How to Pass Your Finals with Pop Culture

PSA: Everyone mark your calendars for awesomeness: July 20, 2010 is Warner Bros. announced date for Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie! Now back to your regularly scheduled post:

College students rarely have the time to sit down and do their Herculean task of assigned reading. Who has time to lounge around and skim the sparknotes for Mrs. Dalloway when there's week-old pizza to eat, TV shows to watch online, and beer pong tournaments to win? But it's finals time, and everything's starting to catch up to you. Once again, Poposophical is here to help. Pop culture covers a lot of what you'll be forced to read in in college courses, so if you find yourself behind in your English, French, or Spanish courses, you're covered. (If you're in the sciences, sorry. You're going to fail.)

Español
Were you upset by the lack of chalupas on the midterm? When your professor calls on you in class, do you repeatedly respond, "Yo quiero Taco Bell"? Do you find yourself going to your professor's office hours to request field trips to Chipotle to order carnitas burritos? Is your Spanish vocabulary pretty much limited to food? Well Señor Hambre, I have good news for you. Here's a whole semester's worth of Spanish vocabulary, in easy-to-memorize love song format!



If you've already managed to not fail your first semester of Spanish, or are just looking for extra credit on your final, check out the sequel:



Français
Spanish not your thing? Maybe you took French so you could speak to our Canadian neighbors, or just generally act pretentious. You're covered, too. Again, in easy-to-learn music video format, here's roughly a semester's worth of French in Flight of the Conchords' "Foux De FaFa". (Note: This will not teach you all that many French words. It will, however, teach you how to convincingly invent them.)



Literature
The bad thing about literature is that it's been around so long, half of it doesn't even sound English. The great thing about it is that it's been around so long, most of it has been adapted in more easily digestible formats by now. Sure, there's always movie adaptations of books, but there are also more creative adaptations, as seen below.

Just about any course on Western Literature is bound to have one of Homer's works on the syllabus. If that work is the Iliad, sucks for you, because you're stuck either reading the book or watching Troy. (Despite the promise of Brad Pitt's ass, I wouldn't recommend the latter.) If you were assigned the Odyssey, though, you're in luck. The same guys who directed The Big Lebowski also directed a movie that's loosely based on Odysseus's journey. According to IMDb, the Coens claim to have never read the original work, which seems a little unlikely if you look at the enormous list of Odyssey references also on IMDb. Too bad the people behind Troy couldn't get Clooney for their movie.

At some point in their collegiate careers, most students will be forced to grapple with Shakespeare. The majority of them will lose. Shakespeare is deceptively inviting because, hey, all his work is either poetry or plays, which can't take more than a few hours to read, right? But then he drops all the ers, wherefores, and exsufflicates, and you feel like you're back in a foreign language class. Fortunately, the majority of books, TV shows, movies--well, pretty much everything--is derived from Shakespeare. West Side Story. She's the Man. The fucking Lion King! I personally recommend 10 Things I Hate about You because of the Heath Ledger and JGL factors. If you're reading (or watching) any of the tragedies, I recommend checking out the Sassy Gay Friend series on youtube. West Side Story was never this good:



Maybe you're reading something more recent. Maybe something more feminine. Maybe something like Jane Austen's Emma. Or maybe you took one look at the novel about a teenage chick playing matchmaker and decided against it. In that case, the alternative isn't much better, because it's movie that epitomized high school valley girls: Clueless. If you're looking for motivation to get through the movie, it has Paul Rudd. Also, the director is the same woman who directed Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which is famous for a naked Phoebe Cates. Otherwise, good luck tolerating one of the worst casting choices in Batman movie history.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century British poetry isn't quite as annoying as Shakespeare, but it's still plenty frustrating, what with its dropped verb and convoluted syntax. That's why we have 80s British metal band Iron Maiden: to take boring poetry and make it rock. Don't want to read Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Listen to Maiden's version. sure, it's almost fourteen minutes long, but that's fourteen minutes of awesome. Have absolutely no desire to read "The Charge of the Light Brigade"? Listen to "The Trooper". Better yet, watch the video, which includes actual lines from Tennyson's poem!



Or maybe you're stuck reading more recent fiction. Something written by Philip K. Dick, perhaps. Don't worry, just watch any science fiction movie ever. It's an adaptation of something Dick wrote. Don't believe me?

Blade Runner
Total Recall
Minority Report
Paycheck
A Scanner Darkly
Next

All Dick's stories. Even Disney's taking a crack at it. Also, they're apparently planning a movie adaptation of Ubik, which turns the word "ambitious" into a severe understatement.

Just look at the cover!

Obviously, this list isn't comprehensive. But it's a damn sight more entertaining than sloughing through Spanish I books or Coleridge. So the next time your professor assigns a book that looks really unappealing, just think: the Coen brothers are probably preparing an Oscar-winning movie adaptation at the very same time that you're slipping a roofie into some hot chick's drink.