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.
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?
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