Daily Plastic: American Teen

Movie	Our Take	Other Takes
American Teen Trailer . IMDB	Whether the movie is intentionally raising these ideas or not, I hope the audience is smart enough to ask how the camera is affecting these teens and also to wonder how teen life today, with or without the camera, is all about performance. J. Robert Parks Daily Plastic	[W]hat really pisses me off about American Teen is the way Burstein ... privilieges the female victim at the expense of asking difficult questions about the psychology of victimhood and its roots in social constructs like high school.... Burstein clearly has a fondness for certain of her subjects, which allows her to present them sympathetically, even when their behavior is less than admirable. Unfortunately, this leads to an almost total lack of interrogation of Hannah. Karina Longworth SpoutBlog Never has a film captured the spirit of being a teenager better. Zack Haddad Film Threat Never? It overtly ridicules the status quo — then reaffirms it. Maybe this will be the big crossover doc, the hit that's a hit because it reinforces everything we knew going in. David Edelstein New York Magazine The problem isn't so much with the subjects per se as it is with the film's insistently slick, reductive attempts to mold them into real-life counterparts to characters from some John Hughes comedy circa 1986. Fernando F. Croce Slant Magazine Still As American Teen plumbs further into these kids' lives, it serves as a bracing reminder of how hard those years can be, and how intensely 17-year-olds can succumb to love and rejection. Scott Tobias Onion AV Club

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