FAME (1980)
God, this is embarrassing. What the hell am I doing? There are so many other good high school movies to write about...much cooler cult and foreign gems like Gregory’s Girl, Flirting (featuring what’s still my favorite Nicole Kidman performance in a supporting role as, yes, an imperious blonde queen bee), Foxes, Can’t Hardly Wait, etc., etc. But, no...as much as I enjoyed those other films, Alan Parker’s musical tribute to New York City’s High School For The Performing Arts is far closer to my theater geek heart and more in need of bloggy defense and rehabilitation. So forget, if you will, the dorky TV version and the horrific stage adaptation (though both, I know, have their defenders). Pretend you didn’t have Irene Cara’s title song jammed down your throat at a zillion amateur talent shows and karaoke bars, and pretend you never saw all those people dancing on cars in the movie’s signature motif. (And, for God’s sake, purge that whole “take your top off, Coco” scene from your memory banks.) What’s left, if you can see past all that, is a believably gritty urban high school full of believably gifted, troubled kids from all walks of life, struggling with dreams they’re stuck with for good, even if they don’t have the resources, talent or luck to follow them. And that’s why “Out Here on My Own” still chokes me up after all these years, no matter what the haters say.
GHOST WORLD (2004)
Ghost World took a lot of chances. Would Dan Clowes' spooky ability to relay the odd rhythms and cadences of teenage girls translate to the screen? Would his visual sensibility carry over? Would the insertion of Seymour, meant to be an audience surrogate, backfire? Would they get the casting of Enid and Rebecca right? Was Terry Zwigoff, who'd never carried off a non-documentary feature film before, the right man for the job? Audiences, who at first consisted mostly of fans of Clowes' work, were breathless throughout the whole movie. Ghost World told the tale of two alienated high school girls and how their lives, which consist largely of mocking a culture they are certainly of but decidedly not in, change when one of them encounters an older man who never fully recovered from the repelled alienation they feel as teens. On the cusp of making major decisions about what to do after high school – decisions that will affect their lives and their friendship – Thora Birch's Enid and Scarlett Johansson's Rebecca begin to drift in decidedly different ways, and for all the recognition shocks the audience receives from the hopeless, hapless eccentric Seymour (expertly played by Steve Buscemi), it's the friendship between the two girls that maintains the movie's emotional and moral weight.
SHOW ME LOVE (1997)
Some aspects of high school transcend nation, era and — yes — sexual orientation. (Who among us had a firm handle on the latter in high school?) Locker-lined hallways, the mind-numbing alcoholized boredom of being 15 in a small town. The way even the popular kids feel like outsiders. Oh, and the redemptive power of chocolate milk. Show Me Love, or "Fucking Åmål" as it was called in Swedish, tells the story of a romance between the reckless hot popular girl and the nerdy outsider girl, both with a burning wish to get the hell out of their one-horse town. This film took Lukas Moodyson from little-known Swedish teen-prodigy poet to indie director of world renown.
BRICK (2006)
Writer-director Rian Johnson's adolescent noir grew out of Johnson's passion for Dashiell Hammett; he came up with the high school setting as a way of giving a fresh spin to what might have been very familiar genre material. It actually does more than that for the movie, because of the way that the physical and social constraints of high school life seem to comment on the hidden traps and doomed undercurrents of noir and the way that the antique hard-boiled slang that Johnson carries over from the work of his literary hero shades into the semi-decipherable slang of the young characters. Brick is also distinguished by the performances of an impressive array of proven and up-and-coming talent, including Lukas Haas, Emile de Raven, Noah Fleiss, and especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose work here, along with his starring roles in Mysterious Skin and The Lookout, confirm his status as maybe the most excitingly unpredictable American movie actor who's still in his mid-twenties.
Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent