playBOYhood

There's that wonderful church scene from The Graduate, the one that begins like this...

... and ends like this ...

In the scene, Hoffman pounds on the glass at the rear of the church, interrupting the ceremony and rescuing his beloved Katharine Ross from a loveless marriage to some Aryan guy with a too-muscular face.

Having seen the movie as a teenager, I always thought I was the Hoffman type. We all did, didn't we? We all thought we'd be the hero, the one banging on the glass, the one escaping on foot while the congregation beats at the the double doors.

It's not unlike our playboy mentality - that which makes us admire Vanilla Sky's spoiled, irresponsible yet irresistibly likable hero, David Aames. Tom Hanks in Big. 20-something celebrity culture. Never growing old.

In the midst of the wedding planning process, it's not your inbox that changes most. It's you and how you perceive yourself. It's seeing yourself not as a singular person but as one part of a very intertwined pair. It's who you aspire to be. Not Tom Hanks in Big; more like Tom Hanks in Joe vs. The Volcano. Well, no, not quite...

And it's being grateful for the fact that you don't have to rush to the church and swing a life-sized crucifix at a mob of wedding attendees to save the girl you love from marrying some douchebag ... because, believe it or not, she's actually marrying this douchebag ... and because, truth be told, it wouldn't look half as cool as it looks in the movie.