My bad. That was not Milly. Stupid me.

--- In mckinleyhigh@yahoogroups.com, Wood Alexander <manchwoods@...>
wrote:
>
> I just saw the movie "Lost and Delirious," which I
> liked a lot for some of the same reasons I like
> "Freaks and Geeks." It was a sympathetic look at
> teenage passions, and the main characters were pretty
> girls! (as are three of F&G's main characters, if you
> include Cindy as a main character.) But one thing I
> didn't like about "Lost and Delirious" is that it
> ended with the central character committing suicide.
> That's a cheap trick. It's an easy way to leave the
> audience feeling moved. I also worry that such movie
> scenes may encourage teenagers going through their own
> painful dramas to kill themselves, particularly in
> that the suicide in "Lost and Delirious" is a very
> public grand gesture.
>
> When I was in eighth grade, my English class was
> assigned to write short stories, which were shared
> with the class. In an exceptional number of them, the
> main character ended up dead. That's how eighth
> graders express deep feeling.
>
> But we have a right to expect better from professional
> writers, and we got it from the writers of "Freaks and
> Geeks." They were able to find drama in the kinds of
> events that really do create drama in the lives of
> ordinary people -- starting to doubt your beliefs,
> smashing up the family car, finding out that you're
> not as good a drummer as you hoped you were, dressing
> foolishly to try to impress someone, then coming to
> regret it bitterly. To me, one of the most dramatic
> scenes in the series is when Sam's parents are
> pressing him to tell them who egged him, and he looks
> at Lindsay and says something like, "Some dirtbags."
> It's perfect. He doesn't turn her in, but he's
> brutally frank about what he thinks of her.
>
> I realize that some of this has to do with the
> realities of making a TV show. You can't kill off
> major characters most of the time, and you have to
> deal with the network's ideas of what their audience
> will accept. But this is another example of how those
> practical pressures can help to produce quality
> writing.
>
> Alex
>