Top 10 teen movies
10. Blackboard Jungle
Billed as "a brass-knuckle punch in its startling revelation of teenage savages" and based on the book of the same name by Evan Hunter – aka crime writer Ed McBain – who drew on his own experiences as a teacher in the Bronx – Blackboard Jungle ushered in the age of the teenage delinquent. In London, Brooks's film attracted crowds of Teddy Boys, who slashed cinema seats, danced in the aisles and actually started a riot.
The reason for such shocking behaviour wasn't so much the film's content, which today garners a more sober 12 rating, but because of the use of Bill Haley and the Comets' early rock'n'roll hit Rock Around the Clock, which played over the opening credits. Today, it is the least shocking aspect of a film that touches on knife crime, drug use and even rape within the state school system, but back then it was a touchstone for disaffected youth, never mind the fact that Haley was a journeying white musician in his 30s and the song was already a year old.
Nearly 60s years later it still packs a punch, with Glenn Ford's Richard Dadier (so called mainly to allow the jive-talking students to call him "Daddy-O") struggling to control his pupils at the fictional North Manual high school. Others try and fail, like the pitiful Mr Edwards whose prized 78s are smashed by his class in a symbolic and still upsetting act of rebellion, but hope exists in the form of African-American Gregory Miller, who finally responds to Dadier's patrician authority. Nevertheless, for all its postwar morality, Vic Morrow's surly Artie West is the film's real antihero, leather-jacketed and blank, the logical heir to Marlon Brando's Wild One of just two years earlier. Damon Wise
9. Superbad
With The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up certified hits, the Judd Apatow express was already rolling at full speed by the time Superbad, a comedy aimed at a younger demographic, appeared on cinema screens. Co-scripted by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who named the main characters after themselves), and produced by Apatow, this a raucous party movie best enjoyed with a crowd. The picture is dominated by three plucky young actors who were not then the stars they are now. Evan (Michael Cera), Seth (Jonah Hill) and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are high-school graduates gearing up for a last party before college. Evan and Seth will no longer see one another when the former departs for prestigious Dartmouth while the latter attends a state college; Seth's resentment simmers away throughout the action, though for now he has his sights set on sex. If he provides the booze for a party being held by the object of his affection, then he reckons he'll get to sleep with her. This is where the drippy Fogell comes in: having secured a fake ID under the ill-fitting pseudonym McLovin, he is the key to Seth's plan.
With its melancholy undertones and 24-hour time-frame, the movie occupies similar ground to American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused, but is distinguished by a post-Porky's sensibility that simultaneously satirises and celebrates pre-PC smuttiness. Much of the humour arises from the inexperienced heroes' chauvinistic assessments of sex. (Adults are hardly more sophisticated. A cop played by Rogen admits that police work is nothing like the forensics-heavy procedure CSI had led him to expect. "When I first joined the force," he laments, "I assumed there'd be semen on everything.") Honest goodwill, expert slapstick, fond observational detail and Greg Mottola's exuberant direction make the picture almost irresistible, even if the pacing is as baggy and the humour as macho-centric as we've come to expect from any Apatow production. Ryan Gilbey
8. Kids
No Merchandising. Editorial Use Only. No Book Cover Usage. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Moviestore Collection/REX (1597326a) Kids, Chloe Sevigny Film and Television FILM TELEVISION KIDS CHLOE SEVIGNY Film Stills Personality 12310942 Photograph: Moviestore Collection/REX
No wisecracking high-school cliques to be found here. In fact there's barely a mention of school. Not that many wisecracks either, come to think of it. Instead, Larry Clark's raw, bracing drama reminds us just how safe and artificial most teen movies are.
Kids was dangerous: an unapologetically frank depiction of things modern teens really get up to (those who've grown up in streetwise New York, anyway). It was a sharp slap to the chops of a complacent society who thought they'd done all the rebelling in the 1950s, and was accordingly denounced by protesters and politicians. But just like The Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause, the movie exposed a terrible gulf between teen and adult generations. The latter demographic barely even figures in the story. While they're out working, their offspring are getting drunk, getting stoned, partying, fighting, stealing, and having lots more sex than they ever did – albeit clumsily, unsafely and with people they don't particularly like.
Worse than all of those headline danger signs, though, is the general lack of concern or compassion the characters display, particularly Leo Fitzpatrick's chillingly uncouth anti-hero Telly, with his heartless quest to "de-virginise" younger girls and his sloppily articulated boasts about his successes. With the spectre of Aids stalking the shadows, a happy ending is a distant prospect.
But there's nothing particularly sensationalist about the way Kids tracked these teen lives. The treatment is more like a documentary: fly-on-the-wall camerawork (which, admittedly, verges on the lascivious at times), real street locations, unstructured scenes and authentically conversational dialogue – the latter largely thanks Harmony Korine's inside job of a script, written when he was 19.
That's the thing Kids never got credit for at the time: it's made up. It's a work of fiction, but the performances are so inconspicuously natural, they don't really register as "acting" – despite the fact many of the players went on to respectable careers, including Fitzpatrick, Chloe Sevigny, Rosario Dawson and Korine himself. All in all, testament to a job done a little too well. Steve Rose
7. 10 Things I Hate About You
HEATH LEDGER & JULIA STILES Film '10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU' (1999) Directed By GIL JUNGER 31 March 1999 SSO56770 Allstar Collection/TOUCHSTONE PICTURES **WARNING** This photograph can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above film. For Editorial Use Only. Entertainment Orientation Landscape Portrait looking ahead Film Still Comedy Romance Photograph: Allstar/TOUCHSTONE PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
The philosophy behind this lively teen comedy appears to be to do to The Taming of the Shrew what Clueless did to Emma. That is, take the bare bones of a literary classic and dress it in high-school threads. Even if the film is no Clueless, it's still quite the bobby-dazzler. The transplanting of Shakespeare to a latter-day US teen setting is the least successful part of it: there's something a touch creaky about the plot, in which a young girl is told by her father that she isn't allowed a prom date until her abrasive older sister Kat (Julia Stiles) lands one also. This sets in motion a scheme hatched by the younger sibling's suitors whereby a cool loner, Patrick (Heath Ledger), is paid to charm the uncharmable Kat. But that's a small detail. What we respond to in 10 Things are the visual and verbal high-jinks, the jaunty pace and the charismatic performances: Stiles and the late Ledger may have become known for more intense films, but it's arguable that neither ever enjoyed themselves more on screen than they do here.
The screenwriters, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, keep things fizzing: no character goes for long without a poisonous rejoinder or a sharpened zinger passing their lips. If anyone hits a dry patch, there is always language itself to contemplate. "I know you can be underwhelmed and overwhelmed," ponders one girl, "but can you ever just be 'whelmed'?" Everyone here is united and elevated by their idiosyncratic vocabulary, and the viewer comes away enriched too, in possession of phrases like "spank bank" (that area of the brain where images of desirable partners are stored for stimulative use) or a crisp new definition for the word "backer" ("Someone with money who's stupid"). The cast also includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt and, as Kat's father, the splendid Larry Miller (who was an early contender to play George Costanza in Seinfeld). When the pace flags, we can still count on pick-me-ups like Ledger's marvellous karaoke showstopper which he performs with the zeal of an early Steve Martin routine. RG
6. Heathers
Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty in Heathers. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Heathers arrived in the late 80s and promptly killed the John Hughes teen movie stone dead. That's not to say that Hollywood stopped making them, but Michael Lehmann's jet-black comedy – superbly scripted by Daniel Waters – offered a macabre take on the teenage experience that resonated so much more with moviegoers, who identified less with Hughes' sympathetic vision of high school as a melting pot and more with Heathers' view of it as a jungle, run along crude and arbitrary lines of popularity. It's this that is perhaps the film's most enduring legacy.
The Heathers of the title are the film's in-crowd, three girls of wealth and taste who have cast their discerning eye at Veronica (Winona Ryder), who, as the film begins, is starting to tire of them. The arrival of bad boy JD (Christian Slater, channelling Jack Nicholson) offers Veronica the chance she need to break out of this constricting caste, and the two become a kind of situationist Bonny and Clyde. However, when the pranking turns to murder – their enemies are despatched in fake suicides, seemingly prompting a schoolwide interest in all things Sylvia Plath – Veronica realises that JD goofball act is simply a mask, and that he is building up to something much, much bigger.
Daring for its time in the depth of its black comedy – two grotesque, sexist jocks are killed and a note left to suggest a doomed gay love pact – Heathers mostly earned its cult kudos from such cracking one-liners as: "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Teresa?" But for all its wilful controversy, Lehmann's film endures because it is perhaps the first truly honest film to made about school life, about its cliques and outsiders, and certainly the first in the pre-Columbine era to say the unsayable about where it all might be heading. DW
5. Rumble Fish
Mickey Rourke in Rumble Fish. Photograph: Kobal
It's a brave director who attempts to make an avant-garde teen movie. And mature viewers could find plenty to sneer at in Francis Ford Coppola's stylised saga, with its pretentious (but gorgeous) high-contrast black-and-white, its random billowing clouds of steam, its pulpy plot and its sledgehammer symbolism (Siamese fighting fish – is that, like, a metaphor?).
But the thing is, it worked. It's a movie that makes an indelible impression, less for what it says than how it says it. Rumble Fish gave 1980s viewers a dose of classic postwar Americana: gang fights, motorcycles, buff teens in white vests and leather jackets, cigarettes dangling out of mouths, all in a nameless, timeless American cityscape. It sounds corny but Mickey Rourke, it must be said, is way cool here. You can see why his younger brother Matt Dillon worships him: Rourke's Motorcyle Boy is dreamily magnetic, with his barely audible mumble and his barely concealed vulnerability. He's Brando from The Wild One meets Brando from Apocalypse Now. Watching him made you feel way cool, too.
Coppola covered similar teen ground, with a similar cast, in his other SE Hinton adaptation, The Outsiders, but there he aped the Technicolor 1950s; here, he was closer to 1930s film noir, by way of the French New Wave. But Rumble Fish's style is more than mere pastiche. Few directors have been that experimental with the teen genre since. Coppola took pains to create a hermetic world all of its own: note how much is absent here: names; parents; "California". Instead we get time-lapse clouds and clocks, a percussive Stewart Copeland score, bursts of colour, a bizarre, levitating dream sequence. Coppola even enlisted the San Francisco Ballet to choreograph the fight scenes.
That very abstraction is part of the reason Rumble Fish has aged so well. The cast hasn't done badly either, packed as it is with still-familiar faces: Rourke, Dillon, Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper. SR
4. Juno
Juno Photograph: Allstar/FOX SEARCHLIGHT/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Written by a former stripper and dealing with the issue of schoolgirl pregnancy – every middle-class parent's nightmare – Jason Reitman's film is a witty, well-played comedy that made an overnight star of Ellen Page as the title character. On its release, much was made of its pro-life overtones, but in reality Juno's situation is something of a macguffin, a premise that allows a smart, savvy 16-year-old to look at the world and its future.
Set in Minnesota but shot in Vancouver, in Reitman's native Canada, Juno begins with its heroine realising she is going to have a baby, the result of a fumble with her weedy best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera, at his very weediest). Rather than terminate it, Juno decides to offer the child for adoption, settling on the Lorings (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a cool-seeming couple who seem to be on her wavelength – he especially, sharing her love of indie rock and horror movies (although her tastes are pretty precocious even by modern standards).
The ending is twee and well signposted, but what's refreshing about Juno is that there is no takedown of its intelligent lead. By the end she is certainly older and wiser, but what Juno learns most to do is brace for disappointment: the world of adulthood is not the Disneyworld of sophistication she seems to think it will be. The use of still-obscure indie rock may have hampered its chances as a mainstream hit, but now that only adds to its lo-fi charm, and in a sense, it is probably fitting, since Juno isn't really aimed at everyone, just those who grew up thinking they knew it all and learned the hard way that, even if they were to know it all, nobody likes a smart-arse. DW
3. Pretty in Pink
Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald in the classic prom film Pretty in Pink. Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Rex Features
John Hughes' uncanny ability to tap into teen emotion, then package it in an irresistibly commercial way, was never better employed than here. This is the most empathetic of his films, but also the most outrageously 1980s-tastic. A universal heart-tugger and a retro style bible. It's a win-win.
It's an age-old story – poor Cinderella meets rich Prince Charming, and they angst over each other all the way up to the climactic ball, sorry, prom – but the full spectrum of adolescent anxiety is here: worrying what your peers will think; secretly fancying your best friend and plucking up the courage to tell her; worrying you're too poor; worrying about your parents; worrying you haven't rolled up the sleeves of your vintage tuxedo high enough.
Hughes takes all of this seriously, and he takes time to build his characters. We know where Molly Ringwald's Andie is coming from. We've seen her home, and how embarrassed she is about it, we've hung out in her bedroom, we've seen the state of her single dad (a poignant Harry Dean Stanton). That's not to take away from Ringwald's wonderfully natural performance. Her mix of front and fragility is effortlessly persuasive. Whether she's applying her lipstick or calling out Andrew McCarthy's snobbery, we're with her all the way. And John Cryer's Duckie is that strangest of male characters – the lovable, clownish nice guy who doesn't get the girl, even though he's better company, and better dressed. The ending (notoriously altered to test-screening demands) feels a bit of a cop-out, though you could read it as a bittersweet commentary on romance versus pragmatism.
If the story doesn't get you with Pretty In Pink, the styling will. The movie is worth watching for the costume changes alone, particular Ringwald's boss, Annie Potts, who flits daily from fetish-punk to 1950s beehive, Madonna-esque material girl to Debbie Harry New Wave. The heavy art direction now makes the film look like a deliberate time capsule, crammed with as many fashions, posters, records, and interior textiles as they thought they could get away with. And not forgetting that soundtrack: Psychedelic Furs, OMD, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order, the Smiths, er, a cover of Nik Kershaw. Has any teen movie had a better one? SR
2. Dazed and Confused
This movie is, like, awsome, dude ... Dazed and Confused. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection
What American Graffiti was to the 1970s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High was to the 1980s, Dazed and Confused was to the 1990s. Though, to confuse matters, Richard Linklater's day-and-night-in-the-life teen comedy is actually set in 1976 at the end of summer term in Austin, Texas, where high-school students are forced to improvise a night of drunken abandon after their party plans are thwarted. But there is a rueful aspect to this welts-and-all portrait of the joys and cruelties of adolescence. One extended slow-motion sequence, based on Linklater's own experiences, shows younger pupils such as the greenhorn hero, Mitch (Wiley Wiggins), being captured by older lads and beaten soundly on the hide with bats. (The girls, forced to imitate sizzling bacon as they are doused with ketchup and mustard, don't escape the humiliating initiation rites.) That prickliness lends Dazed and Confused an ambivalent flavour.
Linklater, working with Universal after his indie debut Slacker, had to overcome untold obstacles placed in his path by the studio; these were detailed in a brilliantly indiscreet diary published in the Austin Chronicle. ("They're killing us on the budget. Cut it, cut it, trim, squeeze… Everyone at Universal is scared shitless of losing their jobs because they've cranked nothing but one big-budget turkey after another for about the last year.") It's even more miraculous, then, that the film turned out so honest, vibrant and fresh. From the thrilling soundtrack to a before-they-were-famous supporting cast (Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Milla Jovovich) to Linklater's unmistakable compassion for his characters, everything clicks. Best of all, this is a period comedy which thumbs its nose at nostalgia. "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life," says one character, "remind me to kill myself." RG
1. Clueless
Alicia Silverstone in 1995's Clueless, 'which transposed Emma to a California high school'. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount
"As if!" — "I totally paused!" — "Minor ducats…" — "Let's do a lap before we commit to a location!" — "I was surfing the crimson wave!" — "Did my hair get flat?" When Clueless was released in 1995, it wasn't just sensationally funny and smart — insouciantly, it was the very opposite of its title. Writer-director Amy Heckerling seemed to have invented a whole new teen-pop culture language: allusive, indirect, shrewd and hilarious. It was a movie as vivid and colourful as its heroine's remarkable wardrobe: funnier and more romantic than any romcom.
Back in the 1990s, dumbing down had been the hot-button issue. This movie was a rebuke to all that, a clever and good-natured tribute to Jane Austen's Emma with nods to Shakespeare and Wilde. In Clueless, 19-year-old Alicia Silverstone found the lead role of a lifetime, showing matchless style and comedy skill, though afterwards never quite found the career path it all appeared to promise. She plays Cher, the spoilt but basically good-hearted LA princess: rich, popular, obsessed with fashion but lonely and looking for love. Silverstone hits the laugh-lines like a maestro, her voice breaking into a kind of pitchy yodel on the rising tones of bafflement or complaint. Cher is best friends with Dionne (Stacey Dash), but kind of snappy with her annoying ex-stepsibling Josh, whose mum was once married to Cher's ferocious lawyer dad Mel, played by Dan Hedaya. But could it be that there is a spark between these two? Josh is a college student into trendy liberal causes and droning "complaint rock". He is played by fresh-faced 26-year-old actor Paul Rudd, who instantly became a Hollywood fixture and fratpack comedy stalwart. Rudd's mature-yet-boyish persona all started with Clueless. Cher decides that the poor grades she's getting are all to do with the fact that her teachers are lovelorn, so she sneakily gets two of them to fall for one another, and when a dorky east coast girl called Tai shows up, Cher makes her a personal makeover "project". Tai is very well played by Brittany Murphy, a talented up-and-comer who, grimly, was to die in 2009 of complications following a prescription-drug overdose. A teen movie with contemporary youth-culture references is always complicated with irony and melancholy when watched nearly 20 years on. Brittany Murphy's awful fate is the saddest part of this. It is strange to think that Clueless predates social media. These people are primed and ready for the internet and the digital revolution. There is a superb sight gag about Cher and Dionne talking on their big clunky mobile phones. Sofia Coppola's recent movie The Bling Ring is next-generation Clueless. The difference is that Coppola's larcenous teens really are clueless, blank and selfish. There is a amiable quality and a comic idealism in Clueless which makes it so attractive. Cher and Dionne are the queen bees at their school, but they are not nasty, and, according to their lights, always want to do the right thing. Clueless is notable for not having a "bully" character who meets a comeuppance. Mean Girls, the satirical 2004 film written by Tina Fey, and starring Lindsay Lohan, is very different. Nothing new about bully-ism, of course, but I think it's interesting that Clueless appeared just before snarky websites and reality TV put mockery back into the centre of pop culture. Clueless is a real classic: charming, innocent, funny. I envy people who haven't yet seen it. Peter Bradshaw
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