high school

Battle Royale (2000)

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The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.

Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.

A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk & The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.

As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.

-Brandon Ledet

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

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2005’s Linda Linda Linda is a very quiet movie about a very loud band. After a couple decades of spotty distribution in the US, the live-action Japanese high school drama has been restored and theatrically re-released by GKIDS, who mostly deal in hip, artful anime. The timing and the choice in distributor for this re-release make enough sense to me, both as a 20th anniversary celebration and as a companion to GKIDS’s recent theatrical run for the anime drama The Colors Within, which largely plays like Linda Linda Linda‘s animated remake. What I did not expect after years of seeing stills of its teen-girl punk band in social media posts championing the movie as an out-of-print, semi-lost gem is that it would be so gentle & understated. When the fictional band Paranmaum plays a hastily learned trio of raucous punk songs at the climax, the movie is exciting enough to make you pogo around the cinema. While Paranmaun is learning those songs in the few days before their first (and presumably only) gig, however, the energy is remarkably lethargic, to the point where the main narrative conflict is that the band is too sleepy to rock. To be fair, that’s exactly what I remember experiencing as a teenager: some of the most ecstatic, memorably chaotic moments of my life interspersed between long periods of feeling long overdue for a nap.

The name “Paranmaum” is presented as a Korean translation of “The Blue Hearts,” a real-life Japanese punk band. In the few days leading up to their high school’s annual rock festival, the teen girls of Paranmaum quickly form as a Blue Hearts cover band, inspired by the discovery of a cassette tape recording of the Hearts’ 80s hit “Linda Linda.” Initially, the major obstacle of their formation is the keyboardist scrambling to learn guitar after losing a couple former bandmates to injury & petty teen squabbling. The even bigger challenge, however, is the impulsive recruitment of a new lead singer, who didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for. Paranmaum takes a Korean name because their new singer is a Korean exchange student who can only speak rudimentary Japanese, agreeing to join the band through polite, confused nodding. As the guitarist learns a new instrument and the vocalist learns a new language, the girls learn to work as a real, legitimate group, effectively turning the band’s formation into a 72-hour sleepover. It’s an intensely romantic week in their young lives, one in which friendship & band practice are the most important things in the world; schoolwork & puppylove crushes can wait. When that cram session pays off and their three Blue Hearts tunes come together at the climactic concert, there’s no better feeling, and they’ll likely cherish that high for the rest of their lives.

This is primarily a movie about cultural exchange, with Japanese & Korean students reaching across a language barrier to become true friends and artistic collaborators. A lot of its nuance is likely lost to American audiences through its two levels of cross-cultural translation, but the rock ‘n’ roll bridge between its Japanese & Korean teen sensibilities is largely American made. While The Blue Hearts may be a Japanese band, their brand of ramshackle rock ‘n’ roll is inextricable from Western pop culture. As such, it was fun to take stock of the generic early-aughts rock posters that decorate Paranmaum’s practice space, which include artists as discordant & irrelevant to the text as Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley, and The Verve. The only two band references that feel directly connected to the music that Paranmaum plays are the college-radio twee group Beat Happening (who appear on a background poster) and the CBGB-era punk icons The Ramones (who appear in a mildly surreal dream sequence that plays like a precursor to the 2010s Thai curio Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy). The other nondescript rock acts in that mix make for an overall sweet & unpretentious sentiment, though, one in which projecting hipster cool cred is secondary to having fun playing loud music with your friends.

Nostalgia for the playfulness of rock ‘n’ roll teenhood is obviously a major factor here. Maybe it’s for the best that I couldn’t access the film until 20 years after its initial release, when I was still a teen myself. Its early-aughts camcorders, flip-phones, and glue-on bling are firmly rooted in that era, but the film is so reserved in its pacing & tone that it likely would’ve tested my tastes at the time, which leaned towards more rambunctious punk rock chaos. Director Nobuhiro Yamashita views these teen bonding rituals from a physical & emotional distance. Characters are often shrunken by extreme wide shots that corral them into cramped doorframes while the camera studies them from afar. As a result, the film is oddly nostalgic for high school architecture as much as it is nostalgic for high school camaraderie. The most Yamashita gives himself a voice in the narrative is through the melancholic ramblings of a middle-aged teacher who gets overly emotional every time he attempts to reminisce about his own memories of forming a band with his high school buddies during the same festival. He gets too choked up to get the words out, so he instead keeps his distance, enjoying Paranmaum’s brief existence as a teenage art project for what it is. When that three-day punk band takes the stage in the final minutes of runtime, it really does feel like the most precious thing in the world, partly because it’s not designed to last. That’s a sentiment that only gets more potent with age & distance, even if the songs being played are immediately satisfying to everyone in the room.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #231: 187 (1997) & Inner-City Schools

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Welcome to Episode #231 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of 90s movies about well-meaning teachers confronted with the violent chaos of inner-city schools, starting with the 1997 Sam Jackson vehicle 187.

00:00 Welcome

01:55 Presence (2025)
02:56 The Brutalist (2024)
06:14 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
08:17 The Lives of Others (2006)
14:39 It’s Complicated (2009)
18:13 Two Days in Paris (2007)
20:48 Willard (1971)
23:12 The Colors Within (2025)

28:17 187 (1997)
50:06 Dangerous Minds (1995)
1:03:17 Sister Act 2 – Back in the Habit (1993)
1:24:16 High School High (1996)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Heathers (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the influential high school mean-girl comedy Heathers (1989).

00:00 The Big Texan Steak Ranch

09:00 Lured (1947)
11:10 Eraserhead (1977)
16:19 The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
20:50 Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
24:18 Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
28:06 The Beast (2024)

34:57 Heathers (1989)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Massacre at Central High (1976)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).

00:00 Welcome

03:23 Hot Shots! (1991)
11:22 A Haunting in Venice (2023)
19:11 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
26:55 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
32:55 Curse of Chucky (2013)

38:55 Massacre at Central High (1976)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Bottoms (2023)

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It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre.  Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice.  Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge, The DUFF, and Spontaneous.  If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes).  Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on.  I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.

So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy.  Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom.  The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show.  Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game.  In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior.  No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds.  The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom.  If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile.  Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.

The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition.  Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds.  Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc.  None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.”  There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points.  The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter.  In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly.  Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott.  It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.

-Brandon Ledet

Do Revenge (2022)

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It probably comes as no surprise that I am a man whose limited social media use includes following the Twitter accounts of several Buffy-related content producers. I used to follow the one and only Mrs. Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram until I got sad that her manager was making her do the same branded social media content that fame bottom feeders like Patreon-less YouTubers and people who make cakes that are 80% fondant are doing; I felt like Sideshow Bob shivering upon learning that “TV’s bottomless chum bucket [had] claimed Vanessa Redgrave.” No judgment on our adulated SMG, of course; I love her like Broadway queens love Patti LuPone. I’m just saying everybody needs to go stream BTVS on Hulu like, right now, so that she never has to do another one of those unless she actually wants to. So, of course when I heard that Her Excellency was going to be in a new movie that was being billed as the high school version of Strangers on a Train, and that I didn’t even have to leave the house to see it, well, of course I was going to. 

At 28 minutes into Do Revenge, the traditionally attractive Drea (Camila Mendes, of Riverdale), having convinced gawkishly gorgeous Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to do revenge with her, gets excited: 

Drea: First we have to fix (pulls Eleanor in front of a mirror) … this. We have to do—

Eleanor: Please don’t say “makeover.” 

Drea: —a makeover! Yay! (jumps up and down)

Eleanor: (with vocal fry) Feels problematic.

Drea: It is, but it’s fun!

Do Revenge presents itself as a pretty conventional movie, and in many ways it is, despite its winking self-awareness that it’s trafficking in cliches. Prior to this scene, when Eleanor is offered a tour of her new high school, she responds “I mean, as a disciple of the ’90s teen movie, I would be offended if I didn’t get one.” It’s borrowing from a deep, deep well: high school-set literature adaptations, the sharp wit and ear for dialogue that permeates the mean girl movie canon, and revenge thrillers. The film opens with narration from Drea, who fills us in on how, from humble beginnings, she has clawed her way to the top of the social hierarchy at Rosewood Country Day, an elite private high school in the Miami area. “They all want me as a friend or a fuck,” she says. “I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a Junior.” Wait, no, shit, that’s Heather Chandler. The words are different, but the speech is the same: it’s the end of her junior year, and she’s done something or other with Teen Vogue. Her friends are mostly vapid hangers-on, and although she thinks of herself as a scrappy underdog, she’s just an Alpha Heather with good publicity. She’s also dating star student Max (Austin Abrams), a weaselly little rich boy who happens to be class president. Since they won’t be seeing each other, he asks her to send him a sexy video, which is then leaked to the whole school. She ends up painted as the aggressor when she punches Max in the quad, and it nearly costs her the scholarship she depends on. 

Humiliated, Drea spends the summer friendless, working at a tennis camp for rich girls, a group that includes Eleanor. When the girls there also get  their hands on the “leaked” video, Eleanor names Erica (Sophie Turner) as the distributor, and is impressed with how swiftly Drea ruins Erica’s life, planting cocaine on her and remaining calm in the face of Erica’s furious accusations. When Drea has car trouble at the end of the summer, Eleanor drives her back, and they bond, with Eleanor relating a particularly traumatizing story about being outed as queer by a girl she had a crush on, who also told gossipy lies about Eleanor being a predator. Eleanor also happens to be transferring to the same school as the girl who bullied her, which is also Rosewood Country Day. On the first day, Max gives a speech which appropriates the language of resistance in order to distance himself from accusations that he was the one who leaked Drea’s video, shames the people who shared and viewed the video, and humiliates Drea by making her stand up in the assembly. He also announces the formation of the new school club “The Cis Hetero Men Championing Female-Identifying Students League,” which is to be exclusively male and straight, for men to become better allies (I fear I’m underselling the intentional tastelessness and invoked odiousness here, but he’s just awful). Eleanor and Drea run into each other again in the bathroom, and agree to each do the other’s revenge: Drea will get close to and socially destroy Carissa (Ava Capri), the girl who outed and started rumors about Eleanor, and Eleanor will get close to Max and help Drea get her own vengeance, and then they act out the scene transcribed above.

You might be asking yourself where Sarah Michelle Gellar is in all of this; she’s the headmistress of the school who’s heavily invested in Drea’s academic success. Although her scenes are too few, too brief, and too infrequent (although every single entrance made me gasp and say “She looks amazing“), her presence is felt throughout the narrative, and that’s not just me singing her praises. All our favorites are here, blended into a pastel smoothie: one part Mean Girls if Janis Ian used to be Regina George; one part Jawbreaker if Vylette’s makeover was arranged by Julie in order to get back at Courtney; two parts Heathers if Veronica allied herself with Betty Finn instead of Jason Dean; there’s even a little zest of that scene in Cruel Intentions where Reese Witherspoon distributes copies of Ryan Phillipe’s catty little journal to the whole school, except this time it’s copies of Max’s data that proves he’s faking his apparent progressivism, from the top of his stupid earrings to the tips of his “masculinity reimagined” painted nails. And I’m not just projecting that; both movies use Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” for goodness’s sake. And that’s not even getting into the (frankly inspired) choice to have the school uniforms uniformly look like Cher Horowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Easter attire (which gives the whole thing a D.E.B.S. flair). It’s like a greatest hits album, right up until the moment that it suddenly isn’t anymore: well-worn and funny until everything gets turned on its head. I won’t spoil the very Patricia Highsmith twist here, but it disrupts the complacency with the familiar into which the audience has been lulled in a clever way. You thought that just because there was a scene in this movie where someone gets a tour of all the school’s cliques like in She’s All That and Ten Things I Hate About You that it meant you were going to ride the whole thing out in your comfort zone, but there’s something fresh and new here, too. 

I’m not really sure what demographic this movie is aiming for, but I’m in it. A few years back, I asked about the decade’s successor to the legacy of the Heathers -> Jawbreaker -> Mean Girls pipeline and nominated New Year, New You as the heir apparent, but there’s something new and fun here. This one is also theoretically aimed at the contemporary teen market, what with the inclusion of Riverdale‘s own Betty with Cabelo, Outer Banks hunk Jonathan Daviss, Alisha Boe from Thirteen Reasons Why, and Stranger Things actresses Hawke and Francesca Reale. (After the recent and dreadful He’s All That, I can only presume that the rest of the cast is filled with TikTokers and former Disney sitcom children.) At the same time, the soundtrack, like the films from which the narrative cribs, is very 90s focused. Aside from the aforementioned Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack also features tracks from The Cranberries, Meredith Brooks, Harvey Danger, the Symphonic Pops, and even The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, if you can believe it. Drea and Eleanor first bond while the dulcet tones of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going To Be?”, and, because someone wanted to make me happy specifically, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.”  And yet there’s also more contemporary music like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish (although the simple fact that I, a man in my thirties, knows them could mean that they are no longer cool).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Easy A (2010)

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There has been such a great wealth of teen-girl-POV sex comedies in recent years that it’s easy to take the genre’s gender-flipped resurgence for granted.  Titles like Blockers, Booksmart, Plan B, and Never Have I Ever have successfully de-Porkys‘d the high school sex romp entirely, to the point where the 80s straight-boy fantasies of yore are more of a distant memory than a ripe target for feminist satire.  It took years to ramp up to this new, de-jocked normal, though, and it’s easy to lose perspective on how far the genre’s default POV has come.  When The To Do List attempted to give teen girls’ libidos a spin at the wheel for a change in 2013, it got away with it by casting fully-grown adults in the teen roles and setting its horny hijinks decades in the past, filtering its transgression through an ironic remove.  In 2022, the Hulu series Sex Appeal borrows The To Do List‘s exact premise wholesale (in which an uptight honors student applies her academic work ethic to learning how to be good at sex) without having to soften its post-Porky’s hook.  The genre has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, especially considering how long mainstream comedies were specifically about boys’ quests to shed their virginities in opposition to the demure deflections of their female classmates.

2010’s Easy A might even be a clearer benchmark for the genre’s recent progress than The To Do List, since it’s a teen-girl sex comedy about its heroine not having sex.  Emma Stone stars as a precocious high school senior whose self-serving lie about losing her virginity to a college student spirals out of control, falsely labeling her as The School Slut.  As an early prototype for a Blockers-style revisionist sex comedy, it is embarrassingly restricted by how much sexual desire “good girls” were allowed to express onscreen in its time.  Our heroine has no interest in participating in the sexual adventures her peers imagine her to be indulging.  When a friend gifts her a vibrator as a thank-you present it’s played as a cheeky joke.  Of course, she wouldn’t use one of those.  She’s a good girl.  Easy A is set in a bizarre fantasy world where California high school students are having so little sex that it becomes the talk of the town when a senior loses her virginity (except don’t worry, she didn’t, really).  It makes a semi-progressive moral stance against slut-shaming gossip, but to get there it has to pretend that smart, well-mannered teen girls don’t actually want to have sex.  That’s still reserved for the realm of mouth-breathing boys (such as the leads of 2007’s Superbad, Emma Stone’s professional breakout).

Contemporary timidness about teen girls’ libidos aside, Easy A is cute.  If you haven’t noticed in her star-making decade that followed, Emma Stone is a charismatic, easily loveable performer who has no trouble commanding the spotlight.  Here, she’s saddled with a near-unbearable overload of voice-over narration—delivered directly to camera via a late-aughts webcast—which includes disastrously overwritten chapter titles like “The Shudder Inducing and Clichéd However Totally False Account of How I Lost My Virginity to a Guy at Community College.”  She handles the challenge ably, though, working in crash-course lit guides to The Scarlet Letter and twisty self-owns like “I’m not really as smart as I think I am” with a casual ease.  By the time she’s riffing with her absolutely delightful parents (Patricia Clarkson & Stanley Tucci), it even feels like she’s having fun (though not near as much fun as they’re having).  I don’t know that the movie ever graduates from cute to hilarious, but I also don’t fit its target demographic anyway: 12-year-olds who want to feel Adult.  The film is basically a slightly-growed-up version of a Disney Channel Original—tipped off by the villainous presence of Amanda Bynes—and for that, it’s endearing enough to get by.

Maybe I’m not giving Easy A enough credit for pushing mainstream-sex-comedy boundaries in the dark days of 2010s.  It blatantly announces to the audience (through rapid-fire montages) that it intends to mash The Scarlet Letter together with 1980s John Hughes comedies, and it certainly achieves that goal, however chaste.  It also takes a few pot shots at overly religious sex-negativity, assuming the audience shares its pronounced secular worldview, which does feel bold for the time.  I’m just hung up on the idea that it’s a teen sex comedy where no teens actually want to have sex (except one dastardly cad who propositions the lead for an act of prostitution).  Its idea of provocation is dressing Stone in lingerie top & blue jeans combos to test the boundaries of her school’s dress code.  That would certainly raise the eyebrows in any American high school, even today, but it still feels timid considering what similar comedies have done since.

-Brandon Ledet

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

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I remember being incredibly skeptical of the sudden consensus a couple years back that 1999 was the pinnacle of modern cinema, as solidified by critic Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.  As I already rambled on about in my review of The Talented Mr. Ripley when that book was still a hot topic, I believe every Movie Year is practically the same.  Most movies are bad, but a lot of them are great, and it takes time to sift through the deluge to single out the gems.  All we’re experiencing now is the inevitability of critics who were young enough to first start discovering a passion for film in the late-90s now aging into a role as legitimized tastemakers, so that they’re able to collectively repeat inane phrases like “1999: Best Movie Year Ever!!!” loud & often enough that they sound halfway legit. 

I am also guilty of that exact nostalgia bias myself, no matter how skeptical I am of its validity.  While the critical reappraisal of 1999 as the Best Movie Year Ever wasn’t entirely convincing to me in a broad sense, it did highlight a particular facet of that era that does stand out as exceptional to me: its immaculate collection of high school-set comedies.  I will never fully be able to tell if the exquisite run of high school movies from 1998-2001 really was exceptionally great or if I’m just nostalgic for the era because I was entering high school around the time.  Either way, this list of titles just from 1999 seems like a staggering canon of all-time classics to my biased eye: Drop Dead Gorgeous, But I’m a Cheerleader!, 10 Things I Hate About You, Jawbreaker, Election, Cruel Intentions, Drive Me Crazy, She’s All That, etc.  And then there’s the one eerie, troublesome outlier from that 1999 High School Classics canon that feels like it drifted in from another place & time altogether – the debut feature from director Sofia Coppola.

The Virgin Suicides is less the social hierarchy satire that most post-Heathers high school comedies strive for than it is a modernized, American update to the eerie Peter Weir whatsit Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Unlike most 1999 High School Classics, it’s not a comedy at all, but rather a melancholy drama about Big Teenage Feelings and the uncanny nature of nostalgia.  Still, the film indulges in a bemused humor at the expense of the awkwardness of teenage dating rituals in the 1970s Michigan suburbs, often conveying the domestic imprisonment of its titular teenage virgins through a tight-lipped smirk.  Under the severely over-protective eye of their parents, the five young sisters become isolated and lonely to the point of suicidal depression, and the movie sincerely engages with the impact of that tragedy (as opposed to, say, the way teen deaths are handled in Drop Dead Gorgeous, the other Kirsten Dunst classic from that year).  Its amusement with that tragedy is mostly centered on how the girls are perceived by their clueless, infatuated peers.

While The Virgin Suicides is technically about the suicidal sisters, the girls’ story is told through the eyes of their romantically starved neighbors – a group of inexperienced young boys who saw them mostly as a window into the supposed enigma of femininity.  All the Picnic at Hanging Rock supernatural mystery surrounding the girls is an extension of their distanced male admirers’ POV, who try to solve their lives and deaths as if they were a curious puzzle and not simply victims of a neurotically repressive parenting style.  By tapping into that nostalgia-tinged teenage longing, Coppola evokes something intensely powerful untouched by any other high school movie of its era.  She stated in an interview, “I really didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done.  I immediately saw the central story about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.”  You’re not going to find that kind of shit in 10 Things I Hate About You, as fun as it is as a more typical literary “adaptation” from that era.

I love The Virgin Suicides.  It feels more complexly funny, dreamlike, and femme every time I watch it, especially since I was a clueless, romance-starved teenage boy myself when I first rented it from a Blockbuster in the early-2000s New Orleans suburbs.  There was a spoil of Teen Movie riches flooding video store shelves in that era, but none of them hit the exact dazed, Hanging Rock tone Coppola’s film did.  I won’t cosign the broader 1999: Best Movie Year ever discourse (which really doesn’t matter, since I appear to be the only person still hung up on it), but if can we narrow that claim down to 1999: Best High School Movie Year Ever the argument is much, much more compelling – and this inclusion in that canon is one of the most impeccable standouts.

-Brandon Ledet