A darkly comic look at precocious teens grappling with sex, excess and alienation. Avoiding the high school party scene and random hookups, Wendy (Amber Tamblyn) and her friends form a clique that claims a more fluid sexuality. Schacter's directorial debut delivers a provocative take on teen romance in this modern promiscuous age. A New Line Cinema Release. ~www.tribecafilmfestival.org
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
lost interest.
Something like a
Larry Clark movie produced by YM Magazine, Normal Adolescent Behavior raises more than a few potentially provocative issues, only to be done in by its slick, pretentious, cell-phone-ad style and some utterly disingenuous teen dialogue.
Amber Tamblyn is an interesting performer with a knack for choosing unconventional material, but here her instincts fail her: Once she and her friends are established as an idyllic bunch of free-love martyrs, there's little brought to the table emotionally or intellectually, and we steel ourselves for the inevitable jocks-versus-misfits conflict. And the movie skirts the very issue it sets out to tackle, shooting these teens in relatively chaste, gauzy, soft-focus eroticism. For a film that's about shattering taboos, Normal Adolescent Behavior is crushingly safe and conventional. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide