 Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union
Director: Peyton Reed
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: Torrance Shipman takes over as the leader of a championship high school cheerleading squad, but after recruiting new girl Missy, she discovers that all their winning cheers were stolen from a rival squad, who don’t have the money to compete at a national level. Suddenly she needs to come up with a new cheer, deal with squad politics, while also making friends with new boy Cliff and handling with the pissed off team they stole their old routines from. |
I have a bit of a soft spot for teen flicks. That said, my ardour has been tested to the limit over the past few years by an endless stream of lazy, tedious teen movies where nobody seems to be making much effort and which just try to capitalise on what’s gone before.
Part of the problem is that the late-90s and very early 2000s, when the excellent Bring It On was made, were a good time for the teen flick, with quite a few emerging that were fresh, funny and which did good business at the box office. However rather than trying to capitalise on that success with new and different movies that moved the genre forward, Hollywood just looked at successful films like Bring It On, Save The Last Dance and American Pie and has spent much of the last 10 years trying to remake these movies over and over again (just in sequels, Bring It on is already onto number five (all of which went straight-to-DVD), while American Pie is on part seven (the last four of which went straight-to-DVD)).
Bring It On and Save The Last Dance in particular have a lot to answer for, because you can pretty much trace every one of the 10,000 dance flicks that have popped up in the last few years to those two movies. They set up every one of plot elements that have become the generic staples of this subgenre, including a conflict between white middle class and black urban culture, and teens discovering themselves by finding a new way to dance. These weren’t exactly new ideas when Bring It On and Save The Last Dance used them, but ever since those films cleaned up at the box office, these elements have been pretty much set in stone. Nobody ever tries to do anything different, with the only fresh thing in each film being the location and the form of dance.
There’s even someone like Duane Adler, who’s made a career out of writing the same film over and over again with only very minor differences. He wrote Save The Last Dance, The Way She Moves, Step Up, Make It Happen and has now been hired for the double-dutch movie, Jump Around. If you ever needed proof that Hollywood isn’t interested in trying anything new with teen flicks, that’s it – as they just get the same person to write nearly all of them
What these movies don’t seem to understand is that when you watch Bring It On, you can see that far more effort was put into it than you’d expect. From the script to the direction, the makers have really thought about how to make it entertaining, funny and feel fresh. It’s meant to look bright, breezy and effortless, but that’s because a lot of sweat was expended to make it seem that way, while later knock-offs appear to believe they don’t have to bother to try and make a teen flick that’s really fresh and fun, because people will turn up to the cinema anyway.
The same can be said for American Pie, which may not have been to my taste, but became a gargantuan hit not just by bringing gross-out comedy to the teen flick, but doing it in a smart way with a film with a real plot, where the cast and crew are working hard to make it succeed. Since then, many writers and directors have just chucked a stream of random scatological jokes on the screen with a vague story that doesn’t make much sense, and have then been surprised when their film didn’t rival American Pie’s success.
The teen flick does seem to be a boom and bust genre. For example, after John Hughes won over audiences with the likes of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club in the mid 80s, an endless succession of copycat flicks emerged that tried to capitalise on the same audience. While some worked, most didn’t really understand what it was that made Hughes’ movies special, and so over the years teen flicks generally started to gets ever worse and became completely indistinguishable from one another, because fewer and fewer things seemed to work, but no one was attempting to do anything even vaguely new.
Eventually Hollywood realised they needed to try something different, and from that we got a new wave of slightly different and more successful teen flicks in the late 90s and early 2000s, like Varsity Blues and 10 Things I Hate About You, which found big audiences at the box office (even though a lot of people didn’t like them and thought they paled in comparison to Hughes’ work). However the same pattern very quickly started again, with nobody allowed to try anything else that felt even vaguely new or different after about 2001, and since then they’ve pretty much been remaking the same few movies over and over again, with ever worsening results.
Inevitably it will get to the point when these endless remakes don’t work anymore – they’re certainly starting to see diminishing box office return – and we’ll then get another wave of fresh and slightly different teen movies as Hollywood looks for new way to get the audience back (the studios are unlikely to give up on the genre as the films are cheap to make and can be very profitable if done right).
The teen flick may not be a genre that’s produced many masterpieces, but they can be a lot of fun, as long as those involved really care about what they’re doing and try to make the best film they can. Instead with most recent teen flicks you just feel like everyone’s there to pick up their paycheque and cash-in on the success of the likes of Bring It On.
While I’m on the subject of Bring It On, I’d just like to say that I think it’s a shame that the two best things about it – Eliza Dushku and Gabrielle Union – haven’t really found the success they deserve in the years following the cheerleading movie. Dushku’s problem seems to be going for the wrong roles (or perhaps only being offered duds), as after Buffy and Bring It On the world seemed to be her oyster, but her TV series, Tru Calling, foundered after its first season, movie roles in the likes of Wrong Turn have done little to raise her status, and her latest venture onto the small screen, Dollhouse, has just been cancelled. She’s great but just doesn’t seem to get the projects she needs to turn her into a full-on star.
Gabrielle Union meanwhile seems cursed by the fact that people rarely write major mainstream roles for dark-skinned black women, and so despite being immensely talented and stealing virtually every scene she’s ever appeared in, she’s largely been stuck in supporting roles or ‘black films’ that no one’s made much efforts to try and get to crossover to a wider audience. Like Dushku, she’s also had problems with only starring in short-lived TV series, like City Of Angels and Night Stalker. Although Gabrielle is currently starring in Flashforward, she’s a pretty minor character who’s been given virtually nothing to do so far. I have a horrible feeling that despite how good she is, she’s going to join the likes of Nia Long and Regina King in the ranks of black actresses who are only allowed to play pointless supporting roles, while the really good mainstream female parts go to somebody else with lighter skin.
I don’t know why either of these women isn’t far more successful and famous than they are, because they’re great, but as always in Hollywood, it’s rarely talent alone that gets someone to the top.
TIM ISAAC
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