Do you need something to do on a rainy day? Are you worried that you will forget what it’s like to be a student? Or do you already miss school so much that you could use a little mental road trip back to campus?
Get the popcorn ready, find the perfect spot on the couch, turn off your phone and join me on a tour through five decades of college themed movies. We have old classics and new goodies – hopefully there’s something that strikes everyone’s fancy!
Legally Blonde (2001)
I know you are wondering when you can finally eat all the pizza, the popcorn, and the ice cream you have saved up from last week’s movie. Fear not. This film will be perfect to eat all those snacks in frightening quantities. Run to the kitchen, I’ll wait here.
As announced last week, we are making a 180-degree turn. We go back to campus, we change coasts, we follow a young woman and we do all this in a very fashionable, and pink way: Legally Blonde. Yes, it’s the chick flick. But please, don’t roll your eyes like that; it’s not as blond as it sounds.
The story is pretty simple: Handsome boy breaks up with beautiful girl. Girl wants boy back and studies her cute patootie off so she gets into the same law school as boy. At Harvard, girl finds her true calling. And the boy, well he’s still handsome.
Reese Witherspoon is perfect as Elle Woods and it’s impossible not to like her. She is the perfect mixture of being adorable, innocent, cheery, sprinkled with a lot of, let’s call it blond naiveté. As her dad puts it when Elle tells him that she want to go to law school, “Oh, sweetheart, you don’t need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious. And you, button, are none of those things.”
So of course Elle gets a wake-up call at Harvard. But she does what we should all do when we feel that our dreams and reality collide: Take the best from both worlds, listen to your heart and just go with it. With enough determination and the right accessories, you can achieve anything.
Even though the title and the story line make the movie sound very superficial, it’s surprisingly sarcastic. A lot of jokes are hidden, come out of nowhere and you might not catch them the first time. Legally Blonde does have its fair share of dirty and mean jokes, beautifully wrapped with a pink bow!
And if all else fails and you can’t stop rolling those eyes: Apparently Reese Witherspoon’s characters wore 40 different hairstyles during 90 minutes of movie time. The counting will definitely keep you busy and awake.
Next week we’ll watch brainy guys do whatever it takes (and it’s gonna take a lot!) to become the champions.
Isabelle Mitchell is from Switzerland (not Sweden). She loves coffee and chocolate and she can talk about movies and the weather for a very long time. Isabelle went to Film School in Denmark and Canada and is a Sound Designer, but she’s currently working on getting her BS in Advertising at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (Online Division). She’s planning on slowly taking over the advertising world one tagline at a time. When she’s not doing homework or studying, she works as a Marketing Assistant. You can find her on Twitter @isabellesagt or if you have a longer attention span, her blog.