December 13–20, 2001

movie shorts

Not Another Teen Movie

I’ve got this idea for a movie. You know those movies that make fun of a whole genre of other movies? The ones Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen, the Wayans brothers et al. built careers out of? Here’s my idea (and stop me if Mad magazine’s already traipsed down this garden path): let’s send them up: Parody, the Motion Picture. We can even use Not Another Teen Movie as our post-Zucker template. Distilling this paradigm to its essence, we’ll need: a) a game, attractive cast of stock characters (played by extras from the movies we’re puncturing), whom we’ll simply name Hero With A Problem, Misfit, Racial Stereotype, Dork, Bitch, Slut, Horny Slut, Horny Naked Slut etc.; b) the merest gossamer of a plot on which to hang c) appropriated setups and musical cues whose familiarity will breed hilarity and d) as many incest jokes as an R rating allows. We can do a riff on how these movies pack most of their laughs in the trailer and/or the first twenty minutes, and another on the distance afield they need to go to have enough targets to skewer. Do American Beauty and Almost Famous count as teen movies? Does the underage target market for this pap have any chance of knowing who Spicoli is? No matter; if Not Another Teen Movie means there actually won’t be another, I feel confident that the world will be a better place. I hope Parody is equally effective.

—Ryan Godfrey

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; UA Cheltenham; UA 69th St.)