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Review: Not Another Teen Movie
From the opening shots, you know you're going to have fun, as the movie is set in the "John Hughes High School." Unable to win acceptance mimicking African-American culture, one JHHS student decides it's now hipper to be a Jackie Chan clone and dresses and talks "Asian." One of the interesting subtexts of all teen movies is that white suburban kids want everybody else's culture, since they don't seem to have one of their own. A cheerleader with Tourette's Syndrome tries out for the squad and wins a spot.
Like all the best teen movies, this one is obsessively self-referential. Even if you've seen all of these movies, from She's All That to Karate Kid to Not Another Scary Movie to Scream to Pretty In Pink to Clueless, you still may miss half of the insider jokes and references, which whiz by in a steady, sometimes hilarious stream. Spoofs of spoofs of spoofs can work. The movie skewers almost every teen star, from Tab Hunter to Freddie Prinze Jr., even offering a cameo role to Molly Ringwald, the teen star of the Reagan era.
Not Another Teen Movie even takes shots at movies outside of the teen genre, like American Beauty (represented by a weirdo in a funny hat with a camcorder followed around by a hovering plastic bag labelled "the most beautiful thing in the world.") But American Pie comes in for the wittiest and most relentless drubbing, with Randy Quaid as the drunken Mr. Briggs who stuffs his kitchen with apple pies when he isn't hallucinating about the Vietnam War. There's also a foreign exchange student named Areola, who shows up for school wearing nothing but a backpack, pointing out that her only purpose in coming to America is to titillate brainless and horny American schoolkids. In terms of raunchiness and scatalogical humor, the movie goes farther than American Pie, pausing along the way for good measure to take on the recent spate of stupid feel-good sports movies like Remember the Titans. There are also some pointed pokes at the way the teen movies manipulate race in the shallowest of ways. "Mr. T" makes an appearance as the befuddled but wise black school janitor dispensing incomprehensible but mystical advice.
It would be pointless to try and suggest or describe anything like a plot, which the movie enthusiastically avoids. Suffice it to say there is a prom coming up, and there is a wager about whether the school's most ungainly girl can be turned into a prom queen by the venal and manipulative jocks, one of whom falls instantly in love with her. The bulk of the teen movies revolve around the same two or three points: shallow cheerleaders, dumb but noble-hearted jocks, obnoxious nerds and geeks, and faux individualists who claim they are different, but who always seem to always end up dating the best-looking kids in school and hanging out with the most popular cliques. It's a big fat target, and Not Another Teen Movie scores with surprising wit and skill. It's all in the writing.
Since when can't nerds be interested in movies?!
I think a lot of nerds are interested in movies. Personally, I'm very interested in making sure that the MPAA doesn't get any of my money for making them, because they helped fund the DMCA to strip me of my First Amendment rights.
But while we're talking about seeing movies for free in one manner or another, I think the point was that this particular movie probably doesn't fit our audience very well. It's a spoof of a special-interest genre (movies for teens 17 and under), and doesn't have the broad-based appeal to a general audience that nearly anything else would.
In short, there's no problem with reviewing general-interest movies on a special-interest site. But there's a big problem with reviewing special-interest movies for high school kids on a site for professional and amateur programmers.
What a joke. The only good thing about this movie is that it will teach those "popular kid" idiots like the atheletes at Columbine that their movies just aren't funny.
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What happens when you outlaw guns
JonKatz wrote: "[...] the movie takes this oddly American cinematic genre [...]"
It might be true that nowadays teen movies are primarily made (and viewed) in the USA, but Israel and Germany had their jointly produced Eis am Stiel ("Lemon Popsicle" in the US) series from 1979 to 1988 starring Zachi Noy among others. They weren't afraid to show full frontal nudity - they probably had to, the movies being so bad that otherwise they would have all flopped. The US movie Porky's seems to have been inspired by these flicks.
The series portrays teens as stupid drooling sex addicts whose primary motivation is invariably getting laid. There are still a couple of teen movies made in Germany from time to time, but since the Germans like (and partially understand) US lifestyle they also import all of the US teen movies.
This goes to show that the US aren't the only nation capable of making silly teen movies.
Some info about Eis am Stiel (German)
A Lemon Popsicle fanpage
So it refers to itself all the time? I think he just means referential.
If you were in the habit of reading movie reviews, instead of just browsing through this one because it happened to be on Slashdot, you would know that the term "self-referential" means that it depends on gags that refer to the genre itself, not the movie itself. For an example I refer you to The Onion's movie reviews, where you will find that pretty much every cartoon movie's review uses the term (at least Shrek and Monsters, Inc.). Granted, the term is confusing, but so are terms like "functional computer language" or "operating system kernel" if you don't already know what the writer is talking about. Maybe instead of automatically assuming that you're smarter than the writer, you should start by assuming that you're the ignorant one, because in this case it's true.
that wasn't funny...
JonKatz's review is "Offtopic." However, let me bring this article into Slashdot's realm of coverage by pointing out an issue related to Your Rights:
If you have a DVR or can otherwise record the TV teaser for this movie in a high-quality way, check out the scene where the woman in a dress falls through the stairs.
Just after they switch to a shot looking down on her (or more likely, her stunt-double) falling into the abyss, there are about 6 frames where her dress most obviously should hike up to the point of heavy undergarment exposure. However it is quite obvious that someone whipped out the Paintbrush tool and did a ridiculously fake-looking, blurry censorship job.
This was only a guess until I dropped my TiVo remote and punched up www.apple.com. I visited their generous selection of trailers and viewed the same footage through the wonders of Broadband. Frame-by-framing with the Quicktime viewer, I located the same set of frames and confirmed that, in fact, the online version displays a great deal of unadulterated Good Old White Cotton American Freedom.
This posting is not intended as an exercise in lechery but instead as an anchor, attaching in some small way this obviously matter-free, nerd-unrelated article to the Slashdot favorite topic, Censorship.
JonKatz should thank me. No personal checks, plesae.
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels