The Myth of the American Sleepover

These are the movies that break my heart. It’s not bad but it’s not good either, which is hard to say to someone if they just spent all their money fulfilling a lifelong dream. How can I, some guy whose opinions are no more valid than anyone else’s, attempt to criticize something like this? All I did was pay to go somewhere where I watched movies and read books on movies all day, anyone could do that. So what I think really doesn't amount to anything. The other thing is I've worked on films just like this. I know just how hard the people on this film worked, how much money they had to spend and how impossible it is to get any movie made at all. Should I really judge the merit of the film when I wish I could give it and A for effort? It's not very fair.

Here it goes. “The Myth of the American Sleepover” is about a group of teens who have one last night of fun before school starts. Let me say right off the bat that at the beginning I was expecting to totally hate this movie, but by the end I was entertained enough that I was surprised. The film is about those transitionary years when you aren’t a kid anymore but you aren’t yet an adult. It’s often vaguely sexual, but ends up being quite tame. I found this to be disingenuous. It’s like a film from another era, where kids in high school still hold hands, an era which probably never existed outside of movies anyway. What makes it unrealistic is teenagers today have a lot more sex than people care to think about. If you’re thinking about the movie “Kids,” this is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. A lot of things about the film were just not believable. The two worst things about the film are the pacing and the dialogue. The movie just goes from one set of teens to the next with no engaging structure. The dialogue is so stilted that I can’t even believe the actors were able to do anything with it at all. I will say this for the movie, a handful of the actors were excellent, but they would have to be to save the movie. There are maybe two or three characters that are complex. These few characters and the rest of the actors are really the only thing that makes this film worth watching even for a second.

The directing in the film was very odd. At some points it was really interesting and original and at other points it was so bland and uninspired. I don’t know if this was the film or if the projector I was watching it on was losing a bulb but the colors are very desaturated, as if all the life has been sucked out of the film. The whole film you are sort of waiting for something to happen, like a rape or a death or someone coming out of the closet, but nothing ends up happening at all really. But like I said, it’s close to impossible to get a film made so the production people should be very proud of that accomplishment.