It's been ten years since this "documentary" came out and Nanette Burstein still hasn't fessed up (the way Peter Jackson did, and immediately, with FORGOTTEN SILVER), so we can now call it what it is. It's not a documentary, nor is it (as one reviewer here suggests) a "mockumentary". It's a hoax, and a pretty clumsy one at that. Burstein supposedly studied a group of high school seniors in small-town Indiana, only to discver that -- surprise! -- they're as stereotypical as characters in a John Hughes movie or an episode of THE O.C. or DAWSON'S CREEK. There's the sensitive rebel (Hannah Bailey), the jock (Colin Clemens), the band geek (Jake Tusing) and the snooty campus queen (Megan Krizmanich). Now granted, they may be real teenagers, and their stories may be (more or less) true, but the movie is a virtual symphony of false notes. Tusing's acne seems to clear and re-erupt from one hour to the next. Many scenes (and I frankly think all of them) are patently staged, with visible microphone packs and camera crews on both ends of "spontaneous" phone calls. Tusing downs his first shot of what we are told is tequila, but he doesn't so much as grimace (even seasoned drinkers can't do that without making a face, never mind a tequila "virgin"). Home video dated 1988 shows Clemens a year old, yet he's supposedly 17 in 2006. And Burstein takes a writer's credit, but there's no narration -- so obviously, what she wrote is the "spontaneous" dialogue.
The movie is entertaining in its hackneyed way, but so trite and cliche-ridden that the only way Nanette Burstein could hope to get away with it was to claim that it was "real life" that just HAPPENED to be trite and cliche-ridden. That so many people -- not only reviewers here but the jury at Sundance and supposedly sophisticated film critics -- accepted this obvious fiction as an honest documentary speaks volumes about their own gullibility.
The movie is entertaining in its hackneyed way, but so trite and cliche-ridden that the only way Nanette Burstein could hope to get away with it was to claim that it was "real life" that just HAPPENED to be trite and cliche-ridden. That so many people -- not only reviewers here but the jury at Sundance and supposedly sophisticated film critics -- accepted this obvious fiction as an honest documentary speaks volumes about their own gullibility.