a review of 年少轻狂

2022 Criterion Challenge Week 13/Category 22: Ana Lily Amirpour's Top 10 Skipped out on watching this one as a high schooler/college kid in the '90s, largely because I was born a little too late to have any '70s nostalgia, kinda hated '90s stoner culture, and didn't really care for teen movies. And for about the first 30 minutes watching it now, I felt like my initial disregard for this movie might have been absolutely correct; All of the small-town hazing stuff with the senior kids hunting down the incoming freshmen for ridiculous punishments felt like complete science fiction to me, since that was not at all my experience growing up in a similar place 20 years later. But as the movie went on, it became clearer to me that all of the characters are sorta losers (except maybe for Milla Jovovich, who IIRC has no spoken lines and just gets to look totally ethereal while strumming her guitar) and that was definitely something that I could access from a sociological standpoint. Even a "cool" character like Wooderson is basically just a dude who hangs out with high school kids because he has nothing else going on. I feel like the movie would maybe gain an extra half-star from me if it had focused about 25% more on the three quasi-nerd kids led by Adam Goldberg, and less on humanizing the shitty football players tormenting Wiley Wiggins' character, but honestly by the end of the movie I was charmed by all of these dumb Texas a-holes.