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- <text id=89TT1013>
- <title>
- Apr. 17, 1989: Teen Life Ain't Worth Livin'
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Apr. 17, 1989 Alaska
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- CINEMA, Page 83
- Teen Life Ain't Worth Livin'
- </hdr><body>
- <p>Two movies turn young angst into black comedy and pop music
- </p>
- <p>By Richard Corliss
- </p>
- <p> Where are the teenpix of yesterday? Gone with the
- demographic wind. As the U.S. movie audience ages toward
- thirtysomething, Hollywood has discarded the teen genre like so
- many Molly Ringwald paper dolls. What's left? Only caustic
- satire, as in the new black comedy Heathers, or retro fantasy,
- as in Sing.
- </p>
- <p> At suburban Ohio's Westerburg High, a quartet of teen
- princesses runs the school. They are called the Heathers,
- because three of the four are named Heather. The fourth,
- Veronica (Winona Ryder, pallid of face and sharp as Cheddar), is
- at first pleased to be accepted by this "bunch of Swatch dogs
- and Diet Coke heads. They're, like, people I work with, and
- our job is being popular." Still, she is ready for a sinister
- avenging force in her life, a juvenile delinquent, a James
- Dean. He turns out to be J.D., a new boy in town who is itching
- to make trouble (played by Christian Slater, handsomely
- imitating Jack Nicholson's silky menace). Veronica may want to
- get back at one of the nasty Heathers by dropping a phlegm glob
- in her morning coffee, but J.D. has bigger plans. Soon this
- Heather is dead, though she does reappear in a dream to whine
- that "my afterlife is so boring! If I have to sing Kum Ba Yah
- one more time . . ." Then J.D. dispatches two boorish jocks who
- bugged Veronica. No loss, he shrugs: "Football season is over.
- Kurt and Ram had nothing to offer the school but date rape and
- AIDS jokes."
- </p>
- <p> The screenplay by Daniel Waters (a find) offers all that and
- much more. It believes, like J.D., that "the extreme always
- seems to make an impression." Its language is extreme -- a
- voluptuously precise lexicon of obscene put-downs and dry
- ironies -- and so is its scenario, which adjusts the teenpix
- format to accommodate subjects as bleak as copycat suicides and
- killer peer pressure. Heathers finds laughs in these maladies
- without making fun of them because Waters writes from inside
- teenagers. He knows what makes them miserable and what makes
- them bad: that they are already adults but can't accept the
- fact. "Why are you such a megabitch?" Veronica asks a surviving
- Heather, and the reply is, "Because I can be." Heathers locates
- the emotional totalitarianism lurking in a prom queen's heart.
- If Michael Lehmann's direction were a bit more astute, the
- movie could be the classic genre mutation it aims to be: Andy
- Hardy meets Badlands.
- </p>
- <p> Sing, written by Dean Pitchford and directed by Richard
- Baskin, could be called 42nd Street: Duh Motion Pitchuh. It
- carts all the cliches of a Broadway backstage story to a
- decrepit Brooklyn Central High and populates it with Sesame
- Street renegades. Each class puts on a musical skit, or "sing,"
- with groups led by a black, a Greek, an Italian and a Jew --
- the "rainbow coalition" that exists only in Hollywood musicals.
- Yes, the tough Italian stud (Peter Dobson) falls for the sweet
- Jewish girl (Jessica Steen). And, honest, when the star of her
- skit gets knocked unconscious, the stud takes over and saves
- the show. You're going out there a punkster, but you've got to
- come back a star!
- </p>
- <p> The dialogue is all song cues; Pitchford's songs are
- standard technopop, except for a comic showstopper, called Life
- Ain't Worth Livin' (When You're Dead), that the suicidal teens
- of Heathers might take to heart. Otherwise, Sing is strictly
- Gold Diggers turned to brass. In the latest teenpix class
- portrait, it's a dropout.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
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