Watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High For the First Time

[MatiasRaudzus]

I've already seen the movie, multiple times, so this is not a review done by me. It is an interesting article.

Growing up, I didn?t realize there was an entire subgenre of movies dedicated to reminiscing about high school. I especially didn?t realize that there was an entire subgenre inside that subgenre dedicated to doing drugs and having sex in high school. The former never made sense to me because I didn?t do anything in high school worth reminiscing about, and the latter made even less sense for reasons that are probably obvious at this point.

High school wasn?t very fun for me, but it wasn?t traumatic or amusing either. I was really small, but it wasn?t a big deal. I was picked on, but not enough to complain about. I was smart, but not enough to apply myself. I had a few good teachers and a few good friends. But mostly, high school is a benign, slightly uncomfortable blur now, and like any other arbitrary chunk of my childhood, sort of pointless to define, let alone romanticize, based on what grade I was in. My identity at 16, in contrast to those of Bueller, Spicoli and Dobler, was embryonic, ambiguous and largely uneventful.

I?m a bit fascinated, then, to be introduced to some of the pillars of those genres so many years after I wouldn?t have related to them. There are some fantastic movies in there: Ferris Bueller?s Day Off, Dazed and Confused, Clueless, and the film I watched for the first time this week, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But instead of reminding me of high school ? let alone striking a chord of fond memory ? these movies play to me like works of pure fantasy: a world in which high school matters, students are the young, ambitious, naive and pure versions of the adults they will later become and the drama and passion of being 16 is immortalized on film because it actually means something to the rest of the world.

http://splitsider.com/2011/03/watching-fast-times-at-ridgemont-high-for-the-first-time/