Self Actual

So they're advertising this movie called Post-Grad on Pandora (like out loud).

It stars Alexis Bledel (who will always be Rory Gilmore to us, a girl who felt like a real agemate, a sympatica, the young star of the WB's much-loved mothers-and-daughters television saga, Gilmore Girls, the wonderful show [may it forever be in syndication] which was shuttered in its seventh season as Bledel's Rory was leaving Yale and making some really bunk "post-grad" cherr-sez, like not marrying a fictional version of A.G. Sulzberger [who is both a Jew and called A.G.!]). And I'm glad, because I like Alexis Bledel, and I like to see her working. But, as one might expect, her character in this Post-Grad seems an awful lot like Rory or that chick she played in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants or really her (the actress)--very pretty, kind, humble, smart, occasionally compromised on account of being pretty but maintaining her general air of lily-whiteness. And somehow it never bothered me, until...you know what I'm saying.

I graduated a year ago last weekend. Since then, I've watched Reality Bites (for the trillionth tiempo),which NEVER disappoints (though it makes me feel like I ought to have stayed in Memphis and shacked up with a broody slacker—inherently disappointing!). And I rented Kicking and Screaming, which, Chris Eigeman aside, sucks (Oh G-d how I hate Noah Baumbach!). And I've caught The Devil Wears Prada on the tay-vay a (ahem) couple of times, which is cool because Stanley Tucci and Simon Baker and Meryl Streep and Adrian Grenier and it's pretty innocuous.

And a movie that's actually called Post-Grad. I'll totes go see it, but it will induce a certain kind of dull sadness, a creepy, antiseptic hospital feeling, a glummm. Because graduating from college is trauma. And (G-d strike me down for mentioning this too often) the Recession is more trauma (trauma on trauma!). And, easy as it might have been with all of that youth and credit and time and apathy, college caused for one hell of a letdown/crack-up/hangover once it ditched us into this damn city just when we probably ought to have been returning to nature and during the Recession (ha) at a grey crossroads of limitation and indecision. And that's not what this Alexis Bledel vehicle is about. It's about the same old bait and switch, the here's a movie that is somewhat supposed to be about you and your demographic and here's a heroine who feels like a little bit of a loser and here's her life being overtaken by a love triangle and OH solved, sublimated (with a few laughs along the way). Whatever.