Best Teen Movies of All-Time (Part 1)
This is your guilty pleasure. High School was a time where things seemed much simpler in hindsight. Yet while you were going through it, everything seemed as though it was the most important thing in the world. A simple thing could ruin the rest of your life. You were free to focus on the trivial things without having to worry about mortgages, marriages, and the other massive responsibilities of life.
What makes a good teen film?
Secret crushes. Check
Graduation/The Prom. Check.
Killer Soundtrack. Check.
A good teen film makes use of all of these and even a few more. Some even have the ability to influence slang (As If), fashion trends (Danny Zuko’s leather jacket) , and even other movies (how many movies have some sort of version of John Cusack with a boom box).
While there were a few teen films over the years, (think Rebel Without A Cause, West Side Story, etc.) the teen movie genre really establishes itself during the 1970’s with a full out explosion, and some might even say a peak in the 1980s.
Fresh out of USC film school and with the help of his good buddy and future Godfather creator, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas kicks off the 1970s with the archetype for what we now know as the teen movie.
And with that, let’s get it started with the best teen movies of all-time:
American Graffiti
If American Graffiti didn’t create the genre, it certainly shaped it and molded it into what we all enjoy and love from a teen movie. It follows an ensemble cast of four friends featuring a young Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Le mat, and Charlie Martin Smith. Each plays their stereotypical role, (the clean cut guy, the jock, the geek, the skeptic) and each character is fully developed. When we romanticize the ‘50s and early ‘60s, this is one of the movies that we think of that really encapsulates the period. There’s a sense of adventure and introspection wrapped up in the veneer of cool cars, drinking, and skirt chasing. George Lucas famously missed out on the “pivotal teen experience”. American Graffiti was his attempt at re-creating that experience. Lucas recounted his experience during a cameo appearance on the popular Fox teen soap opera, The OC.
Mean Girls
If you ever went to school or work on a Wednesday and saw that people were wearing pink more than other days, you can thank Mean Girls. Hands down, the greatest teen movie of the 2000s, the Tina Fey penned classic came about when some critics had thought that the genre was on the way down following the late 90’s run of great teen movies. Starring Lindsay Lohan, Means Girls catapulted Lohan to a rarefied level of fame that perhaps she was unequipped to handle. It also launched the careers of Amanda Seyfried and Rachel McAdams, both of whom have worked consistently since Mean Girls and have won several awards.
Clueless
The fashion, the slang, the Jeeps, the music. Clueless reignited the teen movie genre during the mid to late 90’s bringing together every element that you would want in a teen movie. Breakout star, Alicia Silverstone, carries the movie to new heights while a solid all-around cast hits all of your comedic and emotional notes.
Can’t Hardly Wait
So many people sleep on this film. While it didn’t reach the commercial heights of Clueless, it has all of the elements of a classic teen film. It has the breakout star in Jennifer Love Hewitt, he idyllic hopeless romantic in Ethan Embry, your cool jerk in Peter Facinelli, your lovable nerd in Charlie Korsmo, the ultimate comedic relief in Seth Green, before they were famous appearances from Sara Rue, Jason Segel, plus tons of blink and you’ll miss them cameos from Melissa Joan Hart, Sean Patrick Thomas, Donald Faison, Selma Blair, Jamie Pressley, Jenna Elfman, Jerry O’Connell, and even Liv Tyler. The hit-band Smashmouth highlights the earworm soundtrack of Can’t Hardly Wait.
The Breakfast Club
The magnum opus of the late John Hughes is the quintessential teen movie. In what is supposed to be just another teen movie about of bunch of delinquents in a high school detention, turns into an allegory of our own universality. The Breakfast Club doesn’t look down on teens. It explores them as very real and complex characters with tremendous depth. in terms of popular culture, the Brat Pack, as they so affectionately came to be known as an homage to the Rat Pack of the late 50’s and 60’s that featured the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and more, became larger than life. Judd Nelson and his fist pump lives on in cinematic history even today, with so many movies being inspired by that scene. Molly Ringwald was one of the it girls of the 80s. Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, and Ally Sheedy all had a string of hits into the 80’s and 90’s.
Don’t you forget about this movie.
