Here is the top of films that look reality in the face and presents non-romanticized teenagers with problems, with pain and, not infrequently, with strong impulses of violence. The films below are registered in various categories and are made in various style registers and thematic, but all have in common the teen problem.
10. Bang Bang You’re Dead
It is a movie from which are missing completely the relaxed and non-dramatic references to high school life. Here everything is the cause and dramatic consequence. The story is that of a student too often abused by his colleagues, a child who can not bear humiliation, or simply an outrage. Ben Foster loses control and breaks down social codes.
09. Ondskan
A movie that pushes the boundaries and leading the “tribal” image of high school to the extreme. We know that there are brotherhoods, groups, gangs, micro-companies. We know that there is fierce for those tests will be accepted in such brotherhood. Is known that violence is no stranger to these places. But Hajstrom’s film proposed to public a more than random violence to school.
08. The Lookout
Chris is a promising teenager. It has extraordinary athlete skills. His future is bright. Then has an accident and the castle of cards collapses. Life must be reevaluated. Chris adapt the new situation, a job as a janitor in a bank. Unwittingly finds himself involved in a robbery… all he wanted was to look to the future of its excellent zeroed social, not only wanted to work in relief.
07. Brick
If you thought that in high school society is no room for underworld, you are wrong. Here is a movie that’s been digging for outstanding criminal depths of a seemingly innocuous high school life, and found a world far too dark and violent to be forgotten with a double. Brendan is a withdrawn and introverted teenager who would not put in extreme situations than in exceptional cases. His girlfriend disappears. From one clue to another, from one murderer to another after puberty, Brendan was sinking more and more hopelessly hollow world of crime “school”.
06. Mysterious Skin
Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki, is not a movie about high school, is a film about traumatized teens. Adapting of Scott Heim’s novel, Araki’s film presents the route cleared of two unhappy boys, similar in their misery more or less aware.
05. Donnie Darko
Here is a film in a multiple stylistic register, is surreal, fantasy, dark, macabre, all together in a mix very well structured and very effective. A teenager with visions, murder, a giant rabbit, a high school romance, and violence, a lot of violence. The film is really strange.
04. A Clockwork Orange
Alex DeLarge is a too young offender, leads a pack of fools who promotes anarchy and random violence. They are fighting with authorities, and then is volunteer in an experiment funded by the government of Great Britain who wants to solve the crime problem. As in any dystopia, everything goes awry and it comes to one and the same result. It can soothe experimental science of human nature.
03. Elephant
Directed by Gus Van Sant, proposes a quasi-documentaro-fictional perspective of the events of Columbine High School. Remarkable is the direction. Chamber seeks more students literally follow them going to school, seeing their life intersecting, tracks them living reflection and without drama, while two of their colleagues are preparing a massacre. The directing style chosen by Van Sant deepens the reality, gives shape and practicalities.
02. Rebel Without a Cause
Here’s the film that turned the iconic actor James Dean in the generation of young Americans lack the social and existential values. His character “embodies” the charismatic teenager forced to cope with the absence of landmarks. Disorganized family, unstable and violent, reporting off-the father figure, lack of direction, lack of constructive cultural patterns.
01. Paranoid Park
Directed by Gus Van Sant, is a cinematic poem. In the film less are happened but essential. An accident, a dead, introverted teenager. What matters are interstices, “documenting” a meditative wanderings, young people with empty eyes.
