Rated Greg’s All Time Favorite High School Movies – Ranked
- Dazed and Confused
- Can’t Hardly Wait
- Superbad
- Varsity Blues
- Sixteen Candles
Being on the edge of 33, I doubt I’m ever going to come across another high school movie that resonates the way the top 5 above does, but The Edge of Seventeen is a fine addition to school hall lore. Insert Hailee Steinfeld into the awkward, sky is falling, Sixteen Candles Sam role, only on the outcast spectrum she’s much closer to Sissy Spacek in Carrie than Molly Ringwald. Aside from the fact that someone that looks like Steinfeld would never be unpopular in high school (no matter how big of a jerk she is), the rest of the movie seemed more grounded than most teenage rompers. Unlike Can’t Hardly Wait, the party scenes looked like high school to me as opposed to the myth of it, and none of the characters are portrayed as the one dimensional teenage stereotypes (jocks, burnouts, nerds, ditzes, etc) that we’re used to seeing.
I appreciate the fact that this is R rated even though it very easily could have been toned down to a PG-13 to please financiers. It implies that first time director (Kelly Fremon Craig) had a vision and the studio let her run with it. Most studios would either get rid of the f-bombs and switch explicit sex to inferred in order to garner a PG-13 (think Easy-A), or turn the raunchiness ALL THE WAY UP since they are getting an R anyways (think Jonah Hill and his peculiar drawing obsession in Superbad). The Edge of Seventeen is somewhere in the middle. I found it to be more dramatic than funny, however I think I may be in the minority on this because my theater seat mates (aka my Mom and one of her BFF’s) were chuckling throughout. Tier 3
Rated Greg 