American Teen
95 Minutes | Somerville Theatre: April 26 at 7:30 Pm
The stars aligned when director Nanette Burstein was filming American Teen, a documentary that followed five teenagers from a conservative Midwestern town — Warsaw, Indiana — during their last year of high school. Although her subjects were culled from five different cliques, the heartthrob inadvertently develops a crush on the artsy, rebellious girl, and together they launch an organic, when-social-hierarchies-collide story line that John Hughes would approve of. Burnstein decided to leave the definition of an “American teen” to the experts themselves, who through interviews and gems of footage tease out the varying affectations of adolescence. But she also had the foresight to choose individuals who were shamelessly aware of their fate and could celebrate it: tormenting others with less power, bending to the pressures of jockdom, suffering the punishment of their own insecurities, and forsaking advice to grow up on their own stubborn terms.
— Sharon Steel
Related:
Year in Film: Risky business, Review: Trust Us This Is All Made Up, Urban myths, More 
- Year in Film: Risky business
Every year the studios hold back their best until the end of the year, but this year they let us down.
- Review: Trust Us This Is All Made Up
“Trust us, this is all made up,” begins TJ Jagodowski, addressing a capacity crowd at New York’s Barrow Street Theater.
- Urban myths
Fellini’s Rome, Godard’s Paris, John Waters’s Baltimore — none of these home towns has possessed (or been possessed by) its filmmaker the way Guy Maddin’s does and is in My Winnipeg .
- Franken-Guy!
Why not the Hub?
- Believe it or not
Even the titles of his films are a little weird.
- Pedro, Borat, and a castrato
As usual, dedicated film critics were too occupied seeing four or five movies a day to note the swarm of A-list celebrities at the 31st Toronto International Film Festival.
- Fact and fiction and . . .
It’s that time of year again in the City by the Sea, when attention turns from mansions to movie screens.
- Different strokes
Some say the movie impulse comes from voyeurism, but I think a case could be made for sado-masochism, especially after watching some of the selections in this year’s Boston Underground Film Festival.
- Devine DVDs
Sure, we all know Get Smart! is out on DVD in time for the holidays, and the Superman films (all of them, going back to 1948), and Mission Impossible: The Ultimate Missions Collection , sure, sure, as if you could miss the bleating sirens of studio publicity.
- Review: Beeswax
Beeswax as in, mind your own . . . ?
- Festival atmosphere
Summer traditionally has been the happy hunting ground for Hollywood studios — the time when they unleash their big-budgeted, f/x-heavy warhorses on armies of newly freed schoolchildren and frazzled adults trying to beat the heat.
- Less
Topics:
Features
, Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Movies, More
, Entertainment, Culture and Lifestyle, Movies, John Hughes, Hobbies and Pastimes, Alex Karpovsky, Guy Maddin, Poor Hector, Andrew Bujalski, Micheal Smith, Less
