted, that heart was interlaced with scenes of girls drinking semen-spiked Coors, but it was there. Just look how the film ends: two of the four friends may engage in wild, eyebrow-raising sex worthy of Lambda Lambda Lambda (Finch hooks up with Stiffler’s mother, while Jim has a kinky one-night stand with band geek Allison Hannigan after she famously informs him where a flute was once inserted). But the remaining two friends, Oz and Kevin, are used by the filmmakers as sermonizing tales on the dangers of rushing into sex, and the benefits of “waiting for the right time” (cue ’90s educational health class video theme). No, American Pie is less like Porky’s and more like rebirth of John Hughes’s mildly-naughty but ultimately heartfelt teenage films – a Sixteen Candles for the American Online set.

Road Trip is, in fact, the film that proudly picks up where Porky’s left off. It is a movie for frat guys who considered American Pie on-par with a Merchant-Ivory picture. Who considered There’s Something About Mary a flick “for pussies.” The film stars Breckin Meyer as Josh, a desperate college student who enlists three  friends (including Sean William Scott, a/k/a American Pie’s “Stiffler,” that movie’s only morally vacant character) to embark on a road… um… venture from Ithaca University in New York to the University of Austin in Texas to recover a personal sex-tape (starring a topless Amy Smart, whispers my 15-year-old self excitedly while grinning a set of silver braces) accidentally mailed to his long-distance girlfriend.

It is here I should stop to focus on this driving plot of Road Trip. Its entire plot, its entire reason for existing is predicated on the act of communicating with a friend by parcel-mailing videocassettes halfway across the country. Much like Scream 3’s gags about cell phone memory, this plot-point places Road Trip at a very specific technological moment. It is not an archaic look at the early days of computers like WarGames, nor does it feature cutting-edge technologies. Instead, it lies somewhere in the Late Cretacious Period of the World Wide Web’s history in America. In 2000 the Internet was alive and well. Even non-technophobes Had Mail. This was, after all, a full two years after Nora Ephron had Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks soft-core cyberfuck each-other through dial-up modems.

What we didn’t have was bandwidth. Or at least not enough for the casual 2000 websurfer to easily share videos. DSL and other broadband services existed, but were by no means ubiquitous. (According to an article in the UK Telegraph, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much digital space as the entire Internet in 2000). If only Road Trip’s Josh had waited two or three years to sleep with Amy Smart, this whole situation could have been avoided with the purchase of a webcam. His crisis, however, wound up being a eerily precient warning about the dangers of leaked sex tapes that would go on to haunt various celebrities, fuled by the Internet, in the decade to come.

We’re treated to another example of the emerging Internet culture (and its dangers) during Road Trip’s climax, as Josh and his compatriots arrive at the University of Austin’s mailroom to demand the sex tape (the one with topless Amy Smart!). As they approach, they’re cut off by an uptight clerk typing frantically away on a laptop computer, reading with pride his online destination: “www dot Episode II, dot spoilers, backslash…” Not only does this hark back to a day when people were still looking forward to new Star Wars movies, it introduces the pop-cultural world to a new villian: the net nerd, prowling for spoilers and scoffing at the real-world problems of the decent folks in front of him. And what happens when the gang gets physical with him? He leaps from his computer and beats the shit out of them.

The message is clear, and we should have seen it coming: the Internet larkers are coming. And they are stronger and more violent than they look.

28 Days

In 28 Days, Sandra Bullock plays a boozy New York writer who gets sloshed at her sister’s wedding with Dominic West (what McNulty fan woudn’t?), crashes a limo into a nearby house, and is sentenced to a stint in rehab. Bullock arrives at the wooded retreat grudgingly — a city-smart gal who, even in 2000, is constantly talking on a mobile phone or typing away on her ThinkPad. Soon enough, though, her harsh exterior is melted by a community of loveable recovering addicts whose damaged lives we can only imagine (and have to, since this brutal analysis of addiction is rated PG-13 and doesn’t really want to show the, you know, unpleasant side of addiction).

This Sandra Bullock — stern, no-nonsense, a little bitchy — is the Sandra Bullock we know today. But it is a nice reminder of Ms. Bullock’s earlier, action-packed days that 28 Days should be most frequently rememberd for the abstract reason of not being Danny Boyle’s zombie thriller 28 Days Later.

The year 2000, in which 28 Days was released, nicely cleaves the collected work of Sandra Annete Bullock into two halves. And the first of these halves was Bullock’s breakout era of the mid 1990s, which includes testosteriffic blockbusters like 1993’s Demolition Man and Speed. Among the time traveling and exploding busses of those films (not to mention Dennis Hopper), Bullock emerged as the perky, spunky, Alanis Morissetey new face of Hollywood actresses. (In its review of Speed, The New Yorker called her “Claudette Colbert in the age of hard rock.” Which sounds like it was written by the oldest and whitest human being on Earth, but the point of which is still valid.)

Let’s compare that with the late ’80s , when Norma Rae and Working Girl had already hit theaters, when female empowerment was a perrenial 20/20 installment, and when Michael Crichton was writing Disclosure. Back then your typical female lead was Sigourney Weaver or Melanie Griffith: strong women with powerful permed hair and padded shoulders that made them resemble linebackers more than actresses. Women who could emasculate even Harrison Ford:

If this photograph hasn’t sufficiently tripled you’re blood’s estrogen content, I recommend viewing the music video for Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run,” from the Working Girl soundtrack. (I’m 90% sure I grew fimbriae after one play):

Young Sandra Bullock represented a dramatic shift from Sigourney Weaver’s Reagan-Era alpha-woman. She was, arguably, Generation X’s first female superstar (like a higher-paid Blossom). She wore floppy hats with sunflowers on them. She looked like Phoebe from the first season of Friends (or Wynona Ryder from Reality Bites). She probably owned a few pairs of overalls and a sang along to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” while recording a road trip on Hi 8. She was decidedly of her time. (Who else but Sandra Bullock could have starred in The Net, a picture about the looming threats of of dial-up modems?)

In my adolescent version of a perfect world, Sandra Bullock would have remained the sweet, happy-go-lucky fifth-grade teacher’s assistant whose floral blouse I’d stare down when she leaned over to help me with my long division. But this obviously wasn’t what Ms. Bullock aspired to – which brings me to the second act of her career. Ten years ago, Bullock abandoned her perkiness and never looked back. No more zany, free-spirited bus drivers or futuristic San Angeles peacekeepers. No more Forces of Nature. No more Practical Magic. Not even another Hope Floats.

2000’s 28 Days would be our last taste of that Sandra Bullock. The same year, Miss Congeniality was released. A major turning point. Miss Congeniality represents a clear and sudden turn of Ms. Bullock’s toward stern, powerful women – women who wouldn’t hesitate to plow their SUVs into the old, perky Sandy’s ‘96 Geo. It is telling that the plot of Miss Congeniality concerns a woman who must fundamentally alter her personality for her career.

In particular, last year highlights the post-Congeniality Bullock. She received 2009 Golden Globe nominations for two roles (in The Proposal and The Blind Side) as assertive, steely women who probably wouldn’t let their Honor Roll kids watch Demolition Man, let alone star in it themselves. For reference, check out the first 25 seconds of the Blind Side trailer. You can almost sense the 20th-century Sandra Bullock fade away amid a chorus of middle aged working mothers snapping, You go girl: