Memoirs of a Broke B*tch

My Thoughts on American Graffiti

Disclaimer: I ain't seen it since like February so I might forget stuff or have some details mixed up.

Anyway, girl, so American Graffiti is not the name I'd pick for this movie. Judging from the name I guessed it would have more of a grittier theme. This movie cookie cutter as hell and should probably just be called American Boys or some shit like that. It's probably taken.

I can't remember a single black person having any real onscreen presence in the movie. I think there's like three of them on screen during the dance scenes. Foolery. I think one of the bullies is Hispanic. I'm not even all the way sure. Not sure what I expected of a movie made in the 70s (or maybe it was the 60s).

So we follow a group of friends all night. It's made up of four boys all getting ready to graduate high school. Typical dynamic of school friends. You got the popular guy (Steve), the nerd (Toad), the bully (Milner) and the not quite popular, not really a nerd kind of person (Curt).

They all kind of get their own separate storylines in the story which was WHY I determined pretty quickly that this movie wasn't a great choice to pair with the Vygotsky's development theory. Shit was a CHORE. Back to the review. I'm gonna probably touch on all their stories separately and then whenever they're all together I'll join em all together.

They're all talking about going to the lil farewell dance thing and there's discussion of who's going to college and who isn't. Milner is like "hell nah that shit ain't for me". Steve is like "yeah man I'm going". I can't remember what Toad's deal was but I know he didn't go. Curt was unsure of his decision.

So Steve's whole thing is he got this girlfriend who is in the grade under him (Laurie). But he tryna see what the college girls are giving so he's thinking of ways to let her know that. He plans to leave his car behind and slides his car over to Toad to keep while he's gone. So I guess that means Toad never planned to leave the area, in terms of school. Another little fun fact I learned eventually is that Curt and Laurie are siblings. Anyway so eventually Steve and Laurie get back to the restaurant and they order some food. My girl Laurie is looking all nervous the whole time cuz she's expecting him to pop the question. Steve was kind of stalling a lil bit and when I tell you this scene made me so hungry, I mean it. I'm always in the mood for some fries so when Laurie was chomping on em, I was jealous lol. Steve ends up telling her he wants to see other girls and gives her some BS reasons why. As expected, Laurie is pissed. She was so sure he'd propose so they argued but she resolved to go ahead and enjoy this last night with him.

My dude Toad spend a good chunk of the movie getting clowned and for that he's automatically my favorite. I'm a root for the underdog (almost said undergrad 😂) kinda person. I think he asked his coworker to go to the dance with him and she said "skkkkrt. FOMF." So his friends kind of clown him on that but that's when Steve handed Toad the keys to his whip and told him to take care of it in his absence. Toad is feeling his beat now 'cause Steve has this cool car or whatever. He figures he's gon ride around and try to pick up a girl with it. Eventually he's whippin' it and winds up playing around with it, fool can barely understand how the car works. He hits the back of somebody's car and somehow gets out. As he hoped, though, he does get noticed for riding around in the car, but it's from some bullies. After getting clowned, he eventually made his way to where he sees a blondeisha on the street. So he's calling out to her and she's like "girl leave me alone" and he does some cool shit with the car and I guess she finally noticed what kind of car Toad was in. All of a sudden she gets into the car or whatever. So she wants him to do all this stuff in the car, like speed or something. Poor Toad. Can't recall the girlfriends name. Maybe it's Donna? I'm not looking shit up. I would call her Blondie but I feel like Blondie describes white women with long blonde hair, such as Curt's WCW. So she's sending him on hella tasks, such as oh let's get something to eat, oh let's get drinks, and all that. My nigga Toad is a people pleaser to his own detriment. First of all, when he went to go and get the alcohol, he got PLAYED lmfao. They pull up and he hands this homeless guy some money to go ahead and cop him some alcohol cuz they're underage. So the guy takes the money but gets alcohol for himself lol. So then some young guy walks up and I think Toad slides him a lil something as well to go and cop something from him. He looked pretty young too so I don't know if he expected the dude to steal the bottles out of the store but that's what ends up happening. The guy gets the bottles and runs out of the store and tosses it to Toad in the midst of getting shot at. (Also Toad's actual name is Terry so I'll probably use these names interchangeably cuz I kinda feel bad calling my nigga a bumpy ass frog.) Eventually they get somewhere and get drunk. So Donna's knocking the drinks back, and Terry is trying to lol. He's not a drinker at all but he did it for his bae. By this point, if I'm recalling correctly, they were already on the beach or something alone in the car. So they leave the car and come back to discover it stolen.