if only college were more like the movies
April 11, 2009 4:59 PM   Subscribe

20 movies which make you wish you'd gone to college from UK flim critic Jo Berry.

While Berry is based in the UK, 15 of the 20 films take place in U.S. colleges, and of the remaining five one is A Yank at Oxford.

(Berry is a former reviews editor at Empire magazine, who has written about film for publications such as The Guardian, as well as writing The Essential Guide to TV on DVD: Over 700 Of The Best, Worst And Weirdest Shows and Chick Flicks: A Girl's Guide to the Movies: A Girl's Guide to the Movies Women Love.)
posted by needled (61 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Strangely enough, Legally Blonde is exactly how I remember law school.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:06 PM on April 11, 2009


I do indeed wish I'd been killed by a secret society of rich bastards and a bunch of hubristic med students and also died in a plane crash. Thanks, Jo Berry, for reminding me of those long-neglected dreams.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:07 PM on April 11, 2009


No The Rules of Attraction?
posted by Joe Beese at 5:09 PM on April 11, 2009


I think Jo Berry should have gone to college.
posted by dydecker at 5:11 PM on April 11, 2009 [2 favorites]


No The Rules of Attraction?

Over that, I'd take the plane crash.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:13 PM on April 11, 2009


Hooray for list threads! "How dare they leave off Real Genius!"
posted by carsonb at 5:13 PM on April 11, 2009 [4 favorites]


Flatliners? Fucking Flatliners? It's an alright movie, but it sure as hell didn't make me want to attend medical school.
posted by mannequito at 5:13 PM on April 11, 2009 [3 favorites]


Animal House, eh? That's odd. If anything, I would've thought that movie would inspire kids to want to design parade floats.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 5:15 PM on April 11, 2009


No Back to School?

I loved it when he hired Kurt Vonnegut (played by himself) to help write his English paper.
posted by eye of newt at 5:16 PM on April 11, 2009 [3 favorites]


Mazes and Monsters made me want to go to college _and_ be a dork
posted by bottlebrushtree at 5:19 PM on April 11, 2009


Kurt Vonnegut in Back to School.
posted by eye of newt at 5:21 PM on April 11, 2009


The Paper Chase was a great film, though. I even liked the TV series, which for some reason reason few do.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 5:23 PM on April 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


I though this thread would be about movies that were awesomely clever where most of the jokes/dialog went over my head and I wished I had gone to college so I could understand what a great movie I wasn't missing. Like Futurama.
posted by lyam at 5:24 PM on April 11, 2009 [2 favorites]


College is no more RL than this is. I think I have a bit more walking away from it cred than most people, what with my 96 hours, 3.49 GPA and no degree. Not to mention my Dad the physics professor whose exams I liked to take as a hobby when I was in high school. I hated school, I hated it with the passion of a million suns and I still do. I think if I had grown up in the world some people want to create where there is no summer vacation where you can be away from the Leviathan, I would have almost certainly killed myself. You can learn certain things in such a structured envirnonment, and it might even make sense to submit kids to it for a few years to make sure they'll be able to work their iPhones. But for twelve years, then college, and demanding that you go into dept to your eyeballs for the privilege...

Fuck that and the society that invented it. In the skull. With a knife.
posted by localroger at 5:30 PM on April 11, 2009 [7 favorites]


eye of newt: "No Back to School?"

To this day, whenever I wander into the Drama section of Barnes & Noble, I have to suppress the impulse to call out "It's on me! Free Shakespeare for everybody!"
posted by Joe Beese at 5:31 PM on April 11, 2009 [4 favorites]


"Fuck that and the society that invented it. In the skull. With a knife."

Are you serious? You're trolling right? (I hope so anyway.)
posted by oddman at 6:08 PM on April 11, 2009 [1 favorite]


He's probably talking about liberal arts degrees.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:13 PM on April 11, 2009


8. Hoop Dreams (1994)

Uh...no. Hoop Dreams follows those two kids through high school only. They only just kind of mentioned where they went to college.
posted by NoMich at 6:16 PM on April 11, 2009


Is it me, or are these just 20 random movies that sort of had something to do with college?
posted by dirigibleman at 6:32 PM on April 11, 2009


Where is PCU on that list?

"These, Tom, are the Causeheads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it... for about a week."
posted by mightygodking at 6:40 PM on April 11, 2009 [3 favorites]


NoMich, you may have noticed that the author doesn't quite seem to realize that law school and college aren't the same thing, either.
posted by bettafish at 6:55 PM on April 11, 2009


But for twelve years, then college, and demanding that you go into dept to your eyeballs for the privilege

I don't think I'd want to live in a country where you can be a doctor with just an undergraduate degree.

Sorry, there's something to be said for the Leviathan.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:58 PM on April 11, 2009


oddman and civil_disobedient: I am not kidding. CD, you might want to look up the history of what was required to be a doctor historically; it was not always considered the path to virtual godhood we consider it today. And having pretty much grown up in school, living with the backbiting and stupid politics and fucked up pretentiousness from an age when most people don't even know such things exist -- I think I that even if you've gone through the shredder and gotten your certificate, I probably know more about the process and the means behind it than you do.

We are not what Stephen King so memorably called College People here. We are on the porch. And that metaphor is only one of the small things that made The Tommyknockers the best novel the man ever wrote, flawed as it was in many other ways.
posted by localroger at 7:18 PM on April 11, 2009


And no mention of The Graduate. I always wanted a future in plastics. That, or snapple. At least he didn't just refer to IMDB's list of 'Best "College" Titles'.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:29 PM on April 11, 2009


The Freshman sort of made me want to go to college, but regrettably, none of the schools near me had a major in komodo dragon husbandry.
posted by FelliniBlank at 7:49 PM on April 11, 2009


I don't think I'd want to live in a country where you can be a doctor with just an undergraduate degree.

That'd be most of the world, minus the U.S. and Canada. Same for law, except that I think that Canada has that one as undergrad, too. And it's why the writer of the article doesn't pick up the distinctions.
posted by dilettante at 7:53 PM on April 11, 2009


Hahaha, yes, less education for doctors is what this world needs.

Homeopathy, vitamin megadoses, and acupuncture for all!
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:26 PM on April 11, 2009 [3 favorites]


I don't think I'd want to live in a country where you can be a doctor with just an undergraduate degree.

That'd be most of the world, minus the U.S. and Canada. Same for law, except that I think that Canada has that one as undergrad, too. And it's why the writer of the article doesn't pick up the distinctions.


Yeeees, but that's a little deceptive. An English undergraduate degree in medicine takes six years, compared to the three years that it takes to get a bachelors degree.
posted by atrazine at 9:10 PM on April 11, 2009


Huh, no History Boys?
posted by Demogorgon at 9:59 PM on April 11, 2009


Yeah, this list is silly without Real Genius or Threesome.
posted by heathkit at 10:23 PM on April 11, 2009


dilettante, a JD in Canada is a "bachelor of laws" (LLB) but it's not an undergrad degree. Same 3 years of law school as in the US.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 11:53 PM on April 11, 2009


Eh, we let drug companies use stereo-isomers of existing drugs as de facto patent extensions; we might as well demand our doctors take enough chemistry to know when they're being conned.

Critics allege that the drug's successful predecessor Omeprazole is a mixture of two mirror-imaged molecules (esomeprazole and romeprazole), and that the company was trying to "evergreen" its patent by patenting the pure esomeprazole and aggressively marketing to doctors that it is more effective than the mixture, claiming that romeprazole has no beneficial effects on the patient. However, in the acidic environment of the parietal cells both esomeprazole and romeprazole are converted to the same active drug which stops the gastric acid production.
posted by kid ichorous at 1:09 AM on April 12, 2009


Where is PCU on that list?

"These, Tom, are the Causeheads. They find a world-threatening issue and stick with it... for about a week."


PCU was my introduction to George Clinton and Parliament. For that I am ever grateful.
posted by gc at 1:53 AM on April 12, 2009


No Rounders?

Fail.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:09 AM on April 12, 2009


College is no more RL than this is. I think I have a bit more walking away from it cred than most people, what with my 96 hours, 3.49 GPA and no degree. Not to mention my Dad the physics professor whose exams I liked to take as a hobby when I was in high school.

Yeah, I think you'd have had a bit more walking away from it cred if your dad had been a garbage man and you'd had a 2.49 GPA. *That's* when it takes real balls -- when you know that you're almost certainly kissing goodbye to your prospects of joining the middle class and joining the working poor forever.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:18 AM on April 12, 2009 [1 favorite]


The Skulls?

What an ill conceived list.
posted by fire&wings at 4:55 AM on April 12, 2009


We are not what Stephen King so memorably called College People here. We are on the porch. And that metaphor is only one of the small things that made The Tommyknockers the best novel the man ever wrote, flawed as it was in many other ways.

For example, flawed by the fact that it was written by somebody who wouldn't recognise decent writing if it arose from the dead after having been interred in an old Indian cemetery and bit his redundant head off?
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:23 AM on April 12, 2009 [2 favorites]


Peter, if my Dad had been a garbage man he would have made considerably more money than he did as a college professor, and there would have been no blowup followed by 17 years of not speaking to him when I announced that I was quitting school, because the prospect of being part of the "working poor" would not be a source of horror but normal.

The guy with the 2.49 GPA would know something I did not, and which you don't seem to know, and which they do not teach you in college: You can do quite well for yourself without a degree. You do need other qualities, but if you work hard, if you can make deals, if you learn a trade, you may be "working" but you will not necessarily be "poor." In fact, your job may be considerably safer in a down economy than that spiffy middle class job that puts you in an office instead of a garage and has you wearing a suit instead of coveralls.
posted by localroger at 7:05 AM on April 12, 2009


Your mom goes to college.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 7:38 AM on April 12, 2009 [1 favorite]


I'm always amazed that no one ever called Animal House out for being the proto-fascist -- or at best -- reactionary comedy ever made. Why is it funny that a crude lout takes a guitar out of a man's hands and smashes it against a wall? Bluto seems to be acting out Herman Goering's famous line, "When I hear the word art, I reach for my gun." When this movie first came out, I laughed along with everyone else. But I felt a kind of shadow pass over my soul. It was really a turn for evil on the part of our Baby Boom generation's culture.
posted by Faze at 8:15 AM on April 12, 2009 [1 favorite]


Is it me, or are these just 20 random movies that sort of had something to do with college?

I'd say.
posted by astorygirl at 8:36 AM on April 12, 2009


I'm always amazed that no one ever called Animal House out for being the proto-fascist -- or at best -- reactionary comedy ever made. Why is it funny that a crude lout takes a guitar out of a man's hands and smashes it against a wall? Bluto seems to be acting out Herman Goering's famous line, "When I hear the word art, I reach for my gun."

I'm sorry, Faze, but I can't agree with this. Animal House is all about cheering on the slacker, no goodnik fraternity (almost counterculture, really) as they battle all authority groups: the college dean, the blue-blood old money fraternity, the fraternity system itself and even the military. OK, so it's not about promoting peace, love and unity, but I can't see it as proto-fascist or reactionary when authority itself is being mocked.
If there is one film that you want to dismiss as proto-fascist or reactionary, take a run at Forrest Gump. Please.
posted by NoMich at 8:55 AM on April 12, 2009


For example, flawed by the fact that it was written by somebody who wouldn't recognise decent writing if it arose from the dead after having been interred in an old Indian cemetery and bit his redundant head off?

Disagree. I haven't read The Tommyknockers, so I don't know, it may be crap, but King sometimes does great stuff. I think his story "Hearts in Atlantis" completely captures the essence of what being in college feels like, actually.
posted by naoko at 9:01 AM on April 12, 2009


I can't BELIEVE Old School is down at #17. Move it up!
posted by Westgate at 9:08 AM on April 12, 2009


Brideshead Revisited miniseries has the most over-the-top parody of Oxbridge types. Maybe not even over-the-top in Waugh's day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIgwiKxEMI8&feature=related

The golden age when university consisted mostly of hanging around with a small bunch of aristocratic male fops drinking excessive quantities of excellent champagne. Either that or inventing quantum mechanics in your bedroom. Possibly both if you were really hardcore.
posted by snoktruix at 10:04 AM on April 12, 2009


I should learn about HTML one of these days. blah
posted by snoktruix at 10:05 AM on April 12, 2009


College is the most awesome thing ever. I never want to leave. After I get my PhD (this summer, fingers crossed). I want to just keep right on getting more degrees. College is like an island utopia in the middle of a hurricane.

Also, great vacation schedule.
posted by oddman at 10:08 AM on April 12, 2009 [3 favorites]


What NoMich said about Forrest Gump, IMO one of the most awful movies ever made. Not that that has anything to do with the topic du jour.
posted by localroger at 10:45 AM on April 12, 2009


oddman, I wouldn't argue that college is a great place for persons of a certain temprament. What I would argue is that much of the appeal is based on an enormous lie, which turned from being a promise to a lie right around the time that I left high school. Nowadays young people are expected as a matter of course to rack up an enormous debt for the privilege of waving that sheepskin around at the job fair, in fact "special" debt that can't be discharged by bankruptcy when it turns out there aren't any jobs to be had this year. As it has been offered to us since 1980 or so, going to college is an enormous gamble which many people lose. And if you are going to end up in retail or working as a mechanic anyway because the economy crashed or there's a glut of people who share your major, you're much better off starting out younger and with no debt.
posted by localroger at 10:52 AM on April 12, 2009


Yes, well if your whole point is that going to college can leave you badly off when our society and economy experience one of the worst periods in the history of this country, I'll still take my chances.

Besides the people forced to take the jobs you mention have the option, because of that so-called sheepskin, to get better jobs (i.e. the jobs that they want) when the country recovers.
posted by oddman at 11:42 AM on April 12, 2009


Hitler loved shrimp, it being the fruit of the sea. He liked all kinds of shrimp. Pineapple shrimp. Lemon shrimp. Coconut shrimp. Pepper shrimp. Shrimp soup. Shrimp stew. Shrimp salad. Shrimp and potato pancakes. Shrimp and sauerkraut. And in his final months, shrimp and methamphetamine.
posted by raysmj at 12:37 PM on April 12, 2009


llocalroger, do you have any idea of what the typical "garbage man" earns and what the average college prof earns? And how perks, working conditions, and prestige compare? Did your dad ever actually tell you what he earned?

Yes there are junior faculty at some schools (in the US) who are making barely enough to repay their student loans, but really, the fact that you're labouring under such ridiculous misunderstandings when your dad is a PROFESSOR and when you have benefitted so absurdly from his cultural capital is pretty shocking and, I think, deliberate on your part.

My dad was in the same ilk as a "garbage man"- an assembler at a Ford Factory. 9th grade dropout. I am a professor. My life is better than his on every imaginable level, and my salary is more than double what his was in his best years (yes, controlling for inflation)- and I have at least 15 years until retirement. You cannot possibly say that I'm not far, far, FAR better off then he was. On any measure.

I had the misfortune (among many fortunes, I admit) to attend Reed College, 2000 miles from home, as the only truly working-class, first-generation kid I ever knew of on that campus. I had to listen to the children of college profs, and Reed collected these by the hundreds, complain about what a drag it was to have dad (or mom) doing whatever horrible things college profs do to their kids. I wanted to bash these privileged little shits' skulls in.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 3:02 PM on April 12, 2009 [6 favorites]


College is like an island utopia in the middle of a hurricane.

College is pretty nice, yeah. But (present recession aside) shortly after you leave, you discover this magical world where ou get paid money to do work, instead of you paying money to do work. A place where you do the same things, but where wealth flows to you instead of away from you. And then you discover some of the cool things that you can do with disposable income, and suddenly it becomes a whole lot harder to want to go back.

Just giving you a heads up. ;-)
posted by -harlequin- at 3:31 PM on April 12, 2009 [1 favorite]


"College is pretty nice, yeah. But (present recession aside) shortly after you leave, you discover this magical world where ou get paid money to do work, instead of you paying money to do work. A place where you do the same things, but where wealth flows to you instead of away from you."

College, you were doing it wrong.
posted by oddman at 6:45 PM on April 12, 2009


ethnomethodologist, I know exactly what my father, a tenured professor of physics, made, and I know exactly what garbage men make. I work with people of both stripes every day and I can say with some confidence that neither knows the other. My father would have been much better off in industry, but he found comfort in the academic environment. There are places in academia where he might have been better off, but there are a limited number of those slots and he landed where he did in other hard times, in a secure spot as the token white professor at a black university. He had tenure but wasn't highly paid. I very thoroughly understand why he valued that.

I work every day with people who are much better off than my parents were who didn't have college. I was making more than my father ever did in his life when I was 28. I have also seen the wisdom of street engineering when compared to what comes out of the offices of degreed engineers -- the hackers who can weld while holding a conversation don't really know what engineers do that they can't, but to their discredit the engineers don't know what those guys do either. I walk a weird line between those two worlds and I have respect for both, but I also understand what is wrong with both.

Class shows through. I know a couple of people who are total fools, raised by one of these extremely successful blue collar guys to "better themselves." This pair of neauveau riche doctors is building a three million dollar monument to insanity in a neighborhood near me, with ten thousand square feet of floor space and a forty foot high ceiling in the grand room. They are currently trying to figure out how to manage the changing light bulbs problem. At least they are thinking of it, probably because the groom's practical blue-collar Dad is in the picture. Meanwhile, they are planning on having an income fit to make the note on this thing for thirty years. They are not connected rich people with the kind of contacts that keep that kind of thing going when times turn tough; it is an entirely foolish and stupid thing they are doing. But they graduated from college, so I suppose that makes it smart.
posted by localroger at 6:53 PM on April 12, 2009


Oddman: Besides the people forced to take the jobs you mention have the option, because of that so-called sheepskin, to get better jobs (i.e. the jobs that they want) when the country recovers.

Not really. If you don't find a job within a year or two of graduation, your degree pretty much isn't worth the ink used to print it. You see, there is another crop of graduates coming up after you, with fresher knowledge and no year of working at Starbucks on their resume.

When I was in school, it was taken as a matter of course that your engineering degree is *completely* worthless after five years. I understand it's not so bad in less technical sectors, inasmuch as those degrees are worth anything to start with.
posted by localroger at 7:01 PM on April 12, 2009


true. after five years, the queue of people waiting to fellate you (figuratively) as a law graduate normally drops from about seven hundred to approximately six hundred & fifty.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:11 PM on April 12, 2009


true. after five years, the queue of people waiting to fellate you (figuratively) as a law graduate normally drops from about seven hundred to approximately six hundred & fifty.

As a math major and classicist I admit that the efficient lawyer-fellatio solution eluded me up until I remembered Plato's Ouroboros.
posted by kid ichorous at 7:46 PM on April 12, 2009 [2 favorites]


Figuratively of course.
posted by kid ichorous at 7:48 PM on April 12, 2009


"The Freshman sort of made me want to go to college, but regrettably, none of the schools near me had a major in komodo dragon husbandry."

Ironically The Freshman made me wish I'd avoided college so I could say wistfully but slyly "So, this is college....heh...I didn't miss nothin'"

But I would still want to smuggle lizards into New Jersey in a film noirish setting.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:49 PM on April 13, 2009


Huh, no History Boys?

It's a bit of a stretch, IMHO. It'd make more sense on a list of N movies which make you wish you'd subjected yourself to the stresses of the college application process, along with The Perfect Score and Orange County*.

*I know, neither of those films are very good, but they're topical, okay?
posted by thisjax at 7:49 PM on April 13, 2009


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