I don't have time to do this as well as I should do it--I have to drive home, pick up some clothes I forgot there, air up my bike tires, and get to Darlene's to ride bikes to go drinking in the next 100 minutes. So this will be fast.
I went to a free screening of American Teen on Tuesday, a documentary about four high school seniors dealing with their final year of high school. The film was a sort-of surprise success at a number of film festivals before getting snapped up by Paramount Vantage and getting its soundtrack released on (I think) Sony.
Paramount is advertising the film as a "modern day Breakfast Club" and as being about five students. Really, it's neither of these things. The fact that the film is a documentary and that it covers about ten months of the kids' lives--not a comedy that takes place in one afternoon--proves it has, for the most part, little in common with the Breakfast Club. The documentary focuses on four students: Hannah, the artsy girl who doesn't fit in; Colin, the basketball star who is under pressure to get a scholarship so that he can afford to go to college; Geoff, the band-nerd/loner/dork who play computer games all the time; and Megan, the blonde super-bitch of the high school who thinks her life will end if she doesn't get into Notre Dame. Paramount said there were five stars--They counted Mitch, the "heart throb", as the fifth, I think in a lame effort to get more "traditional" audiences to go to the film (why watch a film with no romance, huh?). In reality, he has very little screen time, and doesn't really have ANY screen time until about halfway in.
But the film itself does a fabulous job of showing exactly what it's like (or, what it feels like it's like) for an American kid finishing their senior year of high school. There's drugs, drinking, sex, "heart break", insecurity, acne, sports, popularity, super-bitch moments...
I don't have time to go into it at all in depth now, but the documentary was superb. It captured all the issues of high school that seemed, at the time, like they would be the end of the world, but ended up all being completely survivable. And it did it well.
And it had a fabulous soundtrack.
ps. I now have a free pass to Tropic Thunder next week too. Woooooo!
Pack Your Bags, We're Moving!
4 years ago
3 comments:
Ever since I heard of this I was compelled to have some sort of interest (I did graduate high school, and I am a young adult). Lucky you, with the free screening and everything (how does that work out anyways)!
I heard a lot of it is re-enactment/staging; did you have any significant suspicion?
Hmmm.
I've always wondered how different the american high school experience is to my own.
I'll check it out.
Well, I didn't really have any significant suspicion. In retrospect, I could see where certain things could have been re-entacted or staged, but in general, I think that most people are such horrible actors, particularly in high school, that I doubt much of it could have been.
As for free screenings, they usually print up passes and distribute them around town at different locations. Sometimes they bring them into the boutique I work at, sometimes I find them at the video store (but they go fast there!), sometimes they hand them out at other screenings (they gave out ratatouille free screening passes at the Eagle vs. Shark free screening I went to), etc., etc.
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