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luv2luvher (5)
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I'm a whole decade and some change late to this party but whatever. I've read this goofy-a$$ thread from top to bottom and the other party in particular never even specified whether they were talking about singing lead on hits, they just said he never sang lead period. Songs were listed by someone else which proved otherwise (which were not then nor are they now very hard to find contrary to edgehillcm's attempt at being dismissive of the findings). Gotta love when stans try to shift the goalposts.
Also, no way in hell this group should've been called David Ruffin and The Temptations. Yes he was a phenomenal singer and performer, but the Temptations were a GROUP of multiple lead singers (yes even Mr. Williams, hits or not), and to put him as top billing, just completely sh*ts on the efforts of everyone else in the group.
It's also a twist of cruel irony how his solo career —promising as it was— never exactly panned out, whereas the group that everyone swears needed HIM, continued to chart long after his departure. Funny how that happened.
I know everyone in this thread is long gone by now, but like I said, whatever.
I realize this post was years ago, but I think Matlock was not only a stickler for having shined shoes, but he also mentioned in the first episode that shining his shoes calmed his nerves or otherwise relaxed him.
To say that he had a shoe fetish, would generally mean that he got some kind of sexual gratification from footwear. Such things are never shown nor implied in the show so I would not say it is a fetish at all.
I never thought of it that way. Excellent points @AmeriGirl26!
I wholeheartedly agree, and I remember back then thinking that that was what was going to happen. I get that they're kids, but it never sat right with me that Marion not only made it easy enough for Janie to shut down her little game, but that Janie, as Harriet's best friend, didn't <i>take</i> the opportunity to shut it down. I was a bit disappointed that the whole plot ended up being based around anger over words written a notebook.
Maybe a better plot would have been Marion trying to STEAL the book and out Harriet. Or maybe Janie being curious and trying to nab the book from Harriet. We would've had a different movie of course, but in my opinion, it would've been better.
<blockquote>I'm going to play the devil's advocate here. But imagine if someone in your class wrote things about you..personal attacks. Like Harriet did in her journal. And all those personal things were made public for your entire class because someone read them out loud... embarrassing you to know end. I can't say for you what exactly your most personal secret would be that you felt it was an attack..only you can. For me it would have probably been my weight. At that age I was extremely insecure about it and if someone in my class was reading the personal thoughts of someone out loud to the entire class..I would be mortified! Embarrassed.. probably following would be rage and anger. I want revenge! So there you have how they all begin the bullying or harassing or whatever you want to call it.</blockquote>
I don't think anyone is denying that Harriet wrote some pretty nasty and hurtful things in that book, and having been bullied and humiliated all throughout school myself, I don't need to imagine how it would feel to have such things read-aloud about me. Those feelings of rage and being mortified all ring true. Yet even as a kid going through that stuff in real-time, even <i>I</i> found myself shaking my head at the extreme lengths her classmates were going to, in order to exact revenge.
I think what OP was getting at was that regardless of how hurtful her words were, there was some serious disproportionate retribution going on. Let's be serious, Harriet was a NOBODY whose biggest crime was letting her journal fall into the wrong hands. She herself didn't go out of her way to humiliate anyone; her private thoughts and opinions just happened to get read aloud (and dramatically paraphrased) by the class alpha-bitch. Being angry at Harriet to the point of maybe <i>ostracizing</i> her would've been completely understandable, but it made zero sense for everyone to lash out at her the way they did. By the time the paint incident happened, I was starting to question whether she was so wrong about everything she wrote...
See, I just think it would've helped more if we'd gotten a better idea of what Harriet's relationship was like with the rest of her class prior to the big fallout. Is she that student that maybe isn't "popular", but everyone likes and gets along with anyway? Or is she that student who is kind of outcasted and has her own tiny circle of comrades she runs with? I don't know if this is ever addressed in the books, but in the film, it seems like she falls more into the second description. Harriet seems only a step or two above "The boy with the purple socks"; we're never given much reason to believe that the other students care much about her. In my opinion, the plot may have worked better if Harriet fell more into the <i>first</i> description. Imagine if Harriet had instead been <i>that</i> student and had it revealed to the class how she really felt. <i>Then</i> I could see everyone wanting to retaliate over the things she wrote, as opposed to "That girl who we barely pay attention to said bad things about us in her diary! Let's all kick her ass!".
And look, I get it. It's a fictional kid's movie blah blah blah yackity schmackity. But I <i>do</i> recall a lot of people back then, gushing over it and saying how relatable to kids it was. And while I can see that with some aspects of the film, I feel like any "Harriet" that would've attended our school and got caught in the same situation would've gotten ostracized at best.
TL : DR OP is right. Even with kids being irrational, the whole concept doesn't hold up very well.
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