A history and tribute to teen movies-from Rebel Without a Cause to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and on to John Hughes, Mean Girls, The Hunger Games, and more.
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.
