Word: teenpix
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What's the matter with kids' movies today? There are too damn many of them, that's what, and they are all about the same damn thing. Since 1978, when National Lampoon's Animal House revived the teenpix genre, rites of passage have become Kabuki rituals: popping zits, snapping towels in the locker room, dancing in the streets, ogling the girls in the shower, getting crazy drunk and tearing up the strip in a "borrowed" Porsche and grossing out Mom and Dad. Sentient adults must unite to cry: Enough already! The glandular convulsions of adolescence are just not interesting...
...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...
Every once in a while, somebody infiltrates the teenpix genre, bends a few rules, applies a little intelligence and comes up with a Risky Business or, last spring, a Sixteen Candles. That funny, good-natured romance offered two teen fantasies for the price of one: a nice girl connects with her prince charming, and a horny dork gets to drive the prom queen to distraction. The Breakfast Club, the new film from the writer-director of Sixteen Candles, John Hughes, is an even odder beguilement. A nine-hour Saturday detention class is called for five balky students: a jock (Emilio...
...over the rough spots and through the inevitable longueurs. Indulgence has its own rewards though. When independent films clear their high hurdles, they can point to new ways of looking at both cinema and American life and demonstrate that film has other pleasures to offer than giddy farce and teenpix thrills...