AMERICAN TEEN: American Teen, stay away from me-ee!

AMERICAN TEEN
Documentary
Directed by Nanette Burstein
Paramount Vantage
Review by Louis Fowler

A lot of critics are putting this documentary at the top of their “best of 2008” list, and boy, is this a total case of following the popular crowd. If anything, it's the most self-indulgent, whiny, irritating film of the year, if not the decade.

AMERICAN TEEN follows the pseudo-deep lives and, ugh, emotions, of a bunch of grating, self-involved teens attending a small-town high school. From the popular bro-jock and queen bee, to the cry-baby band geek and depressive art-girl, the whole thing feels like a staged, MTV-wannabe show pilot that probably could have found an audience that would put THE HILLS to shame.

Are these what today's teenagers are really like? During this whole movie, you pray to God that the Trenchcoat Mafia would burst through the doors, putting these vapid idiots out of their misery. And while every single character is the worst example of humanity possible, you'd think the biggest culprit would be the jocks who cry when they don't make the shot or the upper-class rich-bitch who gets a slap on the wrist for spray-painting “fag” on a rival's window—an incredibly reprehensible act, by the way—but it's the art-chick Hannah.

Oh God, Hannah.

Why do we as a society feel the need to explore every avenue of a teenager's emotions? Why do we need to get deep into the psyche of the teenager, especially when there's absolutely nothing there? Hannah exemplifies everything that we should hate about teens. With her constant drama and psuedo-forced outcast status, you want to just send to a sanitarium and watch Nurse Ratchet beat her with a rubber-hose. She so desperately wants to be cast as the typical feminist-free spirit who's yearning to escape her “oppressive” small-town life, but she is just another lost girl who gets drunk to dull the imaginary pain, which I'm sure is full of Tori Amos-lite daddy issues.

You get the feeling that she could have been the one character that could have been the saving grace of the film, but, much like the aforementioned HILLS, the “director” just wanted another fraudulent pretty face on the screen. And talk about MTV conformity: when Hannah starts dating the jock, it just goes to reinforce the well-held notion that most women, no matter how “alternative” or different they proclaim themselves to be, are all really just the same: give them the square-jawed jock anytime and they'll drop their belief immediately. Now that's the high school story that should have been made!

Yeah, that's it. Instead of all these photogenic teens and their shallow lives, why not cast a real outcast? How about an overweight girl with pimples? How about a kid in special ed? How about the wannabe jock that sits on the bench? How about the band kid that is really socially retarded?

Nope, sorry. Director Nanette Burstein would rather opt for the easy answers, because maybe she's as vapid as the characters she's putting on screen. No...there's no maybe about it.

If anything, AMERICAN TEEN is worth a viewing to make yourself feel better that you're so far removed from this life, so far removed from this teenage idiocy. Consider yourself lucky.

But, for a much better teen-related doc, check out the incredibly honest and moving BILLY THE KID, about a real hard-luck teen with Asperger's who tries to deal with high school pressure. Sure, it's not as flashy or “pretty” as AMERICAN TEEN, so most of you other critics will duly ignore, but it, for everyone else, it's the real best doc of 2008.