Note: This is my final entry for the King of Pain Blog-a-Thon. Tomorrow I’m hoping to cap it all off by turning the mic over to my fellow bloggers. If you’d like to contribute an entry, this post explains how.

-Hatter

My long, slow journey across the cinematic River Styx is over, and if there was one film that helped me step on to the other shore, it was SUMMER SCHOOL. I didn’t love it exactly, but of all eight films within this crazy caper, this was certainly the easiest to endure. For the uninitiated, SUMMER SCHOOL is about a gym teacher getting grabbed at the last minute on the final day of school and co-erced into teaching a class of deadbeats during the sunny days of summertime. Think DANGEROUS MINDS but without the inner city angst.

Jokes aside, the film actually provided a bit of amusement – mostly courtesy of the wannabe movie critics/class clowns (one of them prefers to be called “Chainsaw” – that never stops amusing), and the Guttenbergian performance put in by Mark Harmon. Things get a little icky when 16-year-old Courtney Thorne Smith throws herself at him, but the movie manages to weather the Nabakov storm and come up smiling.

Oddly enough though, watching the movie exposed me to something fellow blogger Tom Clift mentioned to me in reaction to GHOSTBUSTERS: The rhythm of 80’s comedies feels different. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but the jokes felt…tamer?…more lowbrow? Something was ever-so-slightly different. Like when you make spaghetti sauce but forgot to put in those two tablespoons of oregano. I’m beginning to believe that it’s the hardest part about watching old comedies after the fact: The jokes don’t land the same way they did to the intended audience.

All told, I enjoyed SUMMER SCHOOL. Not enough to own it mind you, but enough not to switch the channel if I found it on TV.

Going through all of these films has been an enlightening experience. It has widened my margin of what constitutes good filmmaking. It has exposed me to what I missed out on growing up (not much!). It has primarily proven my theory that some films don’t play well if you weren’t there at the time – and this goes for more than just the fluff. And it has opened my eyes as to what amuses my wife.

But as much as I like to call her collection The Shelf of Doom, I always remind myself of one thing: Were she to have the exact same taste in film as I do, things would get boring in a hurry. I don’t know about you, but I never envisioned myself starting a life with someone who was just like me. Who wants that? I can barely stand myself some days, the last thing I need is to come home to another “me”. That’s where Lady Hatter having things like different ways to do things, and different tastes is a good thing – at the base level, it keeps things interesting.

I’ve mocked her taste in film a lot this week, but the truth is that I very easily could have filled eight posts with great films from her shelf. Furthermore, there are lots of great films I’ve seen over the last nine years that I never would have actively picked up if it weren’t for her. She can be a source of great cinematic pain…but she has pointed me toward immeasurable film-watching joy as well.

In the end, it more than balances out.