 |  |  |
Review #660 of 365
Movie Review of American Teen (2008) [PG-13] 95 minutes
WIP™ Scale: $13.50
Where Viewed:
When Seen: 15 July 2008
Time: 7:00 pm
DVD Release Date: Unscheduled (please check back)
After the Credits: there is info about where the kids are now throughout the credits
Soundtrack: Download now from 
- or - order the CD below
Directed by: Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture )
Written by: Nanette Burstein (NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell)
Featured Cast (Where You Might Remember Him/Her From):
Hannah Bailey (debut) • Colin Clemens (debut) • Geoff Haase (debut) • Megan Krizmanich (debut) • Mitch Reinholt (debut) • Jake Tusing (debut) • Ali Wikalinska (debut)
To wit there is…
• Megan Krizmanich: Queen Bee of the school. She's obnoxious, rich, self-centered, mean, domineering, and self-important. She makes the mean girls of Mean Girls look like Oprah. She makes the bully girl of How to Eat Fried Worms look like Mother Theresa. She's a really, really awful person.
• Colin Clemens: Super Jock of the school. He's as clean cut, hard-working, down-to-earth, as they come. He is, however, unlike the media archetype for a high school jock these days. He's not a hoodlum. He's funny, nice, caring, and for the most part, keeps his ego in check. He only loses it at times on the basketball court where he's king by failing to pass the ball and missing too many shots. If he's got a dark side, the film doesn't reveal it. If he's got a mean bone or arrogant bone in his body, the film doesn't show it. He's the kind of kid probably almost any Elvis impersonator father would give his left arm to have.
• Jake Tusing: Nerd King of Loneliness of the school. This kid's an archetype of an archetype for anyone looking to do a character study of the nerdiest kid who's ever walked the halls alone and unnoticed in school every day since middle school when a kid spilled spaghetti on his pants and made a feminine hygiene joke about his appearance. To top it off, not only would he have started the Dungeons and Dragons club back in the day, but in this area of Indiana the words Retin-A have never been heard. Worse, he's so socially inept he does things like put his face on the table, rub the greasy spot left behind, and admit to his new freshman girlfriend too new to town to realize she's just committed social suicide, "Oooo, the table is really greasy where I put my face." Eeek.
• Hannah Bailey: Queen of Art Freak Goth of the school. Truly beautiful in heart and soul, her spirit explodes beyond the chain link fence of ordinariness prevailing in her quiet homtown of Warsaw, Indiana. There's not a nanogram of her that has any desire to plug in to the mundane existence of the townspeople or her parents. She lives with her grandmother because her father has moved to Ohio to find work and her manic-depressive mother is too unstable to be a proper parent. She's artistically enchanting and so different from anyone else in her school.
…a cross between an episode of "The Hills" mashed with "The O.C." splashed with some Cartoon Network for art's sake is either a poignant, real, and insightful examination of the life of American teens today or one of the most scathing indictments of current American education ever put on screen.
So, with these archetypes covered, and certainly anyone who's been in high school or worked in a high school or perhaps parented a high schooler who shared anything about their life at school in the past 30 years would recognize these archetypes, Nanette Burstein follows their lives through one school year. It's hard to imagine how she pared down all that must of happened, and obviously she's selected these archetypal storylines to increase the drama. Or did she? Maybe that's all teen life is these days is drama. Every single one of her kids, though, faces a lot of it. Will Megan follow in the footsteps of her father and siblings who all went to Notre Dame? Will Colin get a Division I basketball scholarship because his father cannot afford for him to go to college on an Elvis impersonator's salary? Will Jake ever find love and be noticed by anyone? And will the lovely and infectiously ebullient but emotionally insecure Hannah Bailey escape Indiana for California making her dreams of breaking into the film business come true? Tune into to American Teen to find out.
So, on the one hand, Ms Burstein has put together a pretty standard concept for a documentary. Arguably, her subjects and subject matter are pretty trite; and, honestly, she's not done a lot with the film to prove that teen age kids today are much different from the shallow shells we see on the CW and MTV shows fed and marketed to them. There's no kid that raises a million dollars for AIDS research. There's no Eagle Scout who builds a recycling center in his neighborhood. There's no Intel Science Talent Search winner who discovers a new cure for muscular dystrophy. There's nobody, apparently, in this high school who could be considered really outstanding in any way. Not to knock Colin Clemens or Indiana Tech, but Indiana Tech is not Indiana University-Bloomington when it comes to basketball. And, certainly, those on the admissions committee at Notre Dame, after seeing this film, have got to question themselves on admitting Megan Krizmanich—though, according to her, she's matured a lot and fits in so well at ND. On the other hand, though, one has to ask, what was she trying to accomplish here? Was she trying to show that the American teen is pretty accurately portrayed in the media despite conjecture to the contrary? If so, she's definitely succeeded. Was she wittingly or unwittingly, however, and with or without the knowledge of her subjects of scrutiny, creating this film to point out everything that's wrong with public high school education in America today? While her film does not show these kids to be the kid characters of American Pie, we'll never know what wasn't shown, what ended up on the editing room floor, etc., they share much in common with them. And, what's wrong with them is pretty much what's wrong with the entire concept of public high school today. You watch this movie and see how much school is actually going on. It's not school at all. If you manage to learn anything it must be by accident, and so little of these kids' lives has anything to do with learning, it's absolutely confounding why on earth we are spending billions of dollars annually to perpetrate this fraud. For as much time as high school kids spend in class, which is the bulk of their daily time, at least presumably, the film shows us very little, just like the TV shows and the American Pie films, of what goes on in class. And when Ms Burstein turns her lens on the classrooms, which isn't often, there's not much pretty to see: kids reading magazines, text messaging, sleeping on desk tops, paying no attention to these mind-numbingly boring teachers who all seem to speak in either some variation of a Charlie Brown Special monotone teacher voice "Whah whaa whot whaah waaah whaa whaat!" or some corny, phony "you should be interested in me because I'm saying something that matters", Midwest polka cheerleader voice. A case in point is a hilarious scene in Hannah's Public Speaking class where the teacher conducts a mock interview with Hannah as the job applicant. Just when you think that the teacher is dealing well with Hannah's insolence in answering questions like "We expect our workers to show up on time." "Well, I have a problem with being anywhere on time.", she then pops in a video about how great it will be to go to the local community college where you can learn a real skill and get a real job. Late night infomercials are more inspirational than this class and this teacher bless her heart for trying. It's unclear what kind of great teacher she might be if the students in her class were interested in anything other than everything else going on in their virtually meaningless social lives. If TV shows give the impression that kids go to high school for what happens in the hallways and lunchroom not the classroom, this documentary only confirms that. Megan Krizmanich who has the most lavish of college plans spends 99% of her time, it seems, planning ways to humiliate people who wrong her, even former best friends, than she ever does studying. Colin Clemens, bless his heart, admits to having a g.p.a. somewhere around a 3.2 or 3.5 without doing any studying. But, his focus, his goal, his passion, his world is the basketball court. And like so many high school athletes these days who dream of the world of pro sports (Colin dreams of playing for his own Indiana Pacers), Colin's chances of ever playing a day of even semi-pro basketball in Greece are about as good as Jake fathering the child of Megan Krizmanich. But, that's his focus. Will he bother to get an education at Indiana Tech while he's there? Or will he still be living the impossible dream? If this is all that high school is, sorry to say it, but it's pretty much a complete waste of time, energy, and money. We'd be better off as a society to put these kids either directly into college or into the work force. Why pay for them to get no education? Why pay for them to get nothing but lessons in social engineering jiggered by the popular and mean kids in their schools? What's the point?
When you look at the net outcome of the four kids Ms Burstein selected to study, you've really got to scratch your head. Really, there was nearly nothing that the four got out of their high school experience that had much to do with what they continued on to do in life (now they are all about to become juniors in college). All seem to have become better people than they were—which really makes one wonder—but it's absolutely unclear what if any impact their high school 'education' played in them becoming who they say they have become. One could conclude they became better in spite of their education not because of it.
It's easy to look at American Teen as a sort of up-lifting film about high school teenagers today in America. Nobody dies in this film. Nobody shoots anyone. There's a lot about growing up as a person and believing in yourself. There's even a slice of standing up for who you are and want to be versus that which your parents envision for you—that should make a lot of parents thrilled, right? It's a lot harder to look more deeply into this documentary which wasn't written by the creatives behind the new "Beverly Hills 90201" set to debut this fall and help an entirely new generation of teens see that all high school is is personal life drama not SCHOOL and wonder whether Burstein quite realized what she was doing with this film. What she has done is build a very convincing case for the immediate closure of all public high schools in America in favor of something else, something more productive, something more worth the taxpayers' money. Is it any wonder with this as our primary method of preparing teenagers for college or adult life that our nation is in decline?
…serves powerfully as a battle cry for change in the way we educate the public in free public schools more than a tome of revelation about American teens today.
Click for 'Review Lite' [a 150-word review of this film]
Other Projects Featuring American Teen (2008)
Cast Members
Hannah Bailey
• Colin Clemens • Geoff HaaseMegan Krizmanich
• Mitch Reinholt • Jake TusingAli Wikalinska
Director
Nanette Burstein
Writer
Nanette Burstein
No comments:
Post a Comment