The high school movie is one of my favorite genres, and one I've given a lot of thought to � largely because I think not enough people have (someday I'll write a long article, or even a book, on this rich subject). One thing that fascinates me is the hot young girls purity of the form, how the genre has standard conventions and characters that can be played in so many different ways. The best high school films (Rushmore, Election, Fast Times, Heathers, Dazed and Confused) manage to perform a kind of alchemy with those conventions, using them to trandscend themselves and create a genuine American artwork.
The other night I rented last year's underappreciated high school film Pretty Persuasion. It's flawed, to be sure, but utterly fascinating and absolutely essential if you're a fan of the genre. What almost none of the critics got is that the entire film is about the last 15 or 20 minutes. Indeed, lots of critics even complained about the ending. They hated the shift in tone from dark comedy to simply dark. But without that shift, you don't get the point, which is to turn the film against itself, to expose genre conventions to scrutiny they were never built to withstand, and force you to question them and confront what they're really saying.
I'm convinced that this is a movie about high school movies, the way Unforgiven is a Western about Westerns. Not that revisionism is unknown in this genre, but Pretty Persuasion's particular approach is shockingly effective. Unfortunately there's no director's commentary to confirm my opinion (how spoiled DVDs have made us!), but maybe if enough people rent it, we'll get a special edition someday.
