Friday May 30, 2003

SEE YA LATER, BOI. Matthew Yglesias is delighted that Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi" will soon be a major motion picture. He loves Avril, and there I let him alone; de gustibus non disputandum est. But I have a couple of preemptive peeves against the picture.

First, there's the song. A nice piece of radio fluff, but what kind of movie will it make? A stuck-up girl (did ballet, dontcha know) turns down a boy in baggy pants, and winds up a single mom while the eponymous poser becomes a superstar, slammin' on his guitar. My sympathy is with the girl, of course, and I think it's a little creepy that the most noteworthy thing about the boi is that he's popular and rich. Doesn't anyone believe anymore that a heart can broken by anything other than a missed seat on a gravy train?

What seems like more of a problem is the pictoralization of a pop tune. It's rare enough to get that right in a video, let alone a 90 minute feature. I recall the video of the Kinks' "Come Dancin'." A nice tune, and the video has some nice bits, but one scene forever embodies the tendency of filmmakers to crush the life out of a good musical moment. In the bridge of the song, when the "Palais" that was the arena of the older brother's teenage romance, is no more ("The day that they tore down the Palais/my brother broke down and cried"), there's a nice Davies Brothers moment -- Ray sounds sad, and Dave smashes out power chords. It suggests sorrow, futility, and rage. In the video, we see at that moment the younger brother jumping gleefully on his bed, thrashing air-guitar on his tennis racket. It's rhythmically correct, but runs so contrary to the musical moment as to take all the meaning out of it.

When "Sk8er Boi" is all done up nice and Hollywood with James van der Beek and Hillary Duff, or whomever, can we really expect any better?