The Talkies: Teen Beat
Bowman, James
THE TA KIES by James Bowman Teen Beat T he funniest moment in this year's seemingly endless and mostly unfunny Oscar ceremonies came when Norman Jewison gave his speech of acceptance for the...
...All teen movies aspire to the condition of music videos, and with The Mod Squad we have reached the perfection of the genre...
...T he Movie of the Month, Rushmore, directed by Wes Anderson, is a high-school drama which takes seriously the idea of school as a microcosm of life...
...Yes...
...The next thing they know they have followed the trail of the dirty cops to an apparently derelict airplane hanger...
...The shrew is not tamed...
...We're getting too old for this s--t," says Julie...
...Neither is very good, as you might expect, but the former is positively loathsome...
...You're both little children...
...Max's conduct of the war at the same time he is battling the authorities at Rushmore and his thuggish classmates makes him an immensely engaging hero, as does his utter disregard for hipness and "attitude," those twin curses of American youth...
...I also liked a lot of the jokes and the fact that, although the concept requires these kids to impersonate adults, the sexualization of their lives seems hardly to go beyond kissing—Dr...
...Is that fake blood...
...From this point on, the picture follows exactly the same course as She's All That, which it already too closely resembles...
...The Shakespearean connection is only a kind of prestige brand name to be put upon a collection of hip music and hip clothes and hip people—like the black English teacher who does a sort of rap performance of part of one of the sonnets...
...The breathtaking moral obtuseness of a statement like that would be almost enough to drive a French aristocrat to la vertu...
...But deep down he always knew that he was JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...This is because, though it is almost as clever as Clueless in finding modern analogues for its original's details, it cannot pull itself free from the familiar conventions of the high-school movie...
...But to judge from the movies actually coming out of the industry, commerce is only tightening its stranglehold on art...
...Stratford's anxieties ("Kissing isn't what's keeping me up to my elbows in placentas all day long," he says) notwithstanding...
...64 May 1999 • The American Spectator The similarly targeted io Things I Hate About You is a much better film, but it never quite succeeds in being good...
...Learn to think instead, he urged, of how you might "just tell stories that move us to laughter or tears and perhaps tell us a bit about ourselves...
...It's a pity, as a lot might have been done with this material...
...Even in an industry devoted to the manufacture of sentimental gestures completely disconnected from reality, this one ought to make us pause for a moment in admiration...
...Kumble has unfortunately neglected to make it funny that his American high-school kids are assuming the attitudes of world-weary French aristocrats of the ancien regime...
...It is hard not to agree with her, and yet the boyish masculine rivalry which develops into a comic war between the two of them is also an image of the way in which men always do remain little children in the eyes of women...
...So far, so good...
...That tendency is on display to an almost ridiculous extent in The Mod Squad, which has such a lame story that the characters themselves remark on it...
...Maybe even that he had been so too at some points in his career...
...That's almost an abandoned warehouse," says Pete...
...Yet what else should we expect when childishness is subjected to the sort of withering cynicism that Hollywood commonly mistakes for sophistication...
...an artist, and he was grateful to Jewison for recognizing it...
...Grown-ups who watch movies tend to wait until they come out on video...
...That's demographics...
...God...
...It begins as Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a precocious 15-year-old scholarship student at a prep school called Rushmore Academy, is placed on "sudden death academic probation...
...Max is as much a premature adult as Blume is an overgrown adolescent...
...We are brought up short by occasional, unintended glimpses of blasted innocence, or when Phillippe pronounces a sophisticated dissent: aw contraire...
...Max becomes friends with Herman Blume (Bill Murray), the millionaire father of two of his most moronic classmates and a man who is as lost a soul as only Bill Murray can make him...
...Ha ha...
...The American Spectator May 1999 65...
...But one consequence of its being aimed at a teen audience is that it hardly occurs to the film's makers to do anything with it...
...17 contemporary tendency of American movies to replace drama with dramatics and acting with attitudinizing is exacerbated by the fact that so few among their primary audience can be expected to know the difference...
...When a young man interested in Bianca is told that she cannot go out with him unless her sister has a date, he sets out to recruit bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) as the latter's admirer for a pecuniary consideration...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...
...If anything, she tames her Petruchio, forcing him to give up smoking and to listen to the ghastly girl-band rock that she herself favors...
...Each of them is ruthless and cunning in the pursuit of the lady and in his determination to defeat the other by laying waste his property or finding some new way to impress Miss Cross...
...nothing shocks them anymore...
...A little post-modem humor there...
...What was revealed by the applause given to Jewison's appeal to prefer art to commerce was the fact that most of the people there believe that they are already doing it...
...Of course the audience applauded wildly...
...But the filmmakers must have grown weary of the concept, for Kat's feminist spikiness is simply forgotten when she starts to fall for the charming Patrick...
...She takes him in to treat his wounds, and he tries to kiss her...
...Yet if the experience may be regrettably close to the realm of possibility, the worldly-wisdom associated with it here is still as impossible as ever to someone i8...
...Yet they meet on a sort of middle ground occupied by the anachronistic Rushmore Academy and find that they are rivals for the affections of an attractive young widow and teacher at the school called Miss Cross (Olivia Williams...
...And Max tells him: "Find what you like to do and do it for the rest of your life...
...You just make a joke about it, for this contributes to the film's real purpose of having its characters strike poses of hipness...
...My guess is that each person who applauded was thinking that other people are too much concerned with dollars and cents...
...Julie replies: "At least it's not going down at an abandoned warehouse...
...You know, you and Herman deserve each other," she says...
...It should hardly surprise us then that it is getting so that the movies are more and more often not even ostensibly intended for adults...
...As in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet of 1996, Shakespeare's meaning, if he has any, does not survive his hipification...
...This is not because of artistic considerations...
...Late one night Max appears at her bedroom window pretending to have been knocked over by a car...
...Enough, said he, of thinking about "the gross" when you make a movie...
...she says angrily...
...If anything, she tames her Petruchio, and forces him to give up smoking...
...For me it's going to Rushmore...
...She refuses to date for ideological reasons, a fact which her father (Larry Miller), a neurotic obstetrician terrified of his daughters' becoming pregnant, uses as an excuse to forbid her attractive and popular younger sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik), from doing so...
...He took the occasion to admonish his colleagues in the Motion Picture Academy to pay less attention to mere accountancy...
...Perhaps it's because the idea of such sexual experience in an 18year-old is not remote enough from reality that it doesn't occur to us to laugh when the film's Valmont, played by pretty-boy Ryan Phillippe, says, "I'm sick of sleeping with these insipid Manhattan debutantes...
...Regular readers of the reviews published in this space will be all too familiar with my frequent animadversions on the fact that when I go to see what are ostensibly grownup movies these days, what I see is almost invariably pitched at an average 13- or 14- year-old's level of intelligence and maturity...
...No more, said he, of devoting legions of marketing experts to getting right a movie's "demographics...
...As Reese Witherspoon, who plays the public virgin that Phillippe's character sets out to debauch (and who, in what we are taught to call real life, is engaged to him), put it in an interview: "One of the hardest things for me about my chaste character was to find a modern way to make a teenager a virgin...
...Not to say that all teenagers are sex-starved, but it actually was difficult to find a reason that wasn't self-righteous or obnoxious...
...Thinking that Max has "got it figured out," Blume asks him, "What's the secret...
...Watching these children simulate such sophistication is like watching the kiddie gangsters of Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone if, instead of shooting each other with ice cream, they were using real bullets...
...Its Katherine, here called Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles), is a protofeminist proto-intellectual at Padua High School in Seattle who reads Sylvia Plath and spouts academic jargon about the iniquities of "patriarchy...
...Failing all his classes,he devotes himself entirely to his extracurricular activities as the main mover and operator behind practically every extracurricular club and society that Rushmore has to offer...
...Thus the high-school flick is enjoying a new access of popularity with such recent hits as She's All That, Varsity Blues, October Sky, Jawbreakers, Never Been Kissed, and The Rage: Carrie 2. Now, taking a hint from Amy Heckerling's delightful Clueless of 1995, which translated Jane Austen's novel, Emma, to an American high-school milieu, Roger Kumble has done the same for Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses in Cruel Intentions, and Gil Junger for Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew in io Things I Hate About You...
...Whereas the hip kids of Cruel Intentions or She's All That or io Things I Hate About You only seem the more childish for their assumed sophistication, Max's lack of same is a paradoxically successful way of making youth look like real life...
...Are you indeed, sir...
...That's the gross...
...Dirty cops, drops at the airport: I feel like one of us should say, 'We're getting too old for this s--t,"' says Pete (Giovanni Ribisi) to Julie (Claire Danes...
...Obviously, no one expects the audience to be offended, or even disappointed, at being fobbed off with "this s-- t" in lieu of drama...
...Gross in Hollywood has several meanings...
...The44 The Shrew is not tamed...
...If there had been the slightest chance that the movie business would ever modify, let alone give up, its obsession with the bottom line, the audience reaction would have been something more akin to stunned silence...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website —wwwspectatororg...
...As a natural result, the movies will be made for those willing to spend $7 or $8 up front rather than those who spend $z to rent the video in a year's time...
...It is because the audience for first-run movies in America is skewed toward teenagers, who are old enough to seek entertainment outside the home but not old enough to go to bars or clubs or restaurants...
...THE TA KIES by James Bowman Teen Beat T he funniest moment in this year's seemingly endless and mostly unfunny Oscar ceremonies came when Norman Jewison gave his speech of acceptance for the Irving Thalberg award...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
