writerly nods to the things you love

I watched the film Charlie Bartlett last night. It's sweet and has moments of nuttiness that are a pure pleasure to watch. It's about a rich boy who has a yen to be popular. After getting kicked out of private school for some badly judged entrepreneurial behaviour he goes to public school where he becomes the student body psychiatrist. I thought I was enterprising when I was in high school (selling school essays, infiltrating the tuckshop), so I related... I didn't mind that the film felt familiar - it harked back to those good high school movies, those high-school-is-just-a-microcosm-of-the-real-world movies like Pump up the Volume and Heathers ...

Just when we were thinking this is a bit like Harold and Maude, Charlie and his love interest (Kat Dennings - so droll!) broke into a duet - 'If you want to sing out sing out ....' - anyway it was sweet in Harold and Maude and it was sweet in Charlie Bartlett too. The film also had Robert Downey Junior, who can do no wrong. It had more that its share of John Hughesisms as well - there was a Some Kind of Wonderful moment when the school bully takes out the well-rooted cheerleader, and there was a nod to Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald's moment of connect in the half-finished shop car (Sixteen Candles).

This made me think a little about my writing. In Everything Beautiful I have some nods to much-loved film moments: the geek and heroine in the car moment being one of them - in EB that's Riley and Bird in the Dune Buggy before she makes her grand escape. Another moment is after the sex scene in the little desert where Riley makes a little monument at the foot of the monster gum - it's a bit like when Martin Sheen plants a rock in the ground after de-virginising Sissy Spacek in Badlands. And those are the ones I was conscious of. There are probably loads more.

I watched He's Just Not that Into You a little while ago and it was as dumbarse as I thought it would be. Ginnifer Godwin's drippy drippy character used this whole Watts - Some Kind of Wonderful analogy throughout, but it felt very forced. It didn't feel to me like the screenwriters actually liked that film, or even understood it. So, less a nod and more of a desperate attempt to pull in a certain demographic.

Mostly I love it when nods and homages and references happen - makes the world like those crazy parallelogram puzzles that you can distort and contract. My writing is always full of the things that I love - sometimes it's not the right place for them, but when it works it makes me feel happy.