Hacker Cinema
American Pie
1999 · Film · 95 min
Part of American Pie Collection
Directed by Paul Weitz
At a high-school party, four friends find that losing their collective virginity isn't as easy as they had thought. But they still believe that they need to do so before college. To motivate themselves, they enter a pact to all "score" by their senior prom.
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29 comments on Hacker News
Except American movies(and entertainment in general) haven't been good for about 10 years now, it's all slop based on established IP from 20-30 years ago.
When I was a kid growing up in the post communist 90-00s, we were going nearly weekly to the cinema to watch the latest American movies: Blade, Shrek, Toy Story, The Matrix trilogy, LotR trilogy, American Pie, Batman trilogy, Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Fast & Furious, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Wars, Scary Movie, Rush Hour, etc
We couldn't get enough of US entertainment, while now everyone here avoids the new US releases like the plague since it's only cash grabs injected with $CURRENT_DAY identity politics, diversity box ticking based on focus group testing, resulting in sterile, predictable, zero-humor, zero-edge, zero-creativity slop that's not even worth pirating.
Americans have no idea how much soft power they lost worldwide by forcing their identity politics and ideologies in entertainment. Japanese anime and Koran movies and TV shows now run rings around the US entertainment industry.
"It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection."
I honestly believe social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection does a lot less damage to the current generation than partying did to my generation. I can recommend the 1995 Larry Clark movie "kids" for a more balanced view how parties often looked like and which negative side effects they could have. Real life was not like in "American Pie" at all and that is where I guess Gen Z is getting their impression from.
Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.
I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.
A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.
In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.
And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.
I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.
“Can retreating ever inward, pioneering new and more complete ways of irrevocably shedding any vestiges of human contact that simultaneously engender heretofore unseen levels of emotional dependence on a sterile, unfeeling, monthly subscription based phantom in a screen help with dating? Can forgetting humanity so thoroughly that we can only be comforted by the chatbot shaped absence of it help us to find love?” is so funny.
I was trying to figure out why this is so silly to me and I realized that it’s because this is the plot to American Pie. Like, my man you’re doing a serious thought experiment version of pondering whether Jason Biggs’ character learned cool sex tricks by sticking his penis into the pie and if we could all learn cool sex tricks by fucking pies too. The answer was no, they named the whole movie after that scene because that idea was so stupid that every audience would see the comedy in how incredibly dumb of an idea that was
Tech dependency is only bad when it's bad content consumed with that tech.
Ipad toddlers are really only bad because of moonbug entertainment and whatever the heck this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate. If my kid gets addicted to Minecraft, Among Us, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, or any paradox interactive map painting simulator, I know that they are much more likely have a gainful career ahead of them (assuming AI doesn't automate them away, in which case, all such thoughts are forfeit anyway). Load up 50s era cartoons onto that Ipad and I've got entertaining attention span building happening. Swap the language to french and suddenly my kids are learning a new language.
I find it absolutely disgusting how common it is on this forum to see the opinion that "the kids are too tech dependent", and advocating for taking away phones, restricting access to the internet/computers, etc.
A huge amount of these pedagogical luddites themselves only became worthy of working a high paying tech job through their own tech/screen addictions. We should celebrate them here and respect the insane ROI that such addictions provide to us as "hackers". The self-hatred and authoritarian parenting styles advocated here should leave all who witness those who hold these opinions ashamed.
And yes, the kids do have genuine "brainrot" like skibidi toilet or whatever nonsense memes they're making today. I've seen the videos that young kids watch of GTAV characters falling from buildings ad infinitum. We cannot forget the millennial MLG 420 air horn brain-rot of our own era, or the crap TV/movie brain-rot like American Pie, Borat/Bruno, or Reality TV, or the crap from the 90s like bad tabloid talk shows like Jerry Springer, or crap from the 80s designed to sell toys like Transformers, or crap beach movies from the 60/70s like Beach Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, or literally all of Mad Magazine, or formulaic Westerns in the 50s... ?
I for one will relish in high quality entertainment with my child and won't condemn them to getting only tiny glimpses of the wonderful world of art that is within the screen. Addictions to entertainment like books, art, etc are naturally features found in the best writers, painters.
The truth is young women have fallen out of love with dating and "hookups" in general.
Many stats show that the younger generations have less friends, have less sex, etc. They value a life partner or romantic partner more for the stability and less for the "thrill" because living with a permanently online record of their lives and the viciousness of the entire Internet being able to "cancel" you for things you said or did years ago has made everyone a bit less thrill-seeking, a bit less adventurous, etc.
And that doesn't really vibe with dating apps that encourage meeting someone you don't know, your friends don't know, for what's probably going to be a short term relationship.
I think it's a bit of a pendulum effect. We went really hard into hookup culture in the 2000s (just check out all the American Pie type movies back then that would never be made today). Now people are swinging back more to wanting stable relationships that benefit on paper rather than in our hearts and all.
I miss the cheesy but wholesome comedies and parodies of the 1990s and 2000s: Anger Management, Rush Hour, The Cable Guy, American Pie, Scary Movie, Bruce Almighty, Eurotrip, Tropic Thunder, Hot Shots, Borat, Idiocracy, How High, White Chicks, etc.
We can't have any like those in this age because someone on Twitter will claim to be offended. Good thing to back-up those old gems as well before they get cancelled/edited to comply with modern sensibilities.
In the last 20 years more and more movies started delivering appropriate casting for f->m age gaps, mainly because of pr0n revolution and popularity of MILF trope.
American Pie 1999. Jennifer Coolidge -> Eddie Thomas = 19.
Don Jon 2013. Julianne Moore -> Joseph Gordon-Levitt = 21.
Mother Lover 2009 SNL skit is a classic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0DeIqJm4vM. Patricia Clarkson -> Andy Samberg = 19. Susan Sarandon -> Justin Timberlake = 35.
The French Dispatch 2021. Frances McDormand -> Timothée Chalamet = 38.
Comare that to My Tutor 1983 where 8 year difference was still seen risque.
American Pie was a great movie.
"went to a local college at 13 (who lets their 13-year-old live in a college dorm?),"
Sounds like the premise for an American Pie movie.
Why do you think that the "pervy" elements of anime are disliked? Most American teen shows and movies have plenty of innuendo and women with tiny bikinis in compromising situations. Sex comedies like American Pie, National Lampoon, and the Hangover series aren't so different in the kind of humor that one finds in fan service moments.
Yeah, just like the American Pie movies, kids like em, so they're kid movies!
I would be interested to know what teen film people consider most representative of their experience. I love “Dazed and Confused” because it seems like the archetypical US high school experience. I was shocked that the director intended it to convey the boredom of that lifestyle because it seemed approx 1000 times more exciting that my teenager lifestyle in the 00s. American Pie was popular at that time but faaar from reality.
I wonder what films teenagers these days relate to.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
Hopefully it would be better than the related Black Mirror episode (Nosedive), which started with an interesting premise, but handled it in a very crass and immature way, more reminiscent of stupid Hollywood teen comedies (e.g. American Pie).
> No, not everyone, but for most that's reality.
You've been watching to many American Pie movies. College students are insanely focused because they know how tough the competition is. No one has time to party.
I don't think anyone thinks that the new GB movie is a leftist propaganda, it's a bad movie and people now blame the reception on the fact that they've replace the cast with women. They could've used the American pie cast and it would not have mattered they made GB into a Tyler Perry movie that's why it tanked.
Since that word is somewhat noted for its use in the German dubbed movie American Pie, I just wondered what the original uses instead. Apparently: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitbreak
"What was it about the 1970s and early 1980s that made Computer Science more welcoming to women? And what changed? I want the answer to this question too!"
A hypothesis (remember this is only a hypothesis):
What changed was that science and math became way less cooler in the (American) public perception between the 80s and the 2000s.
With the cold war and space race, scientists and engineers were supposed to be the people who took the US to the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were, after all, engineers. The last flight to the moon was in 1972. The Voyagers were launced in 1977. Scientists, astronauts, and their like were cool, for a change. No one cared about who was winning college football when people were going to the moon and exploring the Solar System. My theory is that CS / Engineering got caught along in this wave and experienced strong female enrollment
Later, in the late 90s, and early 2000s, films like American Pie and whatnot came along, and solidified the appeal of the sports-playing jock, and making fun of the "nerds". Suddenly, nerds were the weak, spotty kids who were buried in their math books, and girls did not want to be associated with them. Enter present day, with probably 10% of CS classes in good schools being composed of women (unless it's MIT etc., which preferentially admits women to even the ratios, if I remember correctly)
To see the attitude change, just think of television programs. The scientist/astronaut Major Nelson in I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70) was portrayed as a strong, positive, and socially successful character. The scientists in Big Bang Theory are portrayed as a bunch of socially inept shut-ins who are very socially/romantically unsuccessful and are supposed to be pitied by the audience.
The US is not lagging behind. When it comes to marijuana liberalisation, it is definitely leading the way. With the exception of Netherlands, attitudes to marijuana is pretty strict in Europe. The US has the most pot smokers/capita by a long shot.
Also, Hollywood movies seem to portray it as some cool party drug, that hippies and pseudo-intellectuals use. The drug is present in most American Pie-style movies, many sitcoms and animated series like Family Guy.
Personally I believe marijuana going mainstream is an engineered phenomena. Hollywood is able to create perceptions and demands where none was before. Older generations weren't miserable all the time because they couldn't smoke pot. New generations found out about it by the marketing.
They might be old examples, but 'East Great Falls' was headed straight to video, until it was "accidentally" uploaded and a few months later, after much internet buzz, was released as 'American Pie'. Similarly, 'The Blair Witch Project' was successful at the box office because it too was uploaded "accidentally". Coincidentally, both of these movies' box office release were within weeks of each other and did far better than they perhaps normally would have, if it hadn't been for piracy. Piracy can create a buzz or social network effect when friends talk about movies, that is far more substantial than simply seeing a trailer. A limited amount of piracy does help movie studios and record labels, its just they don't really know how much is helpful, before it eats into their potential revenue or profits.
I'm also Irish and I think the original comment is pretty valid - The point is you would never see a "normal" character in an irish/uk made production drink-driving, it is just a complete taboo. However, a massive amount of American produced shows have the protagonists driving home from the bar, and it is just accepted, which I always find quite jarring. If it was part of the character's image to be a law breaker/troubled/etc, that would be one thing, but "Sideways", the newest American Pie movie and "Dan in Real Life" spring to mind as 3 films I have seen lately which have examples of this casual drink driving. Clearly they aren't documentaries :-) but the American Pie movie in particular is pretty mainstream, so it was really surprising. I think it is reasonable to assume that the US attitude to drink-driving is quite a way behind Ireland.
And on your point on Darby O'Gill - That was an American film depicting Ireland, which was obviously full of stereotypes. The films and tv shows we are talking about are an American view of America, which you would assume should be a little more accurate in terms of attitudes/culture...
Is it possible to use their recommendation engine without being a paying member? I could use some help tracking down more movies in a cluster that's kind of hard to define (think American Pie, Superbad, Fired up!, films of that nature).
Build a production schedule geared around low budget genre films, produced in 12 days and costing an average of $35,000 a piece. Ideally you'd be releasing 50 - 75 films a year.
Interesting. I greatly enjoy tacky high school / college movies (think American Pie, Superbad, Fired up!, that kinda thing), and I would love if there were a LOT more of those on the market. I can't imagine that they are very expensive to make either.
Ooooh... 1999. Fight Club. Go. American Beauty. The Matrix. Boys don't cry. Austin Powers. The Sixth Sense. The Talented Mr. Ripley. The Cider House Rules. Magnolia. Mansfield Park. The Red Violin. Trick. American Pie. ;)
That is despite the fact that installment movies of James Bond, Star Wars, Toy Story, etc., that year.
Everything seemed great that year. Or perhaps if was also a good year for me, and therefore everything seemed good because of that...
I am sure whatever capacity or technical problems they're experiencing are being exacerbated by millions and millions of emails from angry assholes wondering why the hell their $8 a month isn't buying them immediate and perpetual access to a catalog of human creativity and knowledge that would have brought even the most advanced intellectual from 1980 to his knees, weeping tears of joy at the wond'rous advances man has made.
"Surely," he would say between sobs, "surely if man can accomplish this with something as relatively trivial as movies, a hundred years hence will see us spreading our race to the stars."
Unfortunately all most people know or give a damn about is that they shove $8 into the magic box on their desk and it shits American Pie movies. Pan-galactic empire will have to wait, I guess. TV's busted!
Right. American Pie is a movie, Star Wars is a universe. Just about every movie or book with an obsessive fanbase is actually an entire universe.
The only obvious exception I can think of is Rocky Horror, and I don't claim to understand that fandom at all (I've never actually seen the movie). I guess it's still much more divorced from the real world than American Pie is.
American Pie ostensibly takes place in the real world. That's no use to a geeky personality--if a geek wants to get into the real world, he does programming or learns about science or gets into trainspotting or something. But a fictional world means you get to speculate about physics and categorize all the different alien races and starship types you see and so forth, and build vast databases and just lose yourself in what is ostensibly an entire world. This is the type of person who watches Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and makes a mental note of each time they see an Akira-class starship, and then complains when Enterprise comes out because they anachronistically made the Enterprise look like an Akira-class starship. American Pie doesn't have anywhere near this kind of depth of subject--it's just a bunch of dumb teenagers in the real world. (Which is exactly the kind of setting geeks are escaping from in the first place!)
(There's another, largely unrelated appeal to Star Trek and Star Wars: they have genuine heroes. It's very hard to find a TV show or movie today that has genuinely heroic people, it being considered "more realistic" to have flawed heroes.)
Reading the abruptly truncated article, it looks like he's going for the idea that Star Trek evokes a mythological reaction that causes people to be religiously obsessed with it.
Personally, I think he's overstating things. Everything has a fanatical fanbase somewhere. I'm sure there's people who watch American Pie repeatedly, marveling at this amazing piece of cinematography and wondering why other people aren't doing the same.
However, combine that with the following:
1. There is a certain mindset that seems to come out more in the geeks of the world. The obsessive, driving force that makes us dedicate days and hours of our time to a single project, instead of passively consuming, say, romantic comedies. There are people who watch Star Trek and say "Mmm, Star Trek.", and there are people who watch Star Trek, write out technical plans and compare the sizes of all the ships in the series, and recreate scale models of them. There are people who calculate how fast the ship is actually going, how hot a phaser would have to be based on the length of time it takes to burn through material X in episode 1, material Y in episode 2, and call out the writers when it burns through material Z in episode 3 too slowly.
2. In the 70s, there wasn't an internet. There was no real form of escapism for the bullied geeks, no way for them to gather together from across the country in forums based on shared interest. There was just the hope that someday, the brains would win out over the bullying brawn, and Sci-Fi in general, and Star Trek in particular, was the crowning jewel of that time.
3. To that end, the sense of awe you had when you first saw the Enterprise swoop out over the screen, the gasps when Kirk was about to get pummeled by the Gorn, the cheering when he turned the fight the other way-- those feelings are the reason Star Trek was popular back in the '70s. Too, possibly, The Next Generation in the 80s/90s. But after that...well, the honeymoon was over. And it's not really that surprising. As an adult, you can never completely recapture the feeling of nostalgia you had when watching the series for the first time. And instead of realizing that, fans lashed out at the followup series- DS9, Voyager, Enterprise...is it any surprise the franchise had a reboot? But it's too late. The future is literally more fantastic than they could have guessed when Star Trek first came out, and kids are too used to seeing personal communicators with more functionality than Star Trek's from the age of five.
Anyways. The upshot of all of this is that Star Trek managed to hit a sweet spot of mindset, escapism, and time period (pretty much the same as Star Wars did), and that sweet spot is now taken up by other, more interactive media of varying types. It was more a matter of luck than any real sense of the "mythological", and the only reason anyone would think that would be because of their attempt to recapture the nostalgia of their youth, the first time they saw the series.
Edit: I realize that anecdote is not the plural of data, but for me personally, I don't know a single person my age (22) that is a Star Trek geek. The only people I know that collect Star Trek memorabilia, watch and debate the shows, etc. are people who were teenagers when The Original Series came out.