How to Fight, Lie and Cry Your
Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date): Lousy Life Lessons from 50 Teen Movies.
By Nikki Roddy. Zest Books. $12.99.
47 Things You Can Do for the
Environment. By Lexi Petronis, with environmental consultant Jill Buck.
Zest Books. $10.99.
You do not want to base your life decisions on
movies about teenagers or ones targeting them as an audience. But what if you did? Well, you’d make a complete mess of
everything, probably. But what if you
didn’t? This line of questioning gets
really intriguing, in an exceptionally silly way, and Nikki Roddy pursues it
with considerable enthusiasm in How to
Fight, Lie and Cry Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date). Take, for example, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), one of the quintessential teen
horror movies. Roddy neatly summarizes
the film’s plot, includes a photo of heroine Nancy falling asleep in the
bathtub as monster Freddy’s clawed hand reaches for her, and comes up with the
lesson: “If you aren’t afraid of the psychotic killer, you might be able to
conquer him. But maybe not. Good luck with that.” Or take Never
Been Kissed (1999), which teaches the lesson, “Inappropriate
teacher-student relationships are totally acceptable as long as the student is
a desperate, undercover reporter.” Or Clueless (1995), from which readers can
learn that “a smart, sensitive guy will eventually fall for a ditzy,
self-serving girl as long as she promises to be a little nicer to people – and
is ridiculously hot.” The wonderful
thing about How to Fight, Lie and Cry
Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date) is that it is easy to envision the
“life lessons” as part of the way in which these movies were green-lighted in
the first place – they accurately sum up what happens in these wildly
improbable movies, and at the same time pinpoint the films’ attractive
elements. The plot summaries are brief
and accurate (plot not being the main point of any of these films); the stills
from the films neatly encapsulate what happens in them; the “sound bite” chosen
from each movie gives a nice sense of the dialogue; and there is even a
multiple-choice question or set of guideposts offered for each of the movies to
make the film’s flavor even clearer. True,
Roddy’s writing is often embarrassingly bad: for example, in the entry about I Know Want You Did Last Summer (1997),
a character is described as “straight-laced” rather than “strait-laced” and the
word “accidentally” is spelled properly one time but incorrectly as “accidently”
another time. In fact, the correctly
spelled word appears in an unintelligible sentence: “They accidentally hit a
stranger crossing the windy road with their car.” How was the stranger bringing their car
across the road? And what’s that about
the wind? (Roddy means “winding”
road.) But good writing is scarcely the
point here: the core of this book is the “life lessons,” some of which are
utterly hilarious. From Risky Business (1983), for example,
moviegoers can learn that “if you lie to your parents, steal your dad’s car,
and solicit a prostitute, you’ll get into an Ivy League school.” Now, what better lesson could anyone want to
get from a movie?
The lessons in 47 Things You Can Do for the Environment
are far more important and far more realistic, so it is a shame that the book
isn’t nearly as interesting to read. It
gets a (+++) rating for its earnestness and the quality of its suggestions, but
the problem is that Lexi Petronis and Jill Buck (the latter being founder of
the “Go Green Initiative”) don’t have many things that are very unusual or
creative to suggest. Their ideas are
perfectly fine, but many are simply not involving enough to capture the
imagination of any reader not already committed to environmental attentiveness
– and those who are committed will
know a lot of this stuff already. “Check
out the Home Depot YouTube Channel or smartphone app for short, useful videos
on reducing energy and water use around the house” – good idea, but scarcely
revelatory. “Your old cell phone may be
a piece of junk to you, but there are many charities that think it is a little
piece of solid gold – so donate it.”
Turn the car engine off “if you are going to be stopping somewhere for
more than 30 seconds.” When giving a
party, “send e-invitations instead of paper ones.” And so on.
There are some unusual ideas
here: host a “green film festival” to help make people care about the planet
(film suggestions included), or have your car cleaned at a car wash rather than
washing it at home because, at home, “the icky water doused in toxic car muck
trickles into the storm drains and then eventually into our waterways where it
poisons aquatic life.” There are
occasional bits of interesting history in 47
Things You Can Do for the Environment (example: solar cells were developed
as long ago as 1883), and certainly there are plenty of good ideas. But too many of the thoughts will likely be
ones that young readers have heard before: reuse paper and shampoo bottles, eat
a more-vegetarian diet, shut down your computer when not using it for a long
time, hand-wash small spots off clothes instead of immediately throwing
clothing in the washer. The parade of
obviousness means readers may miss out on the more-creative ideas simply
because they tend to be buried among the more-ordinary ones.
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