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.
[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.
