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I watched both Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging and Love Simon last weekend: an accidentally pairing, but one that got me thinking, largely about the fact that I often find current teen movies - not just Love Simon but also movies like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before - more relatable and closer to my actual high school experience than movies that came out around the time I was in fact in high school.
Does anyone else feel the same way? My high school experience was weird and probably shouldn’t be taken as representative of The Way High School Was in the 2000s. But Simon and Lara Jean share an essential good-heartedness and desire to do the right thing (even though the right thing sometimes eludes them, and they make terrible mistakes) which was very characteristic of the kids I hung out with in high school - and not at all characteristic of, say, Regina George.
Or Georgia Nicolson, the protagonist of Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, who begins the movie resolutely self-absorbed and becomes… well, maybe a little less self-absorbed by the end. (To be fair, Georgia is fourteen to Simon’s eighteen & Lara Jean’s sixteen or seventeen - and this is an age where the difference of a couple of years really matters.)
But she doesn’t grow up so much that she has, say, any compassion when her rival Lindsay gets publicly humiliated on-stage at Georgia’s birthday party, and then one of Georgia’s friends yanks out the breast-enlarging inserts that Lindsay wears in her bra to make the humiliation complete.
Incidentally, the guy they both like has just confessed his love for Georgia onstage, in the form of a song that he plays with his band (he has the most 2008 hair ever, oh my god), so Lindsay has already definitively lost. And it’s not like she’s been tormenting Georgia for years or anything: literally all she did was go on a few dates with Band Boy and wear low-cut tops.
At least in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, when Megan Fox completes her public humiliation by falling into a fountain, Lindsay Lohan offers her a hand up, you know? Georgia just laughs as Lindsay runs off stage, presumably on the way to drown herself in the sea, because how is she ever going to live this down?
It’s not that these rivalry storylines are dead in more recent movies - but in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, it’s enough that Lara Jean wins the battle over the boy. The movie doesn’t feel the need to make sure the entire school is looking on and laughing at her rival as it happens.
Does anyone else feel the same way? My high school experience was weird and probably shouldn’t be taken as representative of The Way High School Was in the 2000s. But Simon and Lara Jean share an essential good-heartedness and desire to do the right thing (even though the right thing sometimes eludes them, and they make terrible mistakes) which was very characteristic of the kids I hung out with in high school - and not at all characteristic of, say, Regina George.
Or Georgia Nicolson, the protagonist of Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging, who begins the movie resolutely self-absorbed and becomes… well, maybe a little less self-absorbed by the end. (To be fair, Georgia is fourteen to Simon’s eighteen & Lara Jean’s sixteen or seventeen - and this is an age where the difference of a couple of years really matters.)
But she doesn’t grow up so much that she has, say, any compassion when her rival Lindsay gets publicly humiliated on-stage at Georgia’s birthday party, and then one of Georgia’s friends yanks out the breast-enlarging inserts that Lindsay wears in her bra to make the humiliation complete.
Incidentally, the guy they both like has just confessed his love for Georgia onstage, in the form of a song that he plays with his band (he has the most 2008 hair ever, oh my god), so Lindsay has already definitively lost. And it’s not like she’s been tormenting Georgia for years or anything: literally all she did was go on a few dates with Band Boy and wear low-cut tops.
At least in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, when Megan Fox completes her public humiliation by falling into a fountain, Lindsay Lohan offers her a hand up, you know? Georgia just laughs as Lindsay runs off stage, presumably on the way to drown herself in the sea, because how is she ever going to live this down?
It’s not that these rivalry storylines are dead in more recent movies - but in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, it’s enough that Lara Jean wins the battle over the boy. The movie doesn’t feel the need to make sure the entire school is looking on and laughing at her rival as it happens.
