I suppose I should be grateful. After years of ridiculing teen movies, here’s one that does it for me. It’s like that soup that heats itself. “Not Another Teen Movie” assembles the cliches, obligatory scenes and standard characters from three recent subgenres of the teen movie (prom, cheerleader and tasteless sex) and cross-fertilizes them, if that is the word, with the John Hughes teenager movies of the 1980s. Of course Hughes was a lot better than his recent imitators, but people who know that are likely to be in their 30s now and won’t be going to see “Not Another Teen Movie,” anyway.
Who does that leave in the theater? The current audience for teen movies, I suppose. But if they’re dumb enough to like them, why would they be smart enough to appreciate a satire? Maybe this will simply play for them like–just another teen movie. Did I laugh during the movie. Yes, I did, a few times, although not as much as I did at the better teen movies like “American Pie” or “Scary Movie.”
I liked the way the characters pointed out the cliches they were inhabiting (although that was done first in “Scary Movie”). And the way that when the hero bets he can turn the plain girl into the prom queen, the black guy tells him, “You’ll lose the bet, but learn valuable lessons.” And the way the subtitles left spaces for the naughty bits in the scene with the nude foreign exchange student. And the awareness of the Slow Clap, a cliche that is rapidly getting to be a public nuisance.
It was good to see familiar faces from old movies, like Molly Ringwald, who offers some hard-learned advice, and John Vernon, who engages in some almost hallucinatory dialogue with a student in detention class. But it was not good to see yet still more wretched excess in the jokes about characters being sprayed with vast quantities of excrement. The movie does not understand that all fart jokes depend on context to be funny. And the opening sequence involving a vibrator is just plain embarrassing.
I have here a heartfelt message from a reader who urges me not to be so hard on stupid films, because they are “plenty smart enough for the average moviegoer.” Yes, but one hopes being an average moviegoer is not the end of the road: that one starts as a below-average filmgoer, passes through average, and, guided by the labors of America’s hard-working film critics, arrives in triumph at above-average.
You will know you have reached that personal goal for yourself when it takes but a moment of thought to calculate that in the month of December, when the studios traditionally showcase Oscar candidates, when movies like “Harry Potter,” “Vanilla Sky” and “Ocean’s Eleven” are in theaters, when “Lord of the Rings,” “In the Bedroom” and 21 other ambitious movies are circling for landings, to spend 82 minutes watching “Not Another Teen Movie” would be a reckless waste of your time, no matter how many decades you may have to burn.
Film Review for Not Another Teen Movie
At John Hughes High School, jock Jake Wyler announces that he can turn any girl into a prom queen. Janey, the ‘Pretty Ugly Girl’ is his target in an assemblage of occasionally hilarious genre jokes. Spoofs tend to turn up towards the end of the life cycle of the kind of movie they’re spoofing – just when the cliches and general genre tiredness have become more than apparent to even the most dim-witted moviegoer.
The arrival of Not Another Teen Movie (originally Ten Things I Hate About Clueless Road Trips When I Can’t Hardly Wait To Be Kissed – ho, and indeed, ho) will therefore be welcomed even by those who are thoroughly sick of the excrescence of teenage flicks which has clogged up the very pores of our multiplexes like so much adolescent sebum over the last half decade or so.
But if this is the teen flick’s last gasp, it’s actually a good deal funnier than anyone has a right to expect. Created by MTV Video Awards producer Joel Gallen, whose approach is not so much scattershot as blunderbuss, there are enough serviceable gags to offset the ones that don’t make first base.
Anything with a teenager in it seems to be fair game, from the original ’80s cycle right through to American Beauty (although any movie that relies on a detailed knowledge of Varsity Blues is probably limiting its audience somewhat).
The Rachael Leigh Cook character, whose true beauty no-one can see through the camouflage of paint-spattered dungarees and spectacles, or the black guy who kicks another out of a teenage do announcing, “I’m the token black guy at this party,” are both worth a mild guffaw, as are cameos by Mr. T and Paul Gleason (of Breakfast Club infamy).
A few gags even threaten to punch above the film’s bantam-weight. Take the moment in which a lavatory crashes through a ceiling, spraying the class with an almost endless tsunami of liquid excrement. Rote teen movie gross-out moment or nifty meta-gag about teen movies’ need for a rote gross-out moment? You decide.
Its one of those instantly disposable and deliberately vile comedies that may well have you laughing while youre watching it, but leaves you scratching your head trying to remember exactly why about 20 minutes after its finished.
Not Another Teen (2011)
Directed by: Joel Gallen
Starring: Chyler Leigh, Chris Evans, Jaime Pressly, Eric Christian Olsen, Eric Jungmann, Mia Kirshner, Cody McMains, Sam Huntington, Cerina Vincent, Lacey Chabert, Riley Smith
Screenplay by: Mike Bender, Adam Jay Epstein, Andrew Jacobson, Phil Beauman, Buddy Johnson
Production Design by: Joseph T. Garrity
Cinematography by: Reynaldo Villalobos
Film Editing by: Steven Welch
Costume Design by: Florence-Isabelle Megginson
Set Decoration by: Melissa M. Levander
Art Direction by: Jay Pelissier
Music by: Theodore Shapiro
MPAA Rating: R for strong crude sexual content and humor, language and some drug content.
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Release Date: December 14, 2001
Visits: 884
