2000-07-29 - 01:05:57

It�s still the Manager writing to you Uberhamster fans. The filled moving boxes have begun to appear! Perhaps my fill-ins will be ending soon. Tune in tomorrow to find out!

But we still need to fill today. So here we go.

Back in the early eighties I came to enjoy the genre of films that at the time were laughingly called �Coming of age films�, commonly known as teen-sex flicks by us common folks. Back in those fabled early days of the MTV era, there seemed to be a never ending supply of these sex fueled films to see at the movies, or later rent for that new popular consumer device, the home VCR recorder/player. I always got a kick of them for a number of reasons, many of which didn�t involve the flesh splashed all over the screen. Mostly I liked them because they were so damn bad they were funny.

The film that started this craze was a movie called �Porky's�. It was the font that all of the others sprang from, and copied however badly. The formula was simple. We�d meet our �hero�, who�d be a looser with a heart of gold. His goal would be to get laid. Comic misadventure involving many naked breasts being shown would ensue, and in the end, true love would be found, and we�d be shown that it was a loving and respectful relationship that is the true thing of value, not the naughty sex. One could spice it up by changing the setting, having more than one looser, adding in b-stories that might amuse, and so on. It�s amazing how many directors still managed to screw it up.

By the late eighties these films just sort of stopped appearing. I guess the generation they had been made for had grown up and stopped watching. No money to be made in the genre, Hollywood moved on.

Tonight a friend of mine and I, who often get together on Friday nights when we have nothing better to do, decided to rent a movie for that new popular consumer device, the home DVD player. Feeling silly we chose �American Pie�. We thought it would be good for a laugh.

It was. There were several moments that made us giggle at it, and over all it was a pretty good way to kill an hour and a half. It was not until later that I realized that American Pie, was the late nineties answer to Porky's. And like Porky's before it, had set off a whole new wave of teen-sex films. It was like coming home to an old friend. But the friend had gone away to college and grown up.

I remember the press Pie got when it came out, about how risky it was, and so on. Just like Porky's did. I even remember critics making comparisons. Fair enough, American Pie is indeed a 3rd generation child of Porky's. The generation that was protected by all those yellow �Baby on Board� window hangers must now be old enough for Hollywood to make teen-sex films for. But these new films are far different than their eighties predecessors.

Let me count the ways:

1) Breasts. For all it�s hype, Pie had but one bare set. Porky's had many.

2) Women were shown as fully realized creatures in Pie, who were more than just places to stick it for our male characters, or as comic relief. Dare I say in Pie they were treated with some true respect? Yes, I will.

3) In Pie, women were often empowered, shown as being just as sex crazed and wanton as the men, and often smarter then the guys. They knew what they wanted, and often went and got it. In Porky's they were ill defined objects of lust that eventually fell into bed with the men because... well they just did so the movie could end.

4) Pie was shocking by daring to talk about or suggest sexual things directly, not by what it in fact showed us. Porky's went for the tits to shock us, and kept going for the tits, and back then that was enough to do so.

5) Parental figures were shown far more favorably in Pie. They were as clueless as their Porky's counterparts, but they seemed to actually care for their kids and took steps to try and guide them. In Porky's they simply were obstacles to sex happening, in Pie they seemed to help the process.

6) Pie had a integrated soundtrack that was amazingly good.

7) Sex was portrayed in Pie as the mixed bag of good and bad that it really is. In Porky's it was just shown as something good to do.

Over all, Pie was by far the better movie. It treated sex as a subject with a lot more respect and care than it�s grandfather Porky's did. Yes Pie is a low-brown bit of entertainment, but it�s message and heart was far more complex than those movies that came before it.

I�m pleased to see that in the twenty or so years between these two films America seems to have grown up a little bit when dealing with sex and presenting it to teens. Not much mind you, but a tiny little baby step. There still might be hope for this prudish nation.

"Never waste jealousy on a real man: It is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run." George Bernard Shaw