I had spent a long day at school administering final exams. It’s hard work watching students in torment. So, I treated myself to a beer and a viewing of the classic, Clueless, on HBO. Great adaptation of Emma. Great clothes. It’s among my favorite teen flicks. Heathers is also high on the list.
Question of the Day: What’s the best teen flick?
Apt. 11d 
Since I saw it as a teenager, I would say “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Too bad that Spicolli guy never became a decent actor though.
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“Back to the Future”. Very tightly written and deals with the radical notion that your parents were once teenagers.
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The one genre Hollywood does really well.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High has to be the best.
Then: Election, Heathers, Clueless.
Adventures in Babysitting also has a lot going for it.
For the boys: Bill and Ted, both films.
See — I’ve named 7, and not one of them is English or foreign.
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Anyone, anyone?
Bueller?
At least, I loved it when I *was* a teen. I’m not sure how well it would stand up to adult viewing…
More recently, I thought “Mean Girls” and “Cruel Intentions” were pretty good.
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What Harry said, particularly the Adventures in Babysitting part, but I ask: no Breakfast Club? 16 Candles?
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Ok, WendyW, Breakfast Club is great, but it is mannered in a way that the others aren’t, and, for some reason, I don’t think of it as a teen movie in the same way. When I lived in LA I knew one of the actors in 16 Candles, so I ruled that out on favouritism grounds. But, sure, that goes in too.
Can you believe that I didn’t see Pretty in Pink till I was 42!
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Judd Nelson’s monologue in Breakfast Club was great. “Shut up, woman, and get me a chicken pot pie.”
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10 Things I Hate About You wasn’t bad either. Adaptation of Taming of the Shrew. Keith Ledger isn’t bad in it. And it’s set in a great Arts and Crafts style house.
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Heath Ledger. 😉
You know, American Pie wasn’t a bad movie, either. Classic film trivia: the Weitz brothers’ mother played Sarah Jane (Annie’s daughter, who passes as white) in the Lana Turner version of Imitation of Life.
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I love john cusack, so I have to vote for The Sure Thing, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer. I can still watch those movies over and over and not get bored. As for more recent teen flicks, I’d have to go with Go, before Katie Holmes got all scientology, and Can’t Hardly Wait. Also love Can’t Buy Me Love before Patrick Dempsy was considered hot.
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Donnie Darko. But Fast Times and Election are also up there.
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All terrific movies, but you’re making me feel old. Doesn’t anyone remember Breaking Away?
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Ah, Breaking Away. Terrific movie.
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Consider Say Anything. Remember Lloyd Dobler/John Cusack holding the radio above his head, blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
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Hard to beat Heathers, but “Pump Up the Volume” was pretty good – or at least I thought so way back when.
I don’t look at “Election” as a teen movie – more like the ultimate U.S. poli-sci movie. (Drezner thinks so as well.)
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I watched Breaking Away last week for like the 40th time. Dennis Quaid = babe. And just a perfect movie. “Re-fund? Re-fund?” Still works after all these years.
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High School Musical has been on high rotation with our 15- year old. It’s another variation on the old theme of geeky-brainy-but-talented heroine triumphs over overprivileged, vacuous popular kids.
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Oh, a really stupid one, with the wonderful Jon Lovitz, is High School High. Well worth it if you are willing to suspend your intelligence completely.
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What about Weird Science?
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A really good recent teen flick is “Brick” with hot actor of the moment Joseph Gordon Levitt. It’s a 40s noir set in a contemporary high school and it totally gets the whole emotional drama of being a teenager- plus it has great dialogue.
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I’d have to second the Matthew Broderick selections — Ferris Bueller and Election.
The true geek in me, however, has a soft spot for The Manhattan Project. Nuclear proliferation AND Cynthia Nixon decades before they were considered hip and trendy.
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It’s beautiful to think of Election as the bizarro-world sequel to Bueller, but that doesn’t really make it a teen movie; it’s too much from the teacher’s POV.
Pretty in Pink, 16 Candles, Breakfast Club, and Some Kind of Wonderful are the teen movies *for teens* par excellence– the movies that say, “yes, you really do feel more deeply and profoundly than anyone else in the world, and there’s nothing more important than your introspection and travails.” I can’t watch them any more for just that reason.
But most of the rest people have named– Fast Times, Heathers, Clueless, Ferris Bueller, Say Anything, Donnie Darko, Weird Science– are great regardless of whether you’re still a teen or not. I don’t think One Crazy Summer, Better Off Dead, or Mean Girls (all of which I like) are quite at the same level as those. And I’ve actually never seen The Sure Thing. (hangs head in shame.)
Dan, that’s really, really geeky. And that’s coming from *me.*
While I’m too 80s-nostalgic to identify either of these as greatest-ever, I’m surprised no one’s mentioned Napoleon Dynamite or Ghost World, both of which are surely on the list.
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Pretty in Pink, 16 Candles, Breakfast Club, and Some Kind of Wonderful are the teen movies *for teens* par excellence–the movies that say, “yes, you really do feel more deeply and profoundly than anyone else in the world, and there’s nothing more important than your introspection and travails.” I can’t watch them any more for just that reason.
I think “Pretty in Pink,” at least, can work for non-teens. It ended up being a lot truer to its own implicit class worldview, thanks to–oddly enough–pressure from the studio (John Hughes shot the ending with Andie and Duckie going off together, but was obliged to reshoot it so she gets together with Blaine), than Hughes’s other films. I mean, they are movies for and about a certain mostly fictitious strata of the teen-age population, the kind that, as much as they struggled with and against it, were all living in the same world as and on the same career track as Alex P. Keaton. The only problem is they kept implying that they were saying something to Teens In General. But “Pretty” is wholly comfortable with its little drama within its own world. It’s like watching a National Geographic special.
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Jacob’s right — I’m doing a total forehead slap at forgetting Napoleon Dynamite. A painful movie to watch, IMHO, but nonetheless definitive. My age is showing!
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The 400 Blows.
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The 400 Blows is a wonderful film for adults but I don’t think it would have meant anything to me if I’d seen it as a teenager. But then I feel the same way about reading A Catcher in the Rye.
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Honey is a great movie starring Jessica Alba. You get to see her ghetto dancing side. It’s kind of like step up in a way, but the story is nothing like it.
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