Don't Watch That, Watch This

     Movies about kids are hard to make well.  The lives of kids are very convoluted and abstract, because children/adolescents can't express themselves like adults.  They also think differently than adults, and you have to convey that as a filmmaker.  If you're a good filmmaker, anyway.  Otherwise you can just blindly make another Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants movie, and then go collect your Judas money.  
    There are some very dark movies involving children, and very light-hearted ones; some would argue that darker movies about children exploit them, while others argue that happy-go-lucky kid movies paint an unrealistic picture of real things that children encounter in life.  These two films are most definitely on the darker side.  One just sucks more than the other.

Don't Watch That:  Thirteen

 

Watch This:  Welcome to the Dollhouse

Where Thirteen Loses:

     Thirteen is poorly written and, despite some desperate attempts at acting from Evan Rachael Wood and Holly Hunter, it is way over the top.  The movie follows a seventh grade girl (who looks more seventeen than thirteen) named Tracy who becomes friends with the school hottie bad girl, Evie.  How Tracy becomes her friend is a little confusing and not very well explained, but basically Evie liked the way she shoplifted something.  Before you know it, lip piercings and ecstasy are these girls' main activities.  The film doesn't have a strong plot or pace to it; I think what bothered me most about this film was that it delved into very heavy material, like teen drug use, child abuse implications, and seventh graders having sex with older guys, and then failed to follow up with any real consequences that occurred in lieu of the girls' decisions.  It's almost as if the writers and producers wanted to make a "shock value" teen movie by presenting these issues to the audience, and then didn't have the guts to go through with explaining them, or at least placing it in the context of a good story.  What a lame cop out.     

Where Dollhouse Wins:

     Welcome to the Dollhouse is one of the funniest and most bizarre movies you will ever see about middle school.  Heather Matarazzo gives an amazing performance as unattractive sibling-in-the-middle Dawn Weiner, a seventh-grader whose last name is really the least of her problems.  Her life consists of inattentive, selfish parents, a whiz-kid older brother, a younger sister who is a ballerina and picture-perfect, and an intense crush on an older high school boy trying to make it as a musician.  Dawn's harsh life is what she reflects back to the world; she's mean and rash and cruel sometimes because others are mean and rash and cruel to her.  You find yourself rooting for her, and then quickly disliking her because of the situations she gets herself into, and then sympathizing with her again when those situations get even worse.  This film is one of the most underrated gems of all time.