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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.
Why must we be exposed to another piece of teen movie garbage? Granted, it's a spoof, but it has the trademark "lack of intelligence" that every teen movie has...
Allright, I'll accept that, but Jon, is it worth paying almost eight dollars to see? I think i'll pass..
Berto
The problem is that spoofing "teen movies" is shooting fish in a barrel.
No, I take that back, it's even less challenging than shooting fish in a barrel. The inanity behind "teen movies" is so self-evident, that claiming to spoof them is redundant. It's like trying to spoof Roger Corman movies - unnecessary, and not particularly clever.
I will admit, normally I don't mind Katz articles, but the movie reviews are just off the wall. I read the reviewers whom I usually trust, and invariably what they call boring, derivative, and recycled drek will apparently get raves from Mr. Katz. I guess that's the beauty of opinion being, well, opinion and all, but still....is there ANY lowest-common-denominator entertainment he doesn't lap up and ask for seconds?
Maybe the specific "jokes" in Not Another Teen Movie are worth a chuckle, but the satirizing the "teen movie" genre is like aiming at the kid in the wheelchair in dodgeball....there's just no sport in it whatsoever. And to read a gushing review like it's some genius stroke of parodic insight...stick to sermonizing about the youth-empowering effects of the net, Katz!
What in the world is wrong with you that you have to say such things just because you dislike Katz?
I would normally let this go, as it's off-topic, but your aggregious slander of Mr. Katz has prompted my reply.
I had skipped the Afghanistan article, as I do most of his articles, but have just read it because of your post.
It is entirely plausable that a man has dug up an Amiga, plugged it in, and has connected to the Net. It's not rocket science. Having lived in and travelled around Eastern Europe, I've seen and used some pretty low tech solutions to surf the net.
You can get a modem to connect at 9600 baud across lines that you wouldn't think could support a telephone conversation, and computers you wouldn't think could run a browser. (The web is still very usable over a 9600 baud connection, especially with images off as older browsers allow)
And answering how an Afghani would have this knowledge and ability, you ignore reality:
1. Five years ago you could still have a computer in Afghanistan
2. It's a country with many smart people, educated there and abroad
3. People with chicken coops aren't necessarily poor peasants
4. Borders are porous and different people have different reasons for living in a particular place; this guy may well have lived half his life in New York for all you know.
Before you slander Katz you should get out of college and in to the rest of the world. See what goes on and how people adapt to not being in an environment so sheltered as yours. At 21 you may think you know everything, but in time you'll find you most certainly don't.
We may not like or appreciate Katz, but he is one of the few legitimage journalists (in Print and on the web) with an extensive knowledge of technology and it's impacts on the world. Don't call him a liar if you don't have some serious proof.
Alright people, understand the following disclaimers:
1. I am a student and my major is film, and as such I think I know everything.
2. I actually like some teen movies for what they are-- "Election," most notably, but I didn't think "The Faculty" was that bad, either.
3. I have no problem with Jon Katz, prior to this review.
Here we go then.
I saw this movie last night, as the concept amused me and a friend offered to pay. I regret it immensely.
My tastes are not what I'd call extraordinarily sophisticated; I can be amused by dumb comedy, so long as it's *smart* dumb comedy, if you catch my drift. "Scary Movie" got a few laughs out of me.
"Not Another Teen Movie" did not.
Every bit of humor is obvious and cliched. There is no wit whatsoever to this-- it seems that the makers of the movie are responsible for this heap not because they would want to pander to and work at the level of 12-year-olds, but because that's the best they can do.
It's not enough to say that an adolescent boy could have written this thing. It's more like an adolescent boy could have written it the night before it was due.
Katz gets one thing right: plot is almost non-existant. Unfortunately, without plot, we would need some other cohesive element to this the movie together-- characters, say. But there's so many characters crammed in here, haphazardly and without rhyme or reason, that the whole thing becomes difficult to follow. I've seen just about everything the movies spoofs, so I recognized the "archetypes" of the characters, but each was so bland and unfunny (although I'll admit the token black guy was vaguely amusing at one point) as to completely blend into the next.
I was worried going in that I would have seen all the jokes already in the previews. This was a mistake. I should have wanted to see more of the jokes in the previews, so that I would have known enough to save myself the 82 minutes it took to suffer through this abomination.
Save yourself from it, boys and girls. Go see "Vanilla Sky" instead. It may mess with your head, but at least you'll be thinking about something other than the eight bucks you just lost on your way out of the theater.
Is he a seasoned expert on politics, law, and cinema?
I think most everyone can agree that Katz is none of these things. His political and legal diatribes are one note symphonies of self-aggrandizement and faux-righteous indignation, espousing the values and attitudes of a culture which he has been trying desperately for the past few years to not only be a part of, but also to be the poet laureate for. In these respects he acts the part of the colonials coming to the new world, assigning roles, rules, and boundries that were previously non-existent, nor ontologically inferable, but constitute the only way in which he can fathom the world functioning. So he imposes this artificial order on things, which the natives (slashdotters) see right through, but which the Old World (Wired, Salon, etc), who deal with the new in the same terms as him, views as extremely novel and insightful.
The same can be said for his movie reviews. His lack of understanding of and expertise in the field shows through in the form they all take: plot summaries decorated with occasional tips-of-the-hat to quality or cultural implications. Many people have said of this particular review that they learned nothing that they couldn't have inferred from the trailer, a sentiment with which I empathize. But beyond the shoddy craftsmanship and poorly-suited-to-this-forum topic, there is the fact that he gets close, at points, to actually saying something, as opposed to regurgitating parts of the press kit. He says that "the movie makes some real points about contemporary American teen life." Reading the review over, the only nearly salient point on this topic is "that white suburban kids want everybody else's culture." Thank you Jon, but this suggestion is neither specific to this movie, new, nor, from what I can tell, especially well explored in this bit of cinematic dross.
Please: do not speak for a community that you don't belong to, that doesn't want you, and that you quite obviously don't understand. And when reviewing movies, try to offer your readers something beyond what they could get from the two sentence blurbs that appear in monolithic film guides. Or, if this is all the content you intend to offer, cut to the chase and author one sentence reviews that have the same effect of your current opining rambles: either "I liked it" or "I didn't like it."
strange things are afoot at the Circle K...
There was one other pretty decent set of metajokes in there -- note the reference to asians:
1) The only asian "character" was a white guy.
2) The asian male actors didn't speak but did know kung fu.
3) The asian female actresses were bitchy but subordinate(indeed, could only speak in unison) behind the white head cheerleader.
Mind you, I'm just some white guy. But I have noticed there aren't actually, um, any asian male stars in Hollywood. Like, at all.
Unless they fight.
By contrast, there *has* to be a Token Black Guy, and he *has* to be obvious. Bonus points if he's got an African name.
For a crude movie, this was some elegant subtlety.
--Dan