BuzzSugar

An Interview With American Teen Director Nanette Burstein

BuzzSugar — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:30:02 PDT

When I saw the documentary American Teen at Sundance this year, I was totally wowed, and I knew I was watching something special. It's truly one of the most insightful documentaries on American life to come out in years. The film is in select theaters now, and I highly recommend you check it out.

As you can imagine, it was a delight to sit down with the director of American Teen, Nanette Burstein, and pick her brain about the making of the film, what it means in the grander scope of current teen culture, and what it's like to be a lady director in a field that is still staggeringly dominated by men.

Buzz: When you were first filming at the high school in Warsaw (Indiana), how did you know you found the "right" kids with Colin and Hannah and Jake and Megan, etc.?

Nannette Burstein: Well, I didn't know for a while. I'm used to looking for not only the people but also a story that's already in process. And it's really funny because I found the best stories all in this one town - but that was in the summer. And then I got there like a month later and every one of their stories had changed, and I was so upset! I was like, "Oh my God, I've raised all this money and this film is going to be a disaster." (laughs) But they're teenagers! And their lives change like that.

The interview continues if you

Buzz: Did it take a while for them to trust you, especially in regard to filming them doing potentially incriminating things, like vandalism, drinking, etc.? Were they OK with you filming that?

NB: No, not in the beginning. It did take a while . . . because they were worried that I was going to show that they drank a lot. So, I made this promise to them that I wouldn't do that, and I did keep that promise. There's only one scene where you actually see them drinking alcohol. [But] that wasn't what I was interested in, and in fact, they weren't doing really anything. I was worse in high school, I was drinking and doing more drugs than they were. I think it’s something that teenagers do, and if anything it was tamer. But yeah, it definitely took them a few months to trust me and feel comfortable on camera.

Buzz: Speaking of things that you did when you were younger and what they did, do you think there's anything unique about teenage life right now? And are there things that are the same and are always going to be the same?

NB: Yes, I think what's different about teenage life now is communication. Just overwhelming different forms of communication like the Internet and text messaging and i-chatting and YouTube, and it’s really hard for them to navigate. There's already enough rumors and misunderstandings that happen when you’re a teenager and this has just multiplied them, you know, a hundred-fold. I think what hasn't changed are the core issues of wanting to fit in and feeling insecure and fragile hearts and your parents pressuring you . . . All of these emotional issues are timeless. And up until now, you have these fiction films that deal with these kinds of subjects, but they tend to be more one-dimensional and everyone has a happy ending and nothing is very realistic. And then these reality shows are very stagey and tend to be about the wealthier classes in life so they don't feel very real either. So I haven't really seen a film that's depicted - both on an entertaining level and a complexity and substantive level - what teenage life is like. Hopefully in that way this film is new and different and could have wide appeal.

Buzz: You had mentioned at Sundance that you wished there had been more diversity, but it just didn’t work out that way. Did it ever give you pause to call the film American Teen when it's about basically one sort of homogeneous group of people?

NB: Yes! It gave me great pause, in fact. And I was struggling until Sundance - I knew once I got to Sundance I couldn't change the name because there would be all this publicity and we went through a bunch of different names. But I was and still am concerned about that.

Buzz: It's still quite different from what we're getting a lot of on TV, The Hills, all that stuff, and to me this is endlessly fascinating - the heartland of America, etc. - perhaps more so than say, Southern California.

NB: I know, and it's so funny because when I first got to Warsaw, the more popular kids were like, "Why are you filming here? You should be in California! Who's gonna want to watch this?" (laughs) They were so dubious of the movie because it was set in their Midwestern town.

Buzz: But it’s actually fulfilling a need.

NB: Yeah! Oh, it totally is.

Buzz: As a female director, what has been your experience within the film community as it is today?

NB: You know, I haven’t yet experienced discrimination, and I'm going to do a fictional film next so I'm sure it could be very different. Documentaries, there are a lot of female directors, probably because you don’t make much money (laughs). And it's not quite as political. But subject matter-wise, you look at the movies out there and every year has some exceptions. Maybe Juno is about pregnancy, but it was more than that to me, it was a film about a really smart . . . like a Hannah type of girl. And it's great, and you never see movies with young, female icons like that, that don’t care about being popular and are not vapid but are actually quite witty.

Buzz: And that movie just took off.

NB: I know! Exactly. And the success of it is because there's obviously a desire to see girls depicted that way. Yeah, I don't know why there are so few female directors, but there are . . . I do think there are strong female characters in [my movie], which is cool. I think that both Megan and Hannah are even more complicated than the boys, and I think that definitely comes from a woman making the film. And I didn’t even consciously think about it.

Source and source

What to Download: New Music on iTunes

BuzzSugar — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:30:31 PDT

Tuesdays are big in entertainment-ville: Not only do all the new DVD releases hit Netflix, but new music also pours into stores, including iTunes. So I take a spin through each week's iTunes music releases and pick out some albums and tracks worthy of a download. Here are today's selections:

The provocateur: Finally the album that made headlines long before it was ever released is here, and getting fairly good reviews. The album seems intense, and while I'm already bouncing my head to some of the melodies and rhymes ("Queens Get the Money" and "Make the World Go Round" featuring Chris Brown), other tracks are so thick with messages and insinuations it will take more than a quick listen to suss it out ("Sly Fox," for example, is an all-out attack on Fox News).

A new songbird: Every once in a while I flip on VH1 while I get ready in the morning because that's one of the few times I'm able to find actual music videos on the television. On one such morning, I caught this young Aussie singer (and former star of the TV show Neighbours), Delta Goodrem, and she sounded alright. Kinda reminded me of a slightly more upbeat Sarah McLaughlin. Check out the tracks "In This Life" and "Brave Face" from her self-titled album now available in the U.S. and let me know what you think.

One more pick to go (hint: it's a soundtrack) so

Teen angst: This soundtrack might be to today's youngsters what Empire Records soundtrack was to me back in the day. It's a cute, timely mix of songs from a great little movie, and includes tracks from a range of artists including MGMT, Cat Stevens, and The Ting Tings. And while I may not be a teenager, I'm definitely loving this mix. The folks behind this movie have excellent taste in tunes.

Source

Movie Preview: American Teen

BuzzSugar — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:45:11 PDT

Man, people love to push the whole "this generation's Breakfast Club" angle with the documentary American Teen (though the poster for it, ah, doesn't help). I suppose this makes sense, but only in that The Breakfast Club featured timeless high school themes and characters. Yet, The Breakfast Club was still fiction, and a documentary is always going to be more complex and more nuanced than the stereotypes in a scripted film.

The movie follows four Indiana teenagers - introduced in the trailer as The Jock, The Princess, The Rebel and The Geek - as they go through their senior year of high school. It's both a familiar chronicling of the ups and downs of high school as well as a revealing look at how teens today are quite different from those of other generations. This was one of my favorite movies at Sundance a few months ago, and I plan on seeing it again when it opens July 25. To check out the trailer,

Photo courtesy of Paramount Vantage

TV Tonight: High School Confidential

BuzzSugar — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:32:03 PDT

I often find it interesting to debate just how "real" so-called reality series like Laguna Beach and The Hills are, given that the lives of these wealthy young people are far from any reality known to most of America. While shows about the very rich provide their share of glamour and intrigue, there are plenty of compelling tales to be mined from the rest of America, especially when it comes to youth culture. One example of this is the documentary film American Teen that I was lucky enough to view at Sundance.

Another is a new reality series debuting tonight on the WE network, High School Confidential. The series, created by Sharon Liese, follows 12 girls through all four years of high school in Overland Park, Kansas. The issues facing the diverse group of girls range from body image and popularity, to disease and depression. Liese describes what motivated her to do the project:

High school can be a really painful, complicated time for a girl. It was painful for me. And what girls are experiencing today in terms of angst, the struggles and how difficult it is to forge your own identity is similar to what women faced years ago.

To find out why I'm crossing my fingers this is a good one, and to see clips of the show

On the one hand, I'm glad we're getting something besides the superficial portrayal of teenage girls who are concerned solely with money and boys. On the other hand, from the preview clips I'm a little concerned that this series might go to the other extreme, becoming mired in the gravity and overwhelming angst of being a teenage girl. Statements like, "This is where I cut myself" in the preview clips should probably be delivered with a serious tone. But why does the girl who says, "This is where I got the lead in the musical" look equally somber?

The project looks intriguing, and I'll just cross my fingers we see some smiles as well tears along the way. Either way, I'm definitely going to check out High School Confidential. What do you think?

Source

Sundance Review: American Teen

BuzzSugar — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:30:00 PST

What is it about teenagers that fascinates us so? In the case of many TV shows - from The O.C. to My Super Sweet 16 - there's an obsession with wealthy teens, kids who seem to have way too much way too young. We love seeing the spectacle these kids provide, their outrageous demands, their bratty tantrums that make us tsk-tsk even as we turn up the volume. We love affirming (in certain cases) that money doesn't solve everything, nor does it make anyone a better person.

The documentary American Teen, however, never focuses on this kind of outrageous opulence. The main idea is to get a glimpse at four Indiana kids from different backgrounds and social circles. Yet while everything in the film is completely ordinary, it still fascinates us.

American Teen was one of the best-received documentaries at Sundance, as evidenced in part by the various studios that courted filmmaker Nanette Burstein before Paramount Vantage bought up the rights. I admit I was driven to see the film partly out of curiosity to see these kids go through this delicate, difficult, and intense time of life that I've already experienced in my own way. Is this curiosity the thing that drives the desire to see American Teen? If not, why do we want to see these relatively normal stories so badly?

More thoughts on this if you

On paper, the four kids in Warsaw, Indiana, chosen as the subjects for the film are almost laughably stereotypical. There's the bitchy drama queen popular girl, the band geek with a love for video games, the handsome basketball star with a promising future, and the quirky creative girl who "will never fit in here." This stuff writes itself. There's enough relationship drama, class warfare, and cliquey politics for any scripted show, made more fierce by that youthful mix of optimism, fickle emotions, and selfishness. And it's actually real - or, as real as people can be with cameras on them.

At first the movie seems like it will be like some kind of twisted Midwest version of Laguna Beach. There are weirdly staged-sounding comments and gestures, and some of the kids seem hyper-aware of the presence of the cameras. In time, however, it's hard not to become enmeshed in the kids' lives, their friends' lives, their parents' lives. And Burstein does such an exceptional job at arranging all this information in a compelling way, these kids are impossible to forget for days afterward.

One of the Sundance officials introduced the film by stating that "interpreting our times through the lives of our young people is important work." As I watched the movie I wondered, is this true? And are people interested in this movie because of this "important work" or merely to gawk at the ways these kids misbehave, to judge the harsh words of their parents?

On the bus afterward I chatted with a woman who said, "I'm 44 years old and besides some of the technology - cell phones and things - it's all the same. Nothing's changed. It's all the same as when I was that age." So maybe what I initially suspected is true: We watch to see if we were so different from "the kids today." Turns out not much does change. And there is comfort in that.

Bottom line: American Teen is a seriously well-made, well-edited and highly entertaining way to "interpret our times through the lives of our young people."

Source

Hamlet 2, American Teen Among First Big Deals at Sundance

BuzzSugar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:30:37 PST

Buying started slow at Sundance this year, but things started picking up on Tuesday. Check out a rundown of some recent acquisitions:

Hamlet 2, which stars Steve Coogan as a high school drama teacher, sold to Focus Features for $10 million - making it one of the biggest deals ever in the history of Sundance and putting it in the same league as Little Miss Sunshine. I didn't get to see this one, though the screenings for it at Sundance have been packed.
Another one of the first non-documentary feature films to be picked up was Henry Poole Is Here, which sold for about $4 million on Monday night. I couldn't be happier about this one; it's an uplifting story with some fine performances - particularly by Luke Wilson and Adriana Barraza. It even includes one of my new favorite movie lines.

The documentary American Teen was another hot property, selling to Paramount Vantage for $1 million. I was actually at a morning screening for this when the news of this acquisition broke, which was very exciting. The documentary was made by filmmaker Nanette Burstein and follows four teens at an Indiana high school throughout their senior year. During the Q&A after the screening, Burstein said she chose a school in the Midwest because she felt there was "an innocence and a timelessness" to that area. Stay tuned for more of my thoughts on this film!
The black comedy Choke, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, sold for about $5 million.

P.S. - I took that picture myself!

Live From Park City, It's the Sundance Film Festival!

BuzzSugar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:30:55 PST

It's cold! It's crowded! It's the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah!

I've been here a couple days now and have luckily managed to the avoid black ice and nosebleeds. On the downside, this year's festival seems to be so popular, it's hard to get into the film screenings! Still, this is my first time here at Sundance and I am in awe of this experience. So much great art, so much enthusiasm, so many film fanatics, each with his or her own celeb sighting. Gotta love it. I have a few days left here, but I've gathered some initial thoughts and observations:

Buzz around town is that American Teen is the documentary of choice. The movie "intimately follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school." Morgan Spurlock's super-secretive Where In the World Is Osama? premieres today, however, so we'll see where it lands in the list of favorite docs.
The Wackness has been getting audience reviews that range from "eh" to "amazing!" One person I chatted with said it might appeal most to people who have done lots of drugs.

More thoughts if you

I've heard only glowing praise for The Black List, the rights to which HBO has already snatched up. Fingers crossed I get into a screening of that one.
Some of these snow drifts are so ginormous I can't see over the tops of them. This is scary and also awe-inspiring.
Leaving the screening for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, all I heard around me were male voices prattling on about how "smoking hot" Sienna Miller is. Of course, this was often preceded by "I don't know about her acting, but . . ."
Spotted: Paris Hilton (surprisingly gracious with the flock of starstruck girls), Quentin Tarantino (way taller than I ever thought he was), Scott Wolf (about my height, which I kinda presumed), and Emily Mortimer (she's too adorable for words; also quite fashionable).
Also spotted, at the super fun Entertainment Weekly party were cast members from Brothers and Sisters: Matthew Rhys (Kevin Walker), David Annable (Justin Walker), and Emily VanCamp (Rebecca Harper). I was working up the nerve to go talk to David (who is ridiculously cute in person) when Emily came in and started making out with him. Now, I know in real life she's not actually his half-sister, but still . . . kinda weird.

More to come . . . stay tuned!

Source

What to TiVo: Monday

Maggie Pehanick — Sun, 20 May 2012 23:59:00 PDT

8:00 Dancing With the Stars (new)
9:00 The Bachelorette (new)
11:35 Nightline (new)
12:00 Jimmy Kimmel Live! (new, with guests Kathy Griffin and Emily Maynard)

8:00 How I Met Your Mother (repeat)
8:30 2 Broke Girls (repeat)
9:00 Two and a Half Men (repeat)
9:30 Mike & Molly (repeat)
10:00 Clash of the Commercials: USA vs. the World (new)
11:35 Late Show With David Letterman (new, with guest Lea Michele)
12:27 The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (new, with guest Jeffrey Dean Morgan)

8:00 House (new, series finale)

8:00 America's Got Talent (new)
9:00 American Ninja Warrior (new)
11:34 The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (new, with guest Kevin Costner)
12:37 Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (new, with guests John Lithgow and Miranda Cosgrove)

8:00 One Tree Hill (repeat)
9:00 One Tree Hill (repeat

The X Factor Eyes Miley Cyrus

Becky Kirsch — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:46:05 PDT

Is Miley Cyrus the new host of The X Factor? - Zap2it
Watch a teaser for season two of Teen Wolf - BuddyTV
Which Marvel superheroes might head to the big screen next? - NextMovie
Go behind the scenes of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom - Rotten Tomatoes
See which actors might show up in American Horror Story's second season - HuffPost TV
Check out this Summer's must-see indie films - Moviefone
Adam Yauch's life and career in pictures - The Hollywood Reporter
The many death symbols of Mad Men season 5 - The Daily Beast
Is the Spotify app worth downloading? - GeekSugar

Link Time - How Warmer Weather Heats Up Your Sex Life

Tara Block — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:58:00 PDT

Top 10 ways that warm weather is good for your sex life - Em & Lo
What it's like watching Titanic at 26 vs. 12 - Huffington Post
Why journalism suffers when morning shows seek salvation with celebrity - The Daily Beast
Lena Dunham addresses Lee Aronsohn's "labia saturation point" comments - The Frisky
What your American Girl says about you - College Candy
Learn about pheromone parties and the trend of dating by smell - YourTango
Check out Sofia Vergara in her Hunger Games skit on SNL - BuzzSugar
Study finds economic inequality linked to rise in teen pregnancy rates - The Jane Dough
On- and offscreen celebrity couples - theBERRY
A jealous hubby kills a man over Facebook flirting - Newser