The Writer's Poke

So I'm not sure how much we're supposed to care or how much they think we're going to remember... but at the end of the first movie, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) dies, right? And didn't they mention and confirm her death in part 2? Well, apparently not. Even if she "went crazy" at the end of the original movie, she must have gotten better quickly, because she's back front and center in part 3, as a gifted psychology graduate student. She's so amazing that she even gets a full-blown adult male psychiatrist to fall in love with her. It's a budding relationship that's never really explained or developed. But anyway, this movie does lowkey rock. At the beginning of the film, Nancy (Patricia Arquette) cranks up Dokken's "Into the Fire" in an effort to stay awake, and so we're already Rokken with Dokken, and all is right with the world. Even before anything happens, you can already tell the production value is ten times better than it...

(Cuba Gooding, Jr.) has a father. Granted, Furious (Laurence Fishburne) was 17 when he had him, but Furious made up his mind to be a father his son could look up to. He's tried to teach him how to get ahead in life. How to stay out of trouble -- both on the streets and in the bedroom, and it's Tre who ends up successfully leaving the neighborhood. Both he and his girlfriend, we're told at the end, make it to HBCUs in Atlanta.  Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is not that lucky. He plays football and has been recruited to college, but he's not really equipped for the academic requirements. At 17, he's already a father, and he didn't have a father to help guide him.  It's funny that Ricky only needs a 700 on the SAT to qualify for his football scholarship. That's a score that anyone with a pulse could get, but he dies before learning if he met the score he needed. In fact, the letter came, but he keeps on walking to the store. He never bothered to open the envelope...

School Daze (1988) and Higher Learning (1995). Both are about life on an American college campus. Daze uses the HBCU setting, and Learning uses a traditional "state school" sort of campus.  The link between the two films is Laurence Fishburne. In Daze, he plays a student activist named Dap. This character wants the university to devest from South Africa. In Learning, he plays Professor Phipps, a seemingly humorless Political Science teacher who is eager to teach his students harsh life lessons.  Fishburne plays Phipps with an accent, but we never learn anything about this character. Where's he from? Where did he go to school? Why is he always on campus during crucial moments? The guy doesn't seem to have any sort of life or existence off campus. And although the two films are only seven years apart, Professor Phipps doesn't come across as especially young. (Fishburne would have be 34 during filming, which would be a little on the young side for a full professor. A...