Mostly good-natured, occasionally anthropological and entirely enjoyable ... But one volume can’t possibly contain them all, and Hollywood High gives short shrift to a number of genre disrupters ... Perhaps most criminally, it devotes little room to the 1989 Winona Ryder vehicle Heathers, a devastating black comedy that imploded high school movie conventions so thoroughly it would take years for the genre to recover.
Mr. Handy’s teen-mag title and his book’s colorful packaging belie the author’s seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia ... Acknowledging, if only at the end, that he has no grand unified theory of teen film, Mr. Handy nevertheless exhibits a gift for telling distinctions ... With Hollywood High, Mr. Handy offers an essential contribution to the library of books about the resonance of American genre filmmaking. It’s enough to make the reader punch the sky with a fist while crying, 'Don’t you forget about me.'
Handy’s organizational challenges in this rambling survey (magnified by his eagerness to include every statistic and Googled factoid unearthed in the course of his research) are more daunting than the book’s snappy title might suggest ... He stretches a friendly conversational writing style to the breaking point with his digressions and 'to my way of thinking' throwaway observations in his sprint to lay down facts and those way-opinionated opinions. He is, for instance, lovely when talking about the presence (or absence) of parents and adult figures of authority in teens’ lives and teen movies ... But he is cringe when, after prefacing a useful chapter about the historical evolution of modern American adolescence with a quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville.
Astute and spirited ... More recently, the flavor of the moral panic has changed in a way that Handy doesn’t quite latch on to ... Handy does not underrate the bleak fallout in teen films of 'our current wretched century.' He also rightly identifies the rise of 'girl power' as a force in teen culture, and the popularity and quality of girl-centered movies ... But in emphasizing bullying’s links to the usual teen-film theme of high-school tribalism, Handy stops short of recognizing the portrayal of it, both comic and horrifying, as part of a larger shift toward incisive psychological probing that skewed dark.
[An] entertaining treatise ... Handy’s adoration of the art of moviemaking is evident in every paragraph. This insightful, informative, and witty guide will pique the interest of any aspiring cinephile.
Good, smart, occasionally naughty adolescent fun ... Handy smartly balances scratching the target reader’s nostalgic itch for details on the making of films like The Breakfast Club while also exploring how each iteration of the genre reflects a generation’s concerns ... Inevitably, given the genre’s range, Handy misses a lot: Classics like West Side Story and Heathers are mentioned only glancingly, horror is skipped, and indie gems like Pump Up the Volume are absent. One ungainly chapter crams together ’90s films Boyz n the Hood, Clueless, and Kids. Yet the book is a well-informed conversation starter that takes an often-maligned genre seriously.
Piercing ...The smart exegesis provides both a doting love letter to teen films and a fascinating history of the teen’s place in society. This entertains.
