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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.
It's called comedy. It may be vulgar and unsophisticated, but that's what makes most people laugh. If you're not one of them, too bad. Studios aren't about to start making movies targeted at 1% of the population.
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!
90% of these comments is just whining... If you don't like the article, don't read it, and don't post trash comments. Try to keep the comments on topic...
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
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.
Ummm, this is slashdot.
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
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.
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
The Washington Post panned this movie. One of their critics (Kempley) said "Save your time, save your money, save your soul. Stay at home." Now, I have a dilemma. Should I trust Kempley or Katz?
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
Reminds me of a Simpson's quote:
Who moderates the meta-moderators?