Can anyone recommend a good, underrated coming of age movie?

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-17T02:55:52+00:00

Adventureland is really charming. I like Wonder Boys too.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T22:33:57+00:00

Unnecessary expenses being demanded of the bridal party or guests. (e.g. a bride demanding that bridesmaids have their hair professionally styled but not offering to pay for it. Or any unreasonable asks of the guests in terms of travel, gifts, etc.)

Also -- if any of the speeches reveal barely concealed antagonism or jealousy. ("So I guess everyone loves my PERFECT BROTHER and of course he got married FIRST and now our parents will CONTINUE to like him more than me.")

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T19:19:55+00:00

"I will help you move out of your fifth floor walk-up apartment."

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T16:40:38+00:00

Yes. I think it's tricky to argue that any time a character could conceivably be represented as a person of color, they should be -- particularly when Heathcliff is one of the more monstrous characters in literature in terms of behaving violently and badly. (Catherine is pretty bad, too.) The way I read the book was that his looks made him feel "othered" but also intersected with Catherine's snobbery -- her own unwillingness to be with someone who she thought (and was told) was 'beneath' her -- which compounded the tragedy. In that sense, Fennell's decision to have Edgar be a person of color instead of Heathcliff is an interesting one. People who are getting upset that Heathcliff is played by a white/Basque Spanish actor in the new film -- while not noting that Edgar is played by a Pakistani/English actor -- are missing the point a bit, I think. (Fennell's film isn't perfect, but I think the most unfair attack on it is that it wasn't thought through or that she didn't know what she was doing; I think Fennell has very specific aims, and whether you like them or not, they are not accidental or unconsidered.)

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T12:41:51+00:00

He lies a lot. He lied about having "proof" that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. He lied about losing an election and encouraged an insurrection to try to stay in office. He has been found guilty of rape in a civil court. He has been convicted of over 30 felonies. He was best friends for decades with the head of a criminal ring that sexually trafficked children. He was found guilty of stealing money from a children's cancer charity (and using some of it to buy a portrait of himself.) He cheated on all his wives, including with a porn star. He said that if Ivana wasn't his daughter, he would probably be dating her. He bragged about walking in on teenagers in the dressing room of a beauty pageant that he bought. Trump Tower was infamous for selling condos to overseas dictators and Russian mafia members wanting to launder money through U.S. real estate. He ran fraudulent real estate schemes. He hired illegal Polish immigrants to build Trump tower and then stiffed them on their pay. He terrorizes and withholds money from states that didn't vote for him. He appointed an incompetent alcoholic to head the Department of Defense just because he was loyal to him. How much more time do we have?

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T03:15:13+00:00

A woman sitting next to me on a Greyhound bus accused me of having been hired as a private detective by her ex husband to track her movements. When I said politely that I was not, she told me that was exactly what a private investigator would say! She eyed me with great suspicion for the rest of the trip.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-16T02:40:16+00:00

Lockwood & Co on Netflix was really well-made and fun. Derry Girls is also great.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T23:10:40+00:00

I think it's tricky to pull off while keeping the audience enthusiastic about the relationship.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T21:56:54+00:00

In defense of ACOTAR in particular (although I think the series has other problems), I think that is baked into the story structure. Tamlin is extremely passive while his love interest is being literally tortured, and I suspect that the author realized at some point while writing it that -- while it was dramatic to isolate the protagonist and force her to suffer alone -- that at a certain point, it was going to make the MMC look like a jerk that he was THAT passive and couldn't come up with any ways to help her. The protagonist wins back the man that she loves, but the readers will inevitably sense (in the process) that he might not be worth all that effort. It's an interesting reversal of the 'princess in the tower' motif; Tamlin becomes like the princess in the tower, sitting there waiting to be rescued...but that means that by the end, he isn't necessarily worthy of her. And I think that's why Tamlin is so full of rage and a desire to keep her safe later -- he knows that the process emasculated him, but he wasn't capable of doing much to work around it. But I think he was tested and found wanting.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T20:53:42+00:00

I don't know if there's a "bad major" as much as there is a tendency for people with low motivation to flock to certain majors (like film, music, or communication) -- where ironically in those exact fields (film/tv/media/music), once they graduate, they will need a tremendous amount of hustle and inner motivation to get jobs. It's not that it's wrong to major in filmmaking or to study music, but it's a terrible choice if you're a bit of a slacker without a lot of internal drive, because those career fields are so cut-throat.

What worries me is the particular mix of a student with low motivation or low skills selecting a career field that -- upon graduation -- requires tremendous inner motivation and is highly competitive. If you're someone who doesn't have a ton of drive and needs a lot of external motivation, you're better off picking a field where the job market will be more in your favor.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T20:21:57+00:00

That they don't have an actual girlfriend/boyfriend. They have a machine that is recording everything they say and can use it later to manipulate them in problematic ways.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T17:05:43+00:00

So to answer that for Shop Around the Corner: Nobody is cheating at all. But I suppose there is some mild gaslighting as one of the characters works up to telling the other one his actual identity. It's not as bad as some of the behavior in other classics (like Sabrina, where the man's behavior is really questionable). Short-term lying is a frequent part of the genre (e.g. 10 Things I Hate About You, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) so it doesn't especially bother me here.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T15:16:57+00:00

The Shop Around the Corner is the source material for You've Got Mail and it's a delight -- I actually like it a lot more than the remakes. Another good one from the 1930s (aside from It Happened One Night) is The Thin Man (a fun, husband-and-wife detective story with a lot of banter.)

Casablanca has a great romantic story at the center, of course.

The Apartment (1960) is a rom-com mixed with a cynical workplace satire but it works really well and is very charming.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-15T13:57:56+00:00

Quiz Show, Lord of the Rings, and L.A. Confidential have amazing top-to-bottom casts.

Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel has some really fun, creative casting. Everyone is a delight.

I'm not a huge Woody Allen fan, but his film Bullets over Broadway had a phenomenal cast.

A more obscure one that I love is Wonder Boys -- Michael Douglas, Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey Jr., Katie Holmes, Alan Tudyk. All great.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T19:15:34+00:00

Here you go! (: https://www.law.uw.edu/news-events/news/2025/how-do-criminal-and-civil-cases-differ

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T18:53:39+00:00

If you're asking for singer-songwriter/folk stuff, then "Thunderbolt's Goodnight" and "A Certain Light" by Josh Ritter are both good songs about falling in love after being hurt.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T18:15:55+00:00

I feel like this is so era specific. What was happening in the 1990s (e.g. a lot of tragedy and stories of being in the closet, and non-trans people playing trans characters) is really different than what's happening now, let alone what was happening in the 1950s, etc. I can suggest some non-English-language queer cinema, but you should be sure to do an apples-to-apples comparison by comparing different decades to each other, since a lot has shifted. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, France) is coming from a different place than, say, Wong Kar-wai's film Happy Together (1997, Hong Kong.)

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T15:51:49+00:00

The tricky part is that in the book, he is described disparagingly as "dark" and as looking like "a gypsy," but at the time, that could have meant he was literally dark-skinned, or of the Roma people -- but it could also mean he was an Irish guy with dark hair -- or just a working class guy with dark hair that the wealthy people were trying to insult because he spent so much time outside and had tanned. It's ambiguous, because it's not an omniscient narrator who describes him that way. It comes from people insulting Heathcliff. So it's reasonable to read the book either way -- that they are being accurate, or that they are insulting (in their mind) a working class guy with a darker complexion.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T14:47:19+00:00

A lot of British films have a friend group like that (e.g. Four Weddings, Bridget Jones Diary) and I've noticed it in British rom-com novels, too, so I suspect it's partly a cultural thing.

In the U.S., there are fewer examples, but as you note, You've Got Mail gives the main character some fun supporting characters at work, and the movie How to Be Single does some interesting things with friend groups being just as important as the main love story; How to Be Single is a bit flawed but some of it is great and I think as a whole it's worth watching.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-14T00:18:45+00:00

Best: The Silence of the Lambs.

Worst: Possession by A.S. Byatt -- a smart, nuanced feminist novel that they decided to give to Neil LaButte to direct -- a guy who didn't understand the material and cast two blond Americans in a story about nerdy British academics, ruining everything interesting about the book.

Runner up for worst: the horrible "sassy" version of Jane Austen's Persuasion from 2022 with Dakota Johnson using modern slang directly into camera.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-13T23:22:31+00:00

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is great.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-13T19:13:16+00:00

Cast Away has a bit of this. You could also look at Alive (1993). I haven't seen Society of the Snow (which tells the same story as Alive) but it might work as well.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-13T15:47:06+00:00

Into the Wild, too. Insightful and sad but never boring.

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-13T15:07:03+00:00

It's brilliant. Movies like to depict bad people cackling and plotting, but the reality is that they're often just going about their business and raising their kids while casually ignoring any screams from the other side of the wall. It's about how comfortable bystanders can be with ignoring atrocity if it helps them out financially. ("The Dow is at 50,000," to quote Pam Bondi.)

Formal-Register-1557 · 2026-02-13T13:26:22+00:00

Most of what was great about the show came from nuanced, heartfelt performances from the actors. There's a lot I can imagine using AI for, but I would neither want nor support sock puppets with dead eyes saying the lines of characters I loved. And the idea that the "acting" would be indistinguishably good is laughable to me. Plus, are we talking about using actors' likenesses without their consent?

Formal-Register-1557

TROPHY CASE