Guilty pleasure films are usually those films I watch more than once–sure, I’m a nerd who loves dreamlike visuals and knotty plots, but sometimes big and gaudy work best. Which is why I am dying to see Burlesque.

I was too young to appreciate Showgirls when it was released, but it’s become a favorite–it’s bad in the best ways possible. So far, Burlesque  seems to be an update of Showgirls–sure, Burlesque is the same “small town girl goes to LA to make it big and ends up on stage naked” story. But this story has echoes of Cabaret, Cher in a bustier, and “Lady Marmalade”-ish Christina Aguilera, wearing slightly less makeup than she does in real life. I only wonder if Aguilera will prove to be a graduate from the Beyonce School of Theatre, covering up her anemic acting talent with bullhorn vocals. And it doesn’t even matter much if she can act–she’s got Cher to emote for the both of them.

I can’t wait to see the dance numbers from this film recreated by YouTubers. You know it’s going to happen.

Twelve years after it originally aired, I’m finally watching Dawson’s Creek. Believe it or not, I’d never seen a single episode until I watched the entire first season last week. As a kid and teenager, I was mostly oblivious to contemporary pop culture. I can’t even blame my parents. I don’t remember them ever making any rules that said I couldn’t watch TV or listen to the music that my classmates liked. It just never occurred to me. Most of the time, I was lost in my own little world of Anne of Green Gables and Jane Austen and Bach, and I more or less liked it that way. This sort of thing is often romanticized. Get kids away from the TV! Make sure your special snowflake is only exposed to Shakespeare and classical music! I don’t think my parents particularly tried to do that with me; if anything, they just modeled that behavior. And my brother is nowhere near as pop culturally oblivious, so it wasn’t systematic. But I am, even if accidentally, a product of those methods.

And you know what? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, I read tons. I know more about history and literature and classical music than most of my generation. But I also never, ever felt like I fit in with my peers, and never knew why or how to fix it. Looking back, I wish someone had given me a list of TV shows to watch and albums to buy. If it had meant that I had a little less time to read books none of my classmates cared about, fine. I might not have felt so weird all the time. When I say the one thing I’d change about my teen years would be to read less and watch TV more, I’m not entirely kidding. The point isn’t the TV or music itself. It’s that these shared cultural experiences provide common vocabulary and points of reference.

So now I’m watching Dawson’s Creek, and finally understanding all those references to Joey and Pacey everyone’s been making for years. And really, it’s an enjoyable show! But more importantly, with each episode, a teeny bit of that awkward teenager inside me feels a little less left out.

(I’m also tweeting the Dawson’s Creek experience. You can follow me at @katelinnea if you’re interested.)

Last night I finally got around to watching Drag Me to Hell. I was excited to finally watch Sam Raimi’s return to horror since I’m a big fan of the Evil Dead series.

The film had great tension and made me jump quite a few times. (My boyfriend, who had seen the film already, turned to me and said, “You look really nervous.”) While some people might have trouble falling asleep after a horror movie like that, I slept soundly. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a believer in the paranormal and Drag Me to Hell‘s plot is heavily contingent on the existence of demons (and, obviously, hell). In fact, this is often my problem with horror films: If they’re not good at making you jump, you’re left with mystical creatures that have no basis in reality.

Oddly, it seems the kind of viewer I am — someone who loves to watch fantastical or sci fi series and movies but doesn’t actually put stock in the existence of the supernatural — isn’t as common as I’d like to believe. A 2005 Gallup poll suggests Americans believe in paranormal phenomenon like haunted houses, with 37 percent of Americans professing such a belief.

In possibly one of the nerdiest academic papers of all time [PDF], Corrine Dalelio examined the increase in paranormal or pseudo-scientific shows that occurred in the 1990s — TV shows like Buffy, The X Files, Charmed, and Touched by an Angel as well as films like The Sixth Sense, The Craft, and The Others — for Rutgers University and how such a proliferation of paranormal themes correlates with beliefs in the paranormal among the general public.

Because the paper was published in 2004, it looked at the 2000 version of the Gallup poll, which found a similar percentage of the American public (34 percent of women and 27 percent of men) believe in ghosts. The 2000 Gallup poll also noted that there had been a spike of belief in the paranormal in recent years. More troublesome, Dalelio writes, is the fact that reports of witnesses claiming to experience supernatural phenomenon are increasingly making it into standard news outlets.

Granted, this paper is a few years old now, and if anything television lineups have been swinging back toward realism (the sleeper success of the film Paranormal Activity notwithstanding): Recent Nielsen ratings put America’s Got Talent, hard boiled crime show NCIS, and The Bachelorette in the top five shows last week. The Big Bang Theory, a comedy rooted in science (but that has endured accusations of sexism), squeaks in at number six. Mad Men, which is possibly the most critically acclaimed show of the year, prizes itself on its historical accuracy.

Still, it might be stretching it a bit to say that the popularity of these shows is causing beliefs in the paranormal or the the supernatural. It certainly seems odd that as more and more of our world is explained through science that there’s a sudden spike in the belief of the paranormal among the American public — something some groups are trying to educate against. There’s a podcast called The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe that attempts to increase public understanding of science and critically examine pseudo-scientific reports of everything ranging from homeopathic treatments and haunted houses.

Applying critical thinking is always a good thing — and increasing education in science can’t hurt. I appreciated Drag Me to Hell‘s ability to make me jump in my chair, but I’d prefer leave the belief in demons and ghosts to the fictional realm.

I can’t say enough good things about The Swell Season’s cover of “Two-Headed Boy”:

The Swell Season covers Neutral Milk Hotel

Actually, I can’t say enough good things about AV Undercover, the series at the AV Club that produced it. It’s a pretty wacky premise — put together a list of songs, invite bands in, force them to choose one to cover, repeat — but it’s paid off wonderfully. The best of them either totally rejigger the source material, as when Frightened Rabbit played the Lemonheads’ chipper “Confetti” as a finger-picked ballad, or stay close to original but with a crucial twist, as when Wye Oak turned the Kinks’ “Strangers” into a duet. But sometimes, as with Swell Season, the act barely diverges from the source (Glen Hansard even does a pretty good Jeff Mangum impression) but are having so much fun that it doesn’t matter. I can only hope The AV Club can secure the rights to sell these tracks together as an album; the only problem with the series now is the buffering time and Budweiser ads.