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I have always found that teenagers are far more interesting in person than they are in the movies. In person, they often reveal the kind of individual they will become for life—this individual is totally absent from children, who are just a mess and do the same stupid things as all other children. You can actually hold a conversation with a teenager, and sometimes you even forget you are talking to a young person with a basic education and barely any experience. But once a teenager is on a movie screen, they become boring as fuck. Is this because the writers for teenage movies are often adults? Maybe that's what made Larry Clark's 1995 Kids almost interesting? (It was written by a person who, at the time, was just out his teens—Harmony Korine.) But most teen movies, and particularly the ones out of Hollywood (indie films have a better track record‚ see Moonlight), are like the new film The Edge of Seventeen, which was written and directed by someone, Kelly Fremon Craig, who left their teen years long ago. Nothing on earth would make me watch The Edge of Seventeen except a need to be depressed, the mood that results from being bored for an extended period of time. With this movie, I can expect a teenage character who will certainly be like other Hollywood teenagers, and who in wonderful slasher films is eliminated very quickly and very brutally: struggling to be understood, sassy, self-proud, boy- or girl-obsessed, etc. If I want to make my Thanksgiving as miserable as possible, all I need to do is spend 104 minutes with the star of The Edge of Seventeen.


Read the full feature How to Have the Worst Thanksgiving Ever (On Purpose)