Movie Madness Monday: All I Wanna Do

Today is the first day of school for a lot of the kids here.  For them it means the end of waking up at noon and the start of the dreaded homework and pop quizzes.  For me it means that morning traffic is about to get heinous.  So we're both not thrilled about their return to academia.

Putting that aside, though, it reminded me of a movie I can share with all of you.  It's not available on Netflix Instant, sorry, but it is on DVD.  It's a 90s movie with a lot of faces you might recognize, and a couple of titles.  I know it as 'All I Wanna Do', but it's also been billed as 'Strike!' and 'The Hairy Bird'.

I discovered this movie while it was rotating around basic cable, one of those random finds that becomes a favorite.  The girl power-fueled hijinks remind me of another troublesome boarding school, St. Trinian's, which was an old British series first of children's books, then 1950s comedy films, and recent reboot movie a few years ago.  The older movies are part of the influence spending half of my summers in the UK had on me.

Though this is another all-girls boarding school at risk of closing if not for the scheming of the students, Miss Godard's girls operate less on a system of chaos and anarchy, though.  Instead, this is a movie about a group of best friends who use their wiles to help each other survive their personal and academic battles in the 60s.

Kirsten Dunst leads the gang of girls, pretty much all of whom I've ended up seeing in other movies or TV shows.  Gaby Hoffman is the new kid whose been sent there in a parental attempt to keep her from sleeping with her boyfriend.  The other girls each have their own lofty life goals, from founding a fashion magazine to becoming world-renowned psychologists or biologists.  That doesn't make them above a few pranks, though.  While it's a fun movie, it's also very sweet, with and a good mix of silly with a side of serious to give the characters depth.  It also has a dash of feminism that I love to see.

And in solidarity with the unfortunate youths that are having to set their alarm clocks now, I even wrote an Examiner article for them about what not to use as a shortcut in writing book reports.  Do yourself a favor, kids, just read the darned book.

You know the drill, make this blog post a double feature by reading Amaryllis Musings' review for this week.