13

[DinoBora]

SCREEN - Don’t let your babies grow up
Thirteen gets to the mad heart of adolescence

Planned Parenthood should adopt Thirteen as their number-one weapon to discourage procreation. Catherine Hardwicke’s powerful debut film is designed to scare the shit out of parents of teenage girls and future teenage girls.
Even scarier was an interview I saw on The View with the film’s young stars, Evan Rachel Wood and Nikki Reed, where they said there is nothing parents can do to keep their daughters from giving in to peer pressure to experiment with sex and drugs in adolescence.
It’s part of the continuing trend of kids growing up faster with each generation. Today they’re doing hardcore things at 13 their parents may have done at 16, at which age their grandparents may have been sneaking cigarettes and beer.
Tracy (Wood) enters seventh grade as a good student with no fashion sense. Her best friends are a couple of fellow dweebs. The first thing Tracy notices is her older brother, Mason (Brady Corbet), and his friends noticing that another girl, Evie (Reed) “sure grew up over the summer.”
With the help of a little grand larceny Tracy becomes Evie’s new best friend and she quickly grows up too. Her first experiences with drugs are shot in the psychedelic style of a late-’60s movie and the boys Tracy and Evie hook up with are African Americans.
This will be an additional scare for some parents (black and white), while former hippies may tap into their residual idealism when Tracy says, “If everyone married someone from a different race, then in one generation there’d be no more prejudice.”
As Tracy prepares for her first serious date Evie asks, “You don’t know how to kiss, do you?” Tracy replies, “You want me to prove it, lesbo?” and soon they’re making like t.A.T.u.
The parenting factor is not ignored. Melanie (the amazing Holly Hunter) is doing the best she can to raise Tracy and Mason, doing hair in their home to pay the bills while her ex-husband fails to carry his share of the load. She’s also in recovery and Tracy doesn’t like Brady (Jeremy Sisto), the rehab boyfriend Melanie dates and lets hang around the house.
Melanie often seems on the verge of losing it as Tracy’s sudden changes add to her stress, but we can only hope she’ll have the strength for her daughter she might not have for herself.
Evie, who lives with Brooke (Deborah Kara Unger), a “guardian,” spends more and more time at Tracy’s, getting closer and closer to Melanie until she finally makes a pitch to move in.
Irony fans will appreciate Tracy’s summary of her experiences in seventh grade: “My mother isn’t gonna get a bumper sticker this year.”
In addition to being a good actress Nikki Reed wrote the original screenplay at 13, based on things she experienced or witnessed within her peer group. We’ll never know how much director Hardwicke, who gets co-author credit, contributed, but between them they’ve created something extraordinary, the most serious and frightening film about kids since Kids.
Thirteen shows that rites of passage, like everything else, have become more extreme since you and I went through them. However good or bad an example parents set, children have to find their own limits. Most of them survive, and what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger.
What’s going to happen to Tracy at Fourteen? I’m almost afraid to find out, and after this summer I’m not encouraging Hollywood to make more sequels. But this is a story that cries out for continuation in hopes of reaching a happy ending.
Opens today exclusively at the Magnolia

By Steve Warren
Contributing Film Critic
dallas voice

[PowerPuff Grrl]

Kids too sexually precocious... hmm, it has been done before.
I don't know what it is exactly, but there is something about this movie that tells me I most probably am going to hate it. Much like Kids did actually, look how that turned out.
***shudder***.

Anyhoo, it seems too self-important, despite being quite frivolous, to get me caring enough. Though my friends want to see this, so I'll probably get dragged into this.

ETA: Saw it and it sucks. Man, this is the last time I'll let the hype of a movie get to me.