Talking About School of Rock Every Day

A guest post by Maria Robins-Somerville

Driven by my pure unbridled thirst for Josh O’Connor in or out of a sweater, I said yes to seeing The Mastermind without doing a lick of research. I found myself in the hallowed halls of the Angelika thinking, “I don’t think I’d rather be watching paint dry than watching this movie but I would definitely rather be watching someone mix two colors of paint together for 110 minutes than watching this movie.”

Maybe I was facing karmic justice for my inability to treat my addiction to the delights of infinite scroll. Maybe retribution for the cancelable gender essentialism I’m about to do in this post? Maybe penance for the one time I went with my ex-boyfriend and his parents to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and promptly fell asleep.

Maybe it’s just the reality that I’m on the basic-ass side of movies that Ritam likes to hate prematurely. I have a short attention span and capital R Romantic sensibility that can only be attributed by watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet too many times between 2008 and 2020.

In tribute to the overall “I need to like stuff that girls like Maria may find boring” vibes of this newsletter that I still read each week, I will do a multipart excavation of what happens when I find myself in the famous situation of picking a movie to watch with a friend.

love wins!!

1. I like girl movies.

I know gender is an amazing fluid spectrum but personally I want a movie where a girl is feeling flustered on vacation in a 100% cotton sweater (1.75 Eric Rohmer films).

Or something where Greta Gerwig probably works through her formative crushes on twinks (Ladybird 3x in theaters). I don’t want to watch Dune or Dune 7. I’ve never seen Lord of the Rings and it is way too late for me to find out who the Legolar and Gondola are. The Godfather has been on my proverbial letterboxd watchlist since about 2006. I’m pretty scared of seeing One Battle After Another but I’m gonna try. My exception to this is Fight Club. Fight Club pretty good.

2. Movies are for sleeping

The thing is. I’ve seen the first 15 minutes of about every movie there is. I’m not really a critic I’m just a really sleepy girl with a genetic predisposition to cinema-induced narcolepsy. Next time I come over I’m promise I’m gonna sit in a hard desk chair like at school. It isn’t personal it’s just that the movie you picked probably had a car chase in it. Not that I made it to the car chase.

3. A movie where too much happens has the same effect as a movie where nothing happens.

Too much happening includes but is not limited to

• Car chase (car chase is #1 not for me vibes to the max )

• multiverses, broadly speaking

• guys beating each other up a lot

• Shutter Island-esque stuff

• heists

• yelling (lovers quarrel only exception)

• overlapping plots where there’s all these random characters that i don’t care about w/ 12.5 B-list celebrities on the poster and one of them is randomly revealed to be like…sleeping with his bosses daughter but all turns out okay at the end?

• Sports when I have to know the rules of the game. Vague metaphor about sex and power winning and losing = fine.

Now would you rather watch Josh O’Connor do this or would you rather spend 17 minutes of your life watching him silently put some stuff in an attic??

Sometimes movies where nothing really happens are kind of good, like if they’re in a wood paneled house like in Janet Planet, or it’s a good slow movie with only one word as the title like Boyhood or Moonlight. I can also handle slow pace if they’re in the French Riviera staring at each other but not like, in Framingham Massachusetts (respectfully).

4. Like School of Rock or The Titanic

Class struggles. A sexy underdog guy. Dancing. Generational greats on the come up. Memorable soundtrack. Coming of Age. Bedazzled stuff if you really think about it.

The shipwreck takes up too much of the movie in Titanic which is why School of Rock is actually my number one pick. Plus my main interest and reason for being alive is laughing, which there is less of in Titanic.

“Groupies are sluts – they sleep with the band.” “Paint me like one of your French girls.” “They’ll just wear their school uniforms.” “You let go and I’m gonna have to jump in there after you!!”

Those last four sentences were beautiful lines from two perfect movies I just recited from memory. And you know what movie is not quotable? The French Connection.

This dorky ass cover makes my blood boil.

Picture this. Random weeknight. I am invited to watch a movie with FRENCH in the title (love French stuff). Could be Bonjour Tristesse vibes, could be Rohmer, could be a Mary Kate and Ashley vacation movie!! Hahah noooo fuck that let’s watch a black and white movie from 24 years before we were born that’s just a bunch of guys running around on trains and shooting guns or not while they try to catch a drug dealer?? Narcs alert.

I look at my phone during the movie because what else am I gonna do while my friends are participating in a mass hysteria event of pretending a movie is Not Boring. Text from another friend hits (girl who loves girl movies).

“Something you need to know is that the movie Atonement is amazing.”

Ritam’s Footnote

Maria is neglecting to mention that she led a secession movement from The French Connection—kind of like The Battle of Algiers against the aforementioned French—that resulted in a small kiki/salon type circle of those who also found the movie boring, while the rest of us enjoyed it in peace.

Also, the movie’s not black and white…? But that’s fine. Takes all kinds. God loves us all.

Nabeel’s Footnote

“Yelling (lovers quarrel)” is actually my least favorite shit. That scene in Anatomy of a Fall that everyone loves is corny as hell to me; I also haven’t watched Marriage Story for this exact reason. They can never escape the fact that it’s just someone writing an argument with themselves and making it seem explosive. L