Happy Friday!
I’m Quartz entertainment reporter Adam Epstein, filling in for Jenni this week. If you haven’t seen Booksmart yet, please, I implore you, take a short break from the sun this weekend and see it in a theater near you.
Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, about two high school seniors on a mission to have fun on their last day of school, is a deeply refreshing entry into the teen party movie canon, and it’s one of the best films of the year. It’s as funny as Superbad, and as insightful about the Generation Z experience as American Graffiti was about the Baby Boomers. It’s bound for instant-classic status.
That is, if people see it. The film’s box office totals have been underwhelming, and while that’s never stopped a movie from becoming a cult classic later, Hollywood studios will use it as a case study concluding that they should invest less in risky films from new filmmakers and more in stuff like reanimating franchises from the dead and whatever the Sonic the Hedgehog movie is supposed to be.
So even if you don’t think you’ll love Booksmart (you will), if you want to see more creative, original, diverse stories in theaters, then go see it—and bring a friend.
One crazy night. Booksmart sent me deep down the rabbit hole of one of cinema’s greatest micro-genres: the “one crazy night” movie. Often related to the infamous Teen Party Movie, the One Crazy Night Movie takes place over the course of roughly 24 hours. Here’s how TV Tropes defines it:
“The hero is settling in for a quiet, peaceful night. Maybe they want to go to a party, maybe they need to pick up their friend. Maybe they just want to make through the night.
“Of course, it’s not that simple. It never is. The powers that be keep putting roadblocks in their way…The problems keep piling up and what started out as an ordinary day turns into…well, One Crazy Night. Stories like this take a conflict that could be stretched out over several days and compress it into only a few hours.”
A lot of great high-school movies fit the bill: Dazed and Confused, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the two I’ve already mentioned, Superbad and American Graffiti. In fact, it seems like every generation, one comes along and becomes the seminal film for the people growing up at that time—or those adults looking back at their younger years.
For a fun weekend movie binge, watch them all in order and see how Hollywood’s view of the Partying Teen has changed over the decades:
Fight for your right to party. Many of the great movies in the teen party canon are absent from the above chart. That’s probably because they take place over an entire school year or summer. It’s such a rich tradition that we can’t possibly list them all. But here are some of the most memorable ones: American Pie, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 10 Things I Hate About You, Risky Business, and my personal favorite, Everybody Wants Some!!, which technically takes place in college and not high school but who’s counting?
But really, everybody should want some. In 2016—more than two decades after he made Dazed and Confused—Richard Linklater directed a little semi-autobiographical film called Everybody Wants Some!! (Yes, those exclamation points are in the title.) It’s not a Teen Party Movie, per se, but it gets at the ideas of innocence lost and the weird experience of becoming an adult all the same. I highly recommend it for a lazy summer afternoon.
There isn’t a traditional plot. Everybody Wants Some!! drops in on a college baseball team for a few days in Texas at the start of the school year in 1980, months before their season starts. They hang around the house, getting high. They go to parties. They aimlessly walk around campus. And somehow, through all that, Linklater paints an affectionate, hilarious portrait of a moment in his life.
Don’t forget about TV. The small screen has a long history of dabbling in One Crazy Night scenarios too, though perhaps not one quite as iconic as its big-sceen counterpart. Still, there are some absolute gems if you know where to look.
The “Nana’s Party” episode of American Vandal quickly became a cult classic. Vanity Fair published a great oral history of the episode, which was based on an actual party that a classmate of writer Seth Cohen threw at her grandmother’s house.
Friends had an excellent one too—the aptly titled “The One Where They’re Up All Night.” The gang goes up onto the roof to watch a comet, and then Ross and Joey get stuck on the roof before trying to climb down the fire escape.
Have a great, crazy weekend, but not too crazy.
Prestige depavity. On Sunday, HBO will premiere its latest original drama, Euphoria. The show is an incredibly explicit, unabashed exploration of drugs, sex, and violence among modern American high school students. Former Disney Channel star Zendaya is superb as Rue Bennett, a 17-year-old struggling with addiction. It’s absolutely nothing like Gossip Girl or Glee. When I tell you the show is explicit, I mean it. (Parents, beware.) But, in moments, it’s strangely beautiful, due in no small part to some wonderful visual sequences conjured up by directors Augustine Frizzell and Sam Levinson, who is also the show’s creator. Seriously, Euphoria has more exquisite dolly and zoom work than a Spielberg film. Check out the trailer and you’ll see what I mean. Presented with imaginative camerawork and a slew of honest performances, Euphoria is the rare teen drama that asks real questions about young people’s proclivity for self-destruction without glorifying or judging them.