my careless contagion

It's that time again. It's time for my semi-annual rewatching of Can't Hardly Wait , the 1998 film featuring music of the same ungrammatical name (yes, I briefly wrote about it nearly two years ago in my "That girl" post). What is my fascination with this movie? Perhaps that's too complex to start with. It's a fun, campy movie (that, apparently, still means a lot to many people ). And the main character gets the girl in the end. It's safe to say a lot has changed in the last 22 years. The movie, though, is a time capsule. We've changed. Our world has changed. Things that were okay or even funny in 1998 are no longer okay and funny, as this dumb article points out (leave it to Buzzfeed to miss the point). You can't take things out of the context in which they were created and examine them under the harsh light of today. Things were different then. This movie was never intended to be scrutinized or taken seriously. It was mindless entertain...

*"Can't Hardly Wait" by The Replacements. I love this song. It's grammatically incorrect, but that doesn't seem to bother me. It was included on the soundtrack of the 1998 movie of the same name starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. If you've watched a fair number of movies set in high school, you're aware of certain tropes that exist. There's one that I call "That Girl." You know the girl, the one the (usually) shy guy wants to be with. She's amazing; she's out of his league. She's that girl, the one he's pined for forever. She's the one who can elevate his life in ways he can't even imagine. It could change the whole course of his life if he could just get that girl. Somehow, mustering up the courage or doing whatever is necessary to get that girl would change him from being a loser who nobody knows into somebody. My "That Girl" got away, and I let her get away. The year was 1996. It was one of the most...