American Teen

Year: 2008

Grade: C

Country: USA

Director: Burstein

Review

“documentary” about the high school experience in a small indiana town. much of the documentary is typical mtv “hills” style bullshit and almost as staged/produced. if you look carefully at the way things are shot you can see that some of the scenes were shot again for the sake of the camera, though this alone doesn’t make a documentary bad. after all, nanook of the north is similar in a way and that is a great film. what makes this film bad is the cliché and amateur filmmaking. i also suspect some of the props may have had product placement tie-ins. for example, they didn’t blur mcdonald’s soda cups, but they did bother to peel off the labels of coke brand soda bottles. the product placement seemed conspicuous. in this way the film felt like it was geared towards other teens, rather than serious film people as “hoop dreams” or wiseman’s “high school” were.

one good thing about the film is that it points out the fallibility of teens with a humanity. it’s easy when you’re older to write off teenagers as stupid hormone-addled kids, but the truth is that we’ve all been through that stage and we shouldn’t forget that fact. at this point these kids are still basically embryos, just meaner and less confident.

Watched in theater