Ski School (1990)

One of the great film genres of the 80s and early 90s was the skiing-themed comedic sex romp. Beginning in 1971 with Apres-ski, and continuing into the 80s with such classics as Hot Dog...The Movie and Snowballing, this genre was explored primarily by a small handful of iconoclasts who had become sick and tired of the idea that teenagers had to be in a tropical locale in order to participate in wet t-shirt contests. Why, thought these cinematic revolutionaries, couldn't the wet t-shirt contest be held...at a ski resort? No one could come up with a reason. 

I'm not sure to whom to credit this epiphany, but it initiated a flurry......no.....an avalanche......uh........a whole lot of ideas and insights. Wouldn't a ski gondola be the ideal place for two curious youngsters to experiment with oral sex? And I'll bet out-of-control skiers are always crashing through the walls of buildings. Why not have the overweight buffoon character crash through the walls of the women's bathhouse while the Swedish women's ski team is having a steam in the nude? And we'll never need an elaborate set-up for the line, "Let's get you out of those wet things." We could use it every time a female character comes in off the slopes! And think of how many different occasions there'll be to use "pole" as a double entendre! When the guy behind the counter at the equipment rental shop asks the sex-starved older woman whose businessman husband is too preoccupied with work to satisfy her carnal needs which size pole she prefers, it'll seem completely natural! The ideas just kept coming until in 1990 a film was made that so perfectly embodied the skiing-themed comedic sex romp aesthetic that it would ultimately bring about the death of the genre. That film was Ski School.

Private School (1983)

Peter Biskind's book about the "New Hollywood" era, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, closes with the idea that, to quote Peter Bogdanovich, "The cinema of the director went into eclipse at the end of the '70s. There was a general movement away from .. auteurism toward producer-oriented movies." If there ever was an "American New Wave," it's supposed to have ended in the early '80s. I disagree. I think that's when it began. 

The American New Wave was the cinema of the producer, not the director. If Truffaut and Godard saw American crime films from the '40s and wondered "What could we do with this, artistically?" men like Ben Efraim saw drive-in exploitation films from the '70s and thought "What could we do with this, commercially?" The latter is the American approach, and though he was an Israeli expatriate born on a kibbutz, Ben Efraim understood it better than anyone. 

Private School was the second film in his Private series (after Private Lessons and before Private Resort). I'm reviewing it first for two reasons. First, because Private School has as much to do with Private Lessons as it does with Private Benjamin, so the order doesn't matter. I know what you're asking yourself. "How can they be part of the same series if they don't have anything to do with one another?" Stop that. You're thinking like a director. Or worse, an auteur. Start thinking like Ben Efraim. I want so much for you to do so that that's the other reason why I'm doing it first. For you to understand what the true American New Wave was I first have to explain to you to why Private School is its masterpiece.