Nannette Burstein’s American Teen has become ubiquitous since its Sundance premiere, both on the festival circuit and, thanks to a poster carefully calibrated to target Gen X nostalgia, online. Its title suggests a wishful universality, but in fact, when looked at alongside two less-lauded films about American teens against which it screened here in Silver Spring, its document of five white high school seniors in a semi-rural suburb of Indiana seems as niche as it gets.
World premiering here on Friday before beginning a run on HBO Monday night, Hard Times at Douglas High is a fly-on-the-wall work of activism documenting a year in the life of an all-black Baltimore high school, as teachers, students and administrators struggle to comply with No Child Left Behind. Made by the directors of the seminal reality series An American Family, it makes visible the reverberations of blind bureaucracy on living and breathing institutions, making the home and personal lives of its students a spectre, but not a direct concern. Taking the inverse tactic, Going on 13’s intimate portrait of four girls passing through puberty (or, “puberey”, as one subject refers to it early on) over the course of four years in a barely middle-class Northern California community touches on the institutions that contain their lives only incidentally. Seen together in a single weekend, each of the three seem to say less about age than the variables of fate as played out through place and race.
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At This Recording, Tyler Coates reviews Keith Gessen’s All The Sad Young Literary Men, a book that I’m admittedly curious about, but absolutely refuse to read in hardcover unless someone gives me a copy. It is one of those new fangled novels that wants to tell people in their late 20s and early 30s who live in New York and have creative aspirations and complicated desires what it feels like to be a person in their late 20s and early 30s who lives in New York and has creative aspirations and complicated desires. It is sort of related to movies, by several degrees: Keith Gessen co-founded the literary journal N+1, the latest issue of which I read on the way back from Cannes; the co-founder of N+1, Benjamin Kunkel, wrote the novel Indecision, which Andrew Bujalski is allegedly adapting for Scott Rudin, to some chagrin from those of us who like Bujalski but hate that novel.
Anyway. Towards the end of his (largely negative) review, Coates brings up a blog post written by Gessen’s former girlfriend, Emily Gould. If you live in the world New York on the internet, you’ll know that Emily Gould used to write for Gawker and was recently eviscerated by that site for writing an extremely long cover story for the New York Times Magazine about dating another person who used to write for that site. Less press was given over to an earlier evisceration of Emily by Gawker, in which publisher Nick Denton basically accused his former employee of sleeping her way to the top (of what? The Gawker hate list?) by sleeping with Gessen. I thought that Denton’s post was really, really gross. I thought the NYT Mag piece was just unnecessary––although I applaud anyone who can make five figures off of blogging.
Okay, but seriously: this is a blog post about movies. Here it comes: …Read more
This is a holdover from the weekend, but it’s worth going back to: Nikki Finke says three people have told her that Warner Brothers is no longer greenlighting pictures build around female stars. This is apparently in reaction to dismal box office returns for The Brave One and The Invasion, but as Finke points out, those weren’t exactly the chickiest of flicks. Ergo, this seems to be less about the female audience and more about the general audience not responding to female stars. Or, it could be about WB looking for scapegoats to cover their own failure to efficiently market genre fare to grown-ups. Regardless: it looks bad, and, if it’s true, celebrity feminist/attorney Gloria Allred (who has been awfully busy lately with Britney Spears’ custody battle) isn’t going to let it slide. She tells Finke:
This is an insult to all moviegoers and particularly women. It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men…If that studio confirms that their policy is to now exclude women as leads, then my policy would be to boycott films made by Warner Bros.
This will probably go nowhere, because if pressed, WB will be like, “Of course we love women!” And it’ll all blow over as soon as Finke finds a tastier string to pull. But at some point, someone is going to have to explain to me how 40 year-old actresses having trouble finding work is anything other than business as usual.
