I’m an Elder Millennial. I look back with fond nostalgia at the RomComs I used to see with friends at the movie theaters on the weekends throughout my junior high and high school years. It was one of our favorite pastimes.
Now that I’m a mom, and my children are finally old enough to enjoy some of the cinematic greatness from the late 90s and early 2000s, I figured it was time to start introducing them to some of these masterpieces.
But are they truly masterpieces? Do they hold up to today’s standards? Are they still relevant, poignant, touching, funny? Are the heartthrobs still cute? Are the popular girls still aspirational? I decided I should find out.
My upper elementary aged daughter and I are on a mission to rewatch the movies I consider classics. Here is my ‘mom’ take on a few we watched together recently.
Ten Things I Hate About You (1999)
This one is a top favorite of mine from high school, and I was not ready for it to fall from the pedestal it’s been on all these years. The good news? It definitely holds up! Heath Ledger? Still dreamy. The pacing, the witticisms, the chemistry between the characters– It’s all there, and then some. We loved it. Here are a few things worth noting:
Rating: PG-13, some swearing
Questionable stuff: underage drinking.
Had to explain: The dad’s obsession with his daughters getting pregnant (he’s an OB/GYN so I also had to explain this). References to literature (Ayn Rand, The Feminine Mystique), White Rastafarians (ew, glad we’ve evolved from culturally insensitive and unfunny jokes like this in film), lots and lots of misogynistic jokes, the main character’s mother leaving.
Thirteen Going On Thirty (2004)
This is a very cute one, and while it doesn’t hold up quite as well as Ten Things, it’s still worth a rewatch. There are many things that are culturally irrelevant that I had to explain, but the biggest parts of this movie carry a great message- be true to yourself, and good things will happen.
Rating: PG-13, some swearing
Questionable stuff: 7 minutes in heaven; reference to ‘second base’; stuffing bras; references to beer/underage drinking/getting drunk; references to drug use (pot/ecstasy) in the form of an “are you high” question; infidelity; naked buttocks/one night stand aftermath.
Had to explain: Flip phones, ring tones. Eighties hairstyles (My daughter about poufy bangs- “I don’t like it- at all.”) Thong underwear. The relevance of print magazines.
She’s All That (1999)
This was one of my favorites. I hadn’t seen it in decades. It was very ‘of the moment’ and there are a lot of timely pop-culture references sprinkled throughout that went over my daughter’s head. I had to do A LOT of explaining to make certain plot points make sense. It helped that we had already watched the recent Netflix update, He’s All That, which is a really good modernized version that made my daughter familiar with the basic premise.
I also somehow forgot that this movie has probably the grossest of all gross out moments from these kinds of teen movies. A moment so gross I actually blocked it out until the TV version of the film we were watching had a weird editing moment that left it out-thank goodness- and I remembered. Oh, I remembered.
It involved a bully trying to make the main character’s brother eat pizza sprinkled with hair from his body- not from his head- and then our hero, Zach Siler, forcing said bully to eat the pizza instead. EW. So, be prepared. If you’re watching an unedited version of this movie, you probably want to fast forward through this moment. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Rating: PG-13 for swearing, sex (and gross out moment)
Questionable stuff: underage sex, underage drinking, really mean girl behavior, and the main character Laney being told she should kill herself to gain fame as an artist (!)
Had to explain: MTV spring break and The Real World, hacky sack, performance art, falafel, pagers, college acceptance letters, the premise of the movie Pretty Woman and what a hooker is.
What should we watch next?
