American Teen.

"American Teen, which follows the senior year of five supposedly archetypal high school students in rural Indiana, is entertaining enough, but it's still 100 minutes of pure exploitation," argues Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "To give herself cover, [Nanette] Burstein repeatedly makes the point that this generation lives their lives in electronic media. But just because the subjects are willing to have their private horrors filmed doesn't mean that they should be."

"Maybe this will be the big crossover doc, the hit that’s a hit because it reinforces everything we knew going in," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The movie does get under your skin... but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by."

Updated through 7/25.

"What do Juno, Napoleon Dynamite and The Breakfast Club all have in common?" asks Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. Answer: They're all being used to sell a documentary; American Teen is "one of the summer's trickiest marketing challenges."

S James Snyder talks with Burstein for the New York Sun: "While the movie seems to unite many audiences, reviving memories about the cruelty of high school, it's also revealed the divide that exists between the parents on the screen and some of the parents in the audience. Some are living in very different worlds."

"I want to do a fiction film," Burstein tells Karen Durbin in the New York Times: "I've spent a lot of time taking real life and molding it into a narrative. Now I'd like to take a narrative and make it feel like real life."

Anne Thompson reports on a screening last week at which some of the American teens were on hand for the Q&A.

The AV Club lists "17 scare films about the teen menace."

Online listening tip. Cort and Fatboy.

Earlier: Brian Darr and more reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 7/23: Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times: "'I was really surprised actually and have been upset by it,' Burstein said of the level of pushback American Teen has generated. 'There's accusations that it's staged and scripted and that I went after the stereotypes, and it's just not true. I think it's unusual to have a very narrative documentary, so people aren't used to it,' she continued. 'I think people have a hard time believing teenagers are willing to be that intimate on camera. So sometimes I feel I'm being criticized for what the film's achievements are.'"

"It's no accident that most of the great teen movies - American Graffiti, Sixteen Candles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High spring to mind - were made decades ago, when adolescents were still thought of as a generation rather than a demographic," observes Ella Taylor in the Voice. Still: "Even when it's ripping off Juno and The Hills, American Teen is fascinating in the way of every good documentary—the more time you spend with anyone, the more they surprise you."

Eric Kohn talks with Burstein for indieWIRE; so does Scott Tobias, but for the AV Club.

Updates, 7/25: "It goes without saying that a documentary film that finds non-famous, non-adult people at an especially vulnerable crux in their lives is something of an ethical minefield," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Can a filmmaker investigate the sexual, emotional and family lives of innocent youngsters without slipping into exploitation? The easy answer, confirmed by American Teen, is no way. And why even try? In a project like this one, the line between sympathy and prurience is not so much thin as nonexistent. Once we know a little about how these kids think, interact and behave, we are caught between the hunger to know everything and the impulse to look away before we learn too much."

"It's probably impossible to expect anyone to come up with a documentary as powerful as Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines's Seventeen which in 1983 traced the lives of another group of Midwestern teens with risky, gut-punching social realism," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "The film, broadcast on PBS, is out of circulation but you can YouTube it here. Obscure as it is, Seventeen has, in retrospect, the advantage of being shot on the cusp of the MTV era (a big moment comes when the teenagers play Bob Seger's 'Against the Wind' as a eulogy for a pal who has been killed in a car accident). American Teen, for all its seeming 24/7 access, never feels terribly vérité. Its subjects sport their remote transmitters on their belts like the latest hip accessory. Yet that may be the most telling element of all."

"The kids' mistakes make you cringe - often with laughs of recognition - and, during the film's most involving moments, makes you long to comfort them through their trials and cheer on their triumphs," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times. "If nothing else, American Teen reminds us that, though its charges aren't exactly Sudanese refugees, their pressures, joys and pains fill their worlds as much as anyone's do."

"In form, it's admittedly slick and packaged, with a commercial feel that owes as much to reality television as it does to Frederick Wiseman," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But in content, it's easy for anyone who survived (or is surviving) high school to feel twinges of identification."

In the New York Press, Armond White describes an incident that he finds to be "a vile misuse of the intimate, verité and reportorial technique that the Maysles, Pennebaker and other doc pioneers worked so hard to justify."

Posted by dwhudson at July 21, 2008 9:33 AM