Peyton Place - The Fifty Year Update
TITLE: thirteen
GENRE: Drama, coming of age, adolescent girls
CAST: Evan Rachel Wood, Nikki Reed, Holly Hunter and Sarah Clarke
PLOT: In an effort to fend off peer pressure, A young girl begins a personality transition. She goes from clean cut, poetry writing honor student to sex, drugs, and masochistic practitioner. Her new best friend usurps the place of her mother in her life and so the mother watches from a distance and wonders, "what the F...?". Will she live to a ripe old age? check back in fifty.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT: 9 of 10; The acting is worthy of more accolades than it gathered (several nominations for best actress and support). There are long unbroken stretches of dialogue which fine tune the development of character. Some of the cuts of when she's letting loose (high) are too much like a music video, but hey, it works.
DVD BONUS: Overdubbed commentary by the director/co-writer Catherine Hardwicke, co-writer/co-star Nikki Reed (yes the dark haired girl of the pair helped write this story, but it's not she claims autobiographical), Evan Rachel Wood and Jeremy Sisto, who played Wood's brother.
ADDED NOTES: The movie I watched just prior to this one was "Peyton Place" with no specific comparison planned. But the tales are strikingly similar. All the bad things are in both: abuse, abandonment, peer pressure, self analysis, intervention attempts, single mother, etc. My how fifty years is different and isn't different at all. The names have changed, the music, the clothes, city size also. The fact of innocent little girls having the reality of the real world forced upon them hasn't changed a bit. Where's progress?
