A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HIGH SCHOOL, NO MUSICAL: I join ALOTT5MA Friend Carrie Rickey in enthusiastically praising Nanette Burstein's new documentary American Teen, which may well be the best film I've seen this year. By turns funny, tender, scary, and heartbreaking, the film follows five very different teenagers in a small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school--the "queen bee," the star jock, the heartthrob jock, a band geek, and an outsider. Unsurprisingly, the studio's tried to draw connections to The Breakfast Club, most notably with a poster, but this is different--there's no artificial "lessons learned" at the end of the day and, indeed, several of the teens don't directly interact with one another during the course of the film. And, yes, as EW indicates, I think anyone who sees the film can't help but get a little crush on Hannah Bailey, the "misfit" of the group.