Word: teendom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...John Hughes sculpted a career writing about kids like these in The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink; Judd Apatow's Freaks and Geeks mined the same vein. Burstein's film is way more earnest, but she's learned a lot, maybe too much, from the movies' take on teendom. Rather than offer a gritty view, upending the familiar vision of high school angst, she has fashioned a work so smooth and assured, it seems like a re-enactment of real events--the Hollywood remake of itself...
...such measures may not do much to curb rotisserie-style teendom. For one thing, parents often give the go-ahead. It was Kennedy's stepmother who first took her to a tanning salon four years ago, and her aunt regularly accompanies her now. Likewise, her friend Sabrina Hendershot, 16, irradiates herself indoors a dozen times a year--with her mother's permission. "My mom doesn't really like that I do it," she says, "but she says it's O.K. as long as it's not all the time...
...teenagers that rose-tinted light. Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and this spring's hit Pretty in Pink succeed because they are about the kids who go see them--not the locker-room sadists, lubricious cheerleaders and barons of barf who populate the Porky's films, but teendom's silent majority of average, middle-class suburban kids...
...still they breed, obeying the first law of commerce: You tailor your product to your market. More than half the U.S. movie audience is in the 12- to-24 age group, so Hollywood keeps grinding out these smudged, cracked fun- house mirrors of teendom. It matters not that most megahits cast their nets over broader demographics. Teenpix come close to guaranteeing a decent return on a modest financial and creative investment. They will keep coming until Chip and Wendy Q. Public weary of seeing their screen doubles lose their virginity for the zillionth time to an MTV beat...
There are some 30 million teens in the U.S., and they spend $12 billion each year. That enchanting fact has prompted publishers to go after a share of the teen green. The first adolescent stirrings were detected more than ten years ago when two events of major import to teendom coincided: the birth of Elvis Presley as an idol and the death of James Dean. Suddenly publications bearing either one's name were selling half a million copies. Soon magazines were riding, first, the Beatles, then the Rolling Stones, and now the Monkees. Currently, half a dozen monthlies...