Five 2000 Movies for Five 2000 Pop Punk Albums

 by Rob DiCristino

It wasn’t a phase, Mom.

Loyal readers will recall my affinity for 2000s pop punk, that wave of power-chord-driven alternative rock that was aggressive enough to piss off your stepdad but catchy enough to be played at the mall. The Bouncing Souls. The Ataris. Lagwagon. Any band that headlined Warped Tour or the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack would qualify. Somewhere on a spectrum between purer punk like Rancid or Pennywise and the more introspective emo scene emerging in the Midwest, pop punk — or, as my record store calls it, “MySpace Core” — gave snotty malcontents like me an outlet for our adolescent rage. Pop punk of the year 2000 built on the breakthrough of bands like Green Day and Blink-182, solidifying a movement that continued through the Fall Out Boy/Paramore era (era) of the late-00s to modern acts like State Champs and Machine Gun Kelly. To celebrate 2000 Month — and to indulge me in a bit of nostalgic reminiscence — let’s pair a few iconic ‘00 pop punk records with ‘00 movies that fit their bratty, Hot Topic energy.

1. New Found Glory and High Fidelity

The pogo-jumping Florida quintet made their major label debut with this self-titled album, glossing up their melodic post-hardcore for the MTV crowd with anthems like “Hit or Miss” and “Dressed to Kill.” Though it’s still one of my favorite records, listening to New Found Glory today feels like thumbing through my teenage diary at 2x speed; it’s a chronicle of a time when every breakup triggered an existential crisis, a time when I was too insecure to recognize how my own emotional blindness doomed each romance from the start. In those days, girls were cruel and selfish (“This song’s for stupid girls/who think that every boy is all about them”), but good buds and good music would save us in the end (“Let’s toast the night away to friends/and forget about tomorrow”). Is there a better conceptual match than Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity? Both are ur-texts for male insecurity, swooning melodramas desperately masking their sentimentality under layers of performative angst. Simply put, Rob Gordon would hate how much he loves this record.

2. Maybe I’ll Catch Fire and In the Mood for Love

Though Chicagoland gloom-punk three-piece Alkaline Trio wouldn’t properly break through until 2001’s From Here to Infirmary, Maybe I’ll Catch Fire was crucial to establishing co-vocalist/bassist Dan Andriano’s influence on their developing sound, as tracks like “She Took Him to the Lake” and “You’ve Got So Far to Go” mix the band’s sepulchral mood with a warm, yearning emotionality. Andriano’s songs have a certain romantic self-deprecation to them, and while Maybe I’ll Catch Fire is probably defined by co-vocalist/guitarist Matt Skiba’s “Radio” — an aggressive fuck-you to a former love — Andriano’s songs counterbalance Skiba’s theatrics with something more intimate and confessional. There’s a candle-lit quality to Maybe I’ll Catch Fire that recalls Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, a moody and voyeuristic film about the unspoken desires we confine to the margins of our affairs. Andriano’s croon even has the same ache as Wong’s cinema, a hushed quality that might shatter under the slightest bit of pressure.

3. Good Charlotte and Battle Royale

Elder Emo Millennials might bristle at the notion that they were ever into Good Charlotte, a band that felt tailor-made for TRL in an era (era) when thrift-store credibility ruled supreme. Headlined by the Madden brothers — whose chiseled good looks also irritated the punk intelligentsia of the day — Good Charlotte was derided as a focus-grouped product meant to capitalize on a DIY movement. Their studded belts were too clean. Their liberty spikes were too perfect. Listening back to their 2000 self-titled album, it’s hard to separate the power pop sheen of “Little Things” from softcore acts like Simple Plan, but assimilation was everything in those days, even in a subculture fixated on individuality. Good Charlotte’s mix of punk and polish led me to Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, which brought another emerging subgenre — the transgressive ‘90s Japanese thriller — to a wider audience by giving its trademark elements a more commercial panache. Its violence is an aesthetic choice, not a narrative necessity, a spectacle staged for maximum visibility.

4. MxPx’s The Ever Passing Moment and Almost Famous

MxPx were already pop punk godfathers by 2000, but it was the success of their fifth album that cemented them as mainstays on the basement show circuit for decades to come. Though it’s not essential listening — spin Ten Years and Running to get the gist of their skate-core vibe — The Ever Passing Moment does feature key tracks like “Responsibility” and “My Life Story,” three-chord wonders driven by the same earnest, defiant corniness — “Don’t hate me forever/I’m better late than never” — that marks so much of MxPx’s work. Don’t let the tattoos and piercings fool you: these are thoughtful, conscientious boys rocking in service of growth rather than indulgence, a sensibility echoed in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Like MxPx, William is hopelessly uncool, approaching his youth as an opportunity to learn instead of a prison sentence to endure. Through it all, he avoids the cynicism that his idols use to shield themselves from self-reflection, using sincerity as a path to integrity and “Responsibility” as a path to insight.

5.The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show and Road Trip

I’m cheating a bit here, as Blink-182’s live album features songs released between 1995-1999, but it technically came out in 2000 and features the unreleased studio track “Man Overboard,” so I’m counting it. Cool? Cool. I remember my dad buying this for me the day it came out — Enema of the State was and still is our favorite album — and listening in disbelief as Blink sped through songs even faster than they did on their records and filled every lull in the action with dick jokes so profane that I wouldn’t understand most of them until college. It’s juvenile irreverence that borders on gross misconduct, so obviously we’ll pair it with Todd Phillips’ Road Trip, another gleefully obscene tract about a group of boys stuck in a voluntary state of arrested development. Time hasn’t been kind to either text, but at least both use chaos and cruelty as an avenue for bonding and reinforce a kind of camaraderie — however idiotic — in their bullying and provocation. Boys will be boys, it seems, and they’re perfectly content to stay that way.