Thursday, October 8, 2020

In Which I Recommend A Movie I Have Not Yet Seen.

My friend’s son has to stay home for his first semester of college, so I’m going to puke in his shower and set off the fire alarm at 3 a.m. so he can have the true freshman year dorm experience. 

Shithouse, a movie about a freshman in college, debuts on Netflix next Friday. By the looks of the trailer, it’s right up my alley – I love a great coming of age story. On the one hand, there’s nothing like the thrill of going away to college, but it also comes with its challenges: trying to fit in, living with some strange idiots, risking getting your heart broken.

  

But then I read more about the movie. The star, Cooper Raiff, was a sophomore at Occidental College here in LA, and decided to stay at school one spring break and shoot a short film. It was rough around the edges but filmmaker Jay Duplass saw it and encouraged Cooper to turn it into a feature film. Cooper dropped out of school, made the film, and it won the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest this year. 

Action and horror films are awesome, but we need stories like this, too. (Both the plot and the making-of stories, I mean.)