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Chosen One of the Day: Can’t Hardly Wait, a subtle sci-fi classic
In 1998, I went to the movies with my best friend and we saw Can’t Hardly Wait and it was everything. Seriously, everything. It had humor, heart, romance, drama, an angel, Jason Segal — like seriously, everything (and everyone) was in this movie. On its surface, it’s another ‘90s high school movie: there’s cliques, ridiculous romantic entanglements, a bangin’ soundtrack (not one, but two Smash Mouth songs), Jennifer Love Hewitt, the list goes on. But it is beyond the surface we go, to the... beyond.
One of the C-plots (D-plots? There’s a lot going on on this movie) involves the two nerdy friends of Big Nerd aka Kid from Hook aka William. While William gets sidetracked on his plan to take down popular king and bully Mike Dexter, his friends are hanging on the roof talking about Star Wars and wearing X-Files T-shirts.
A brief aside to say that these kids are talking about Bob Fett like he’s the be-all-end-all of Star Wars, so obviously they’re surface-level geeks. But I digress.
After everything that goes down in the movie, our two nerds — who I must point out are credited as X-Phile #1 and X-Phile #2 — come out of the party relatively unscathed. Unscathed, that is, until the post-credit sequence. A full decade before the MCU became synonymous with “Do not leave your seat until the credits roll” Can’t Hardly Wait gave us a PCS that twisted the whole movie.
Those two nerds? They get abducted by aliens.
Can’t Hardly Wait is a science-fiction movie.
