I know I should be re-watching Firefly in preparation for it’s 10th Anniversary Special Event at NY Comic Con, but I’ve already got each episode practically memorized, so I’m catching up on film classics I didn’t get the chance to see (and watching some that I would like to see again).

Yesterday, I watched Dead Poets Society and Saturday Night Fever for the first time.  They were two movies that have been on my radar to watch for years, but for some reason or another I didn’t.  How I received an English degree without seeing Dead Poets Society is currently boggling my mind.  I’d say it’s one of those movies you have to see as a teen to really feel the impact.  In my twenties, I look at their mentality with nostalgia.  Ironically, I was supposed to watch Saturday Night Fever for one of my lit courses, but I was too lazy to take the train to watch it with my professors and classmates the night they were watching it in the dorms.  There was a lot of hype it didn’t live up to (the movie’s soundtrack is my dad’s holy grail of soundtracks), while I can see how a movie like this would make waves in its era – sex, abortions, the car culture, feminist changes due to birth control, ethnic foibles.  It’s funny how much NYC has and hasn’t changed over the years.

While watching both I couldn’t help wondering: What they would be like if they were made today? I think that Dead Poets Society would have East Asians and South Asians in their group, whose high maintenance parents would be perfect examples of conformity (for sake of maintaining sanity, I’m going to point out that I’m South Asian and most of my friends are East Asian, we’re all Type A-minuses/B-pluses).  Saturday Night Fever would probably be closer to the Step Up movies in terms of dance style, because that’s what’s in right now.  Even though the films are both dated at this point, their stories are just as strong as they ever were.