Megan Krizmanich of 'American Teen' American Teen: It's worth seeing the DVD, just for the terrible performances the documentary subjects (including "popular girl" Megan Krizmanich) give in an artificial environment. Paramount Vantage
 

by Linda Holmes

The 2009 Sundance Film Festival opens this Thursday, January 15. If you hark back to Sundance 2008, one of the big splashes was the documentary American Teen, a crafty little movie that was marketed as a reality-show Breakfast Club but was actually much less about classic arcs (basketball stud going for the scholarship; Montague-Capulet romance between outcast and pretty boy) than about tiny moments of truth plucked from piles and piles of footage. Appallingly bad breakup etiquette from seemingly sane individuals, battles between queen bees and queen wanna-bes, and the fine line between a genuine free spirit and a self-pitying drama queen: these things, I remember so well.

The film is also a great conversation-starter: Is Hannah, who's so sure she doesn't fit in, the biggest cliché in the group? Is Megan, the cruel girl at the top of the social structure, getting what she deserves when her friends start to turn on her, or does it just mean they're worse than she is? Why did that freshman girl agree to date Jake the band geek when she clearly can't stand him?

The unexpected way a bad interview makes for a great DVD, after the jump...

American Teen came out on DVD in late December, and the most surprising feature on the DVD is a set of cast interviews about filming that are so awkward and so uninspired that they lend tremendous credibility to the body of the movie.

The footage looks just like what you'd see if you sat down the yearbook staff at your local high school and asked them to discuss their senior year: shifting in seats, crossed arms, stilted efforts to say something interesting when there's nothing to say.

These kids are not TV-ready, particularly. Filmmaker Nanette Burstein clearly worked hard to get them comfortable on camera, because they're not naturals.

Which is wonderful, really — they're not so trained on The Real World and Survivor that they press an internal "start" button and speak in sound bites. They're actually ... pretty bad at it. Painfully bad, most of the time.

So in the film, when you see them laughing and bantering with their friends or arguing with their parents, you can rest assured that it's the real thing, because none of them are any good at putting on a show.

categories: Movies

2:11 - January 12, 2009

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