Teen Angst Roundup!

June 6, 2004

I just realized that the last three movies I’ve seen were Mean Girls, Saved, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which means somewhere along the line, I’ve turned into a 16 year old girl. Keep your dirty jokes to yourself.

Mean Girls is a few problems away from being the superawesome teen movie of the year, but what’s there is still funny and smart and worth your time. It’s a glammed up and softened down version of Heathers, as a school newcomer infiltrates the most popular clique in school, the Plastics instead of the Heathers, and destroys them from the inside. While Heathers went off the deep end with staged suicides and school bombings, Mean Girls is relatively nice. The sabotage is mostly backbiting and protein bar antics, with virtually no body count whatsoever. This is, of course, one of the points of Mean Girls and its depiction of Girl World. Boys may beat the snot out of each other, but the girl-on-girl crime teenagers commit with their gossip and their betrayal leaves much gnarlier scars with nary a punch thrown. This keeps the film on a nice line between satire and realism, but it also feels oddly restrained too, with the movie jogging in place just when you think it’s about to take off. My other beef is that I thought Lindsay Lohan’s Cady was stunningly dull. She doesn’t really have any reason to start on her Plastics surgery, other than the goth girl and gay dude told her to, and she goes to the dark side so easily and quickly that I ended up rooting for Plastics to just kick her teeth in anyway. That’s just me and my boyish lust for violence.

Oddly, with Saved I found myself reacting to it with almost the exact opposite reaction. Saved is another teen comedy, the twist being that it’s set in uber-Christian American Eagle High School. With this kind of backdrop, you would think it would go whole-hog Jesus crazy, but it really doesn’t. Yes, there are rock’n'roll prayer assemblies, afterschool abortion clinic attacks and a towering Christ cardboard cutout above the school, but I have both TBN and the Angels network and I’ve seen Kirk Cameron handselling me the bible, so none of this seems outlandish at all. After seeing Minister MC Hammer late one night, the world of Saved seems downright normal. Anyway, back to the movie. Jena Malone plays Mary, a nice kid at American Eagle that starts “backsliding” to hell despite her best intentions. The plot is very afterschool special, without any particularly notable set pieces, but it’s held together with honest portrayals of likable, down to earth characters. Everyone in the movie seems like someone you know or could have known, even Mandy Moore’s nutty villainess, and that carries it through a somewhat bland and preachy finale.

Now, on to some devil worshipping with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I still haven’t read the books, so you’ll get no complaints or any particular insight from me. The third edition is legitimately scary, unlike the first two, and for the first time I really felt like people were in danger and there was something at stake. Cuaron directs with a fierce economy that wasn’t in place with Chris Columbus, and keeps things moving while still laying out the details for the clockwork plot. One of my complaints about the first two was that there were far too many red herrings that could have been excised, and that’s been remedied here. Of course, that means you can see the pieces fall into place, but I’d rather have that than half-assed magic explanations that come out of nowhere. The rules of the world are firmly established now, so for the first time I felt a sense of internal logic in the movies, which was nice. I still think Potter’s kind of a tool, and that Hermione does all the heavy lifting. The movie’s worth seeing just for Gary Oldman’s wanted poster.

Posted in Moving Pictures