Hacker Cinema
Legally Blonde
2001 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Robert Luketic
Fashionable sorority queen Elle Woods has it all, but, she wants nothing more than to be Mrs. Warner Huntington III. But he dumps her before heading to Harvard Law School. Elle rallies all of her resources and gets into Harvard, determined to win him back. While there, she figures out that there is more to herself than just good looks.
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10 comments on Hacker News
Ask Russian-speakers to recommend a fun iconic movie to watch, and Ivan Vasilievich comes up all the time. I don’t see why, but it does.
Diamond Hand too.
It would be ridiculous if the same were true about Hollywood.
A Russian asks an American what movies to watch, and 8 out of 10 people go back to 1969 to recommend the same one? Impossible.
You’d get everything from Citizen Kane to Hitchcock to Rocky, etc. But you’d also get about 150 great picks from the 80s and 90s, and another dozen from after 2000.
And forget the greats. You’d get Zoolander, Demolition Man, Total Recall, Gremlins, Scream, John Wick, Legally Blonde even… there’s such a wide pool of fun iconic popcorn movies for any person.
Not to mention your Star Wars/Trek/Gate.
These movies aren’t “good” in the sense of being art. They’re good in the sense of people wanting to watch them.
Every n years I rewatch Commando, Con-Air, The Last Starfighter, etc just for kicks. It’s not pure nostalgia- they’re fun movies.
With int’l movies from any given country the list of recommendations is extremely shallow. It’s always one or two iconic revelations from a given decade. Or a couple auteur directors who won all the awards for their think-pieces about the human condition.
I just had the realization that "legally blonde", the comedy movie, may have been a pun on this expression, it makes much more sense now.
When was the last time MGM did something truly creative? They pretty much just churn out the same formulaic franchise films every 2-3 years (James Bond, Rocky/Creed) or do pointless reboots (Robocop, Legally Blonde, Pink Panther). The studio has already gone through bankruptcy and layoffs and is on its last legs. There isn't too much left for Amazon to ruin.
I think there is a huge societal weight that is hard to escape because most sexual liaisons are also social relationships.
We date. We get married. The people we are romantically attached to in a public way get judged by others and that judgement impacts us.
The only way to separate your actual sexual preferences from your desire for social approval is to get involved secretly, out of the public eye. And that's inherently problematic.
How do you arrange such secrecy? Will it come back to bite you later? Can you successfully transition from secret love affair to public association with this person?
The plot for the movie Legally Blonde is rooted in family interference in Elle's boyfriend's love life. She's gorgeous and they are in love but she's not what his family wants for him.
There are countless other such examples in both fiction and the real world. Hollywood even coined a term for marriages intended to cover up socially disapproved preferences for LGBTQ stars during a certain era: the lavender marriage.
The world often interferes significantly with whom we can marry, which means it interferes significantly with whom we can openly be sexually involved with.
It's a quite difficult thing to escape, even for people who simply cannot make those expectations work for them (like gay men being forced to marry women and pretend to like sex with women, a still fairly common occurrence in the world). If your sexual orientation and preferences make those social expectations not overly onerous, the path of least resistance is to just go along to get along, at least publicly and superficially to some degree.
But I suspect it still does enormous harm in ways that go largely unrecognized.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-product-placements-in-tv-and-movies-2012-8#legally-blonde-3
Barter is still a form of payment and all of this screen placement occurs under contract and marketing direction from Apple. I still view that as paid product placement, which is different than if the production included Apple products without any contract or guidance from Apple.
They don't have rights to stream any decent movies
That seems hyperbolic. Just browsing around (I decided to cap this at 5 minutes):
The Interview
Forrest Gump
Major League
Pirates of Carribean
Hot Fuzz
Armageddon
Kingpin
A League of Their Own
Inglorious Basterds
Scarface
Django Unchained
Legally Blonde
E.T.
Days of Thunder
The Princess Bride
Crocodile Dundee
Clear and Present Danger
V for Vendetta
Galaxy Quest
Running Man
Big Trouble in Little China
Talladega Nights
Kill Bill (1 and 2)
Star Trek Movies (including The Wrath of Kahn)
Tommy Boy
Team America World Police
Lilo & Stitch
Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
Wayne's World
Clerks
Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure
Very true, and thanks for not taking offense at my comment.
Did you ever see the movie Legally Blonde? There was a funny scene where Elle was tired of being seen as a dumb blonde, so she bought a MacBook of whatever vintage they made back then and brought it to class. (She was wearing her Playboy bunny outfit when she bought the machine, but that's another story!)
She took the Mac to class and there was one great shot of the whole class from the front of the classroom - so what you saw was the top lids of everyone's laptops. They were all solid black - presumably ThinkPads but they hid the logos - and she had the one lone Apple logo. Guess she didn't fit in after all!
How times change... :-)
That's just it though while Doctor Strange Love (1964) was #32 and Up (2009) was #924 there both vary good movies. There was plenty of recent and fun movies vary low on the list, consider:
Bowfinger (1999), Solaris (2002), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), From the Village to the City (1974), Going Postal (2010), Legally Blonde (2001) that's that's 4913 to 4918.
PS: Granted, rating movies is a huge multi dimensional problem, just ask Netflix, but you don't need a lot of accuracy to find a good movie.
Some of my favorite quotes/comments on the topic:
"Fools go where angels fear to tread" -- "Maybe god is just waiting for a fool." -- (something I read somewhere, I think)
"Impossible means it just hasn't been done before." -- (something my youngest son says -- he may have read it somewhere)
"There is always a first" -- (from the Kung Fu TV series, the old master indicating they will accept him into the priesthood even though he is not full-blooded Chinese)
"Ignorance is bliss" -- (something I often say about overcoming the long list of problems my oldest son had/has, in part because no one gave me the long list of frightening and prejudicial labels he qualifies for until well after I had done all kinds of things other people say cannot be done)
"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done." -- Helen Keller
"What? Like it's hard?" -- Elle Woods/"Legally Blonde", in reply to her ex-boyfriend expressing surprise that she got into Harvard law school (the even bigger punchline is she finds out later he was wait-listed and his daddy had to make a call whereas she got in on her own merits)
If I know anything about Bollywood, I'm guessing this movie will have about as much to do with engineering as Legally Blonde had to do with law.