{"id":3748,"date":"2010-10-09T09:17:04","date_gmt":"2010-10-09T16:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josemarquez.com\/xsml\/?p=3748"},"modified":"2010-10-09T09:17:04","modified_gmt":"2010-10-09T16:17:04","slug":"movies-about-life-from-an-adolescent-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/2010\/10\/09\/movies-about-life-from-an-adolescent-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Movies about the lives of adolescents."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago I <a href=\"http:\/\/josemarquez.com\/xsml\/archives\/3667\">panned the movie Easy A<\/a> as a teen drag performance and a bad one at that. <\/p>\n<p>Using teens and teen scenarios to tell adult stories is not inherently a bad thing. Allegories like the movies Election, Mean Girls and Rushmore are rich with meaning despite treating adolescence as a pretext rather than a dramatic purpose. <\/p>\n<p>But these rare successes may come at the expense of movies that actually and accurately depict the lives of teens. Such movies don&#8217;t disregard the feelings and struggles of adolescents as immature or shallow \u2013\u00a0i.e., as something you &#8220;get over&#8221; like a cold or a sprained ankle \u2013\u00a0but rather as pivotal moments in a person&#8217;s life; the stuff of drama. <\/p>\n<p>Below is a short list of such achievements. Not all of these movies are equally good and a few have some real problems but they are all focused on what life can mean to teens:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1068646\/\">The Class<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Show_Me_Love_%28film%29\">Show Me Love<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Raising_Victor_Vargas\">Raising Victor Vargas<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0114906\/\">Welcome to the Dollhouse<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Europa_Europa\">Europa, Europa<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0113540\/\">Kids<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/movies.nytimes.com\/2008\/02\/27\/movies\/27chop.html\">Chop Shop<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Y_tu_mam%C3%A1_tambi%C3%A9n\">Y Tu Mam\u00e1 Tambi\u00e9n<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fat_Girl\">Fat Girl<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have excluded some &#8220;canonical teen movies&#8221; (e.g., by John Hughes, Cameron Crowe) from this list on what is a perhaps a technicality: while they are clearly movies for teens, they strike me as movies about overcoming adolescence rather than muddling through it. They are fantasies rather than dramas. It&#8217;s a distinction that surely says more about my taste for narrative than any shortcomings in these movies. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fish_Tank_(film)\">Fish Tank<\/a> would now be at the top of this list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago I panned the movie Easy A as a teen drag performance and a bad one at that. Using teens and teen scenarios to tell adult stories is not inherently a bad thing. Allegories like the movies Election, Mean Girls and Rushmore are rich with meaning despite treating adolescence as a pretext&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,10,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}