rue-madame's Diaryland Diary

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Special delivery

Special delivery

I got my prescription filled at Target the other day, and was really psyched to have my pills encased in this newly designed bottle. I love Target for championing design. They rock the hardest. They�re number one!

The pharmacist brought the bottle out before even filling it with drugs, to demonstrate the superiority of this design and give me the general blahblah about the new system.

�Oh my god! I just read about this! It was designed by an SVA student as a grad project and Target decided to produce it! That is so cool! Can I have the purple ring?�

The pharmacist was caught off guard, and even TA was surprised at this nadir of design nerddom.

But you know what might even be nerdier? Knowing all the dialogue from Sixteen Candles! Am I�m not talking about me! I�m talking about TA! I sat there, incredulous at not only his perfect parroting of Farmer Ted�s delivery, but also at his near-identical aping of body language and hand gestures! I tell you, you can know someone for 17 years and he can still surprise you. TA was a weensy bit embarrassed to tell you the truth, and screamed �this is not leaving this apartment!� but I said, all Mia Wallace-style from Pulp Fiction �Oh, nononononononono, this is going in the blog and you can�t stop me!�

I lovelovelove that movie so I�m fine with TA knowing it by heart. We both agree that Farmer Ted was way cooler than Jake (I even managed to date a real live Anthony Michael Hall Geek lookalike in high school!), and that Molly Ringwald�s performance in that movie has never been surpassed by anyone else working in the teen genre, in the 1980s or since. Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls or Freaky Friday? Please.

Nothing in the Ringwald cannon can ever hold a candle (winkwink, nudgenudge) to her embodiment of Samantha Baker. Her work as �pushing maximum density� Claire in The Breakfast Club? Merely ok. Andie Walsh in Pretty in Pink? Face it: that movie was ALL about Jon Cryer and The Psychedelic Furs. And the pink theme was a bit contrived.

But Sixteen Candles really is AMH�s movie. I don�t think I fully appreciated the nuances of his performance when I was a teenager. Seeing the film again the other day made me realize how genius he was in it. To think he was only 16 years old when he casually mixed that martini for Jake? You really need to rent the movie and watch that scene in particular: he is so natural in his cool Rat Pack nonchalance. There�s just no way you could think Jake was hotter than him!

In conclusion, I would like to state that I like Truffaut and Wong Kar-Wai as much as the next art film pedant, but you can�t tell me that Sixteen Candles isn�t a good movie, egregious Asian stereotypes notwithstanding.

Back to work�

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