Reviewing Movies

There are best times to make most purchases and summer is the best time
to buy movies which is how I came to possess a complete set of this
series. Kevin Williamson developed this supposedly autobiographical show
based on a quartet of best friends growing up in an upper-class
neighbourhood of East Coast America. These teens are preternaturally
self-aware and precociously articulate. This does nothing apparently to
ease the tensions of teenage angst or the effects of raging hormones.

Dawson's bedroom figures prominently in the first season and his pal
Joey uses a ladder exclusively to gain access from the veranda roof. At
15 she is getting nervous about sharing his bed, she has after all grown
breasts and he 'genitalia'. Dawson is an aspiring movie producer and a
Spielberg junkie. At the start of Season 2 his idol sent him a new set
of posters for his bedroom walls for real. He and friend Pacey have part
time jobs where else, a video store. Dawson's News Anchor Mom is having
an affair with her co-anchor which Dawson picks up on from the way she
says his name on air. He and his father have a unique open relationship
epitomized by the scene in which he asks and receives pointers on
kissing from Dad.

Joey, from up the creek, has a Father in prison for peddling 10,000
pounds of weed and lives with her older sister and the sister's black
boyfriend, they run a restaurant. Never shy about confronting issues
head-on the show has Pacey engaging in a sexual relationship with his
English Teacher starting with the first aired episode. Jen is the girl
next door with an unspecified past in New York who has come to live with
her Gran and dying Grandpa.

The show featured the hippest music it could afford as a fledgling new
series, that selection broadening as its budget increased. What was hip
in 1998 tends to date the show today.

Question? If you know your best friend's Mother is having an adulterous
affair should you tell him? For Joey this is a lose, lose situation. If
you're the son and you make this discovery should you tell your Father?
Do you really want to be the one who broke this news?

The first season of this show I'm watching aired in 1998 when the
principals involved were in their early twenties portraying
15-year-olds. Most of these actors have gone on to have successful
careers in movies and television. I am happy to be able to report that
none of them have succumbed to the young actor's curse of
self-destructive behaviour and early death. The case of the young actor
Neil Hope who played 'Wheels' on Degrassi whose death became news 5
years after the event when he was finally identified has weighed heavily
in that regard.

Last evening it was a couple of the guest players who had me scratching
my head and playing the who is that guessing game. Seeing actors now in
their mid-thirties in earlier roles can lead to some challenges. That
actor playing Jen's New York boyfriend was Eion Bailey, David Kenyon
Webster on Band of Brothers; I had to look that one up. Seeing Eric
Balfour who plays Duke on Haven playing a jock who attempts to hit on
Joey needed only confirmation.