40 GREATEST INTERNET SUPERSTARS by Web Junk

1. Gary Brolsma – Numa Numa kid
Gary Brolsma rose to fame in 2002 when the then 18 year old posted a video of himself lip-synching to a Romanian song “Numa Numa”. In September 2006, he released a new version. Has been viewed over 13 million times (according to Wikipedia) and has spawned many parodies.

2. Ghyslain Raza – Star Wars Kid
The 2003 clip shows Quebec teen Ghyslain Raza performing Jedi light saber moves with a golf ball retriever. Shot in his high school, when his classmates found the tape they posted it on the internet. Raza sued the kids who swiped his tape, asking for 350-thousand dollars. The case was recently settled for an undisclosed amount.

3. Denny Blaze – The Average Homeboy
90’s rap audition tapes from “average homeboy” Blazin Hazen. He returns presently teaming up with internet star Leslie “Gem Star” Hall in the video Cadillac Beats.

4. Jessica Rose – Lonelygirl15
An elaborate internet faux masterminded by three San Francisco friends. Lonelygirl15 posted video blogs from her bedroom of her strictly religious parents. Searching for love lonleygirl aka Bree, was portrayed by actress Jessica Rose.

5. Tila Tequila
A breakout my space unsigned music star Tila’s page has netted 31.5 million hits, has her own clothing line, a cell phone endorsement, and she has appeared on the April cover of Stuff Magazine as well as Maxim.

6. Perez Hilton – Gossip blogger
Working as writer for gay magazines Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. quit his job and since September 2005 has been working under the surname Perez Hilton. Sued twice, his blog site tripled hits when he was the first to post pictures of Angelina, Brad and Maddox in Kenya, and also the first to post Collin Farrell’s sex tape. Hits jumped in one month from 70,000 hits per day to 700,000 making Perez a celebrity in his own right.

7. Chinese Backstreet Boys
Huang Yixen and Wei Wei’s are two of China’s biggest internet exports. Donning NBA jerseys, head gear and sitting in a dorm room they lip synch to the Backstreet Boy jam “I want it that way”. The Back Dorm Boys maintain a Chinese-language blog through Sina.com. There is also an English-language “Dormitory Boys” blog on Blogger.com, but some readers suspect this is a hoax written by someone other than Wei Wei and Huang Yi Xin.

8. OK Go
The video features boy band dance choreography on treadmills. Choreographed by front man Damian Kulash’s sister Trish the band practiced 16-20 times before they landed the single take that became one of the most watched clips in you tube history. The video made for only $4.99 (the cost of the videotape), the video became one of the most downloaded videos in you tube history.

9. Tom Anderson – Myspace Tom
Though Myspace Tom is the “face” of Myspace, he is very elusive. We never see interviews with him, though we have seen interviews with his colleagues. There have been parodies made of him by Myspace members, pretending to be him — holding interviews, making comments, etc.

10. Ask a Ninja
Video blogs of two comedians dressed as Ninja’s answering questions about Ninja’s. Recent blogs are about how to get a hit done, and does the globalization of the world help or hurt the Ninja’s. Big hit on you tube and they launched their own site askaninja.com

11. Mike Caracciolo – Kid from Brooklyn
Michael Caracciolo likes to express his views in a big way. Posting video blogs on his site thekidfrombrooklyn.com. Mike vents his views on a variety of subjects from gas prices, the war in Iraq and even Starbucks. Coincidentally, Mike lives in New Jersey not Brooklyn.

12. Fritz Globe & Stephen Voltz – Diet Coke and Mentos guys
Two scientist type characters see what happens when you combine mentos (the “Fresh Maker”) with Diet Coke. They keep upping the anty and adding more 2 liters of Diet Coke and more mentos as the experiment goes on.

13. Kyle MacDonald – One Red Paperclip
The website one red paperclip was created by Kyle MacDonald, a Canadian blogger who bartered his way from a single paperclip to a house in a series of trades spanning almost exactly one year.

14. Noah Kalina
Noah took a picture of himself everyday for 6 years. The film ‘everyday’ will be shown on IFC (Independent Film Channel) during the month of November.

15. Jay Maynard – Tron Guy
Jay Maynard a single computer consultant from Minnesota started dressing up as the lead character from his favorite movie a few years ago before going to a science fiction convention. Since then he has gained a ton of popularity and even appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live several times.

16. Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell – Lazy Sunday
The film was viewed more than five million times at YouTube before NBC Universal asked the site to remove it, along with several other copyrighted NBC video clips in February 2006.

17. Lee Paige – Cop shoots self
DEA Agent Lee Page is lecturing to students in Florida on gun safety when he accidentally shoots himself in the foot with a handgun. Agent is attempting to sue US Government for releasing video.

18. Gino the Ginny
Started as a stunt to get then 10 year old Bronx native Gino famous. He had his cousin and NYU student videotape him during the blizzard of 2005. Mimicking the Italian American Guido’s and Ginny’s of the NY/NJ club scene the video clip which hit the internet a day after it was filmed was an instant hit. With 850,000 + hits on you tube so far Gino has become a celebrity in his own right with a record deal, speaking engagements an planned DVD of his stick, and 30,000+ my space friends

19. Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog
Skateboarding bulldog Tyson zips around on his custom made skateboard. 4 year old Tyson started skating at 1 after his owner put him on and he took to it. Now he’s a canine celebrity with film and TV credits, and even his own Myspace page.

20. Leslie Hall – Gem Sweater
Art school graduate and internet celebrity Leslie Hall loves Gem Sweaters and has a collection to boot, over 400! In the first of her and her bands “Leslie and the Les” videos she sings about her love for them. She’s also done promos for MTV U, and launched her own website. Gem Sweaters.com

21. Little Superstar
Excerpt from the 1990 film Adhisaya Piravi starring Rajnikanth known as superstar. The clip which has found fame via the internet and was re-dubbed “little superstar”

22. Alabama Leprechaun
In 2006, a news station in Mobile Alabama did a story about people seeing a leprechaun in a tree (he only comes out at night). After the story ran, it was posted on youtube and received 2,497,000 hits and then a rap video/song was made from the footage (“Where Da Gold At”) as well as a website where you can buy t-shirts and learn more…..

23. Matt Harding – Where The Hell is Matt?
Videogame writer/designer Matt quit his job in 2003 to travel the world with his savings. He kept a website to keep his family and friends up to date on where he was. Along the journey his friend suggested he dance at each location he went to. After the trip he decided to make the video.

24. Jack Rebney – RV Man
Jack Rebney, a.k.a Winnebago Man, has numerous outtakes and tirades pieced together by the video crew Mr. Rebney hired to assist in making a promotional video for marketing RVs. There are several versions of this file on YouTube featuring Winnebago Man’s hatred for flies and several long swearing and cursing montages.

25. Mister Pregnant
Madman from New York City whose videos are offensive yet somehow hilarious.

26. geriactric1927
WWII vet with hugely popular YouTube videos — 2nd most subscribed uploader.

27. Brian Atene – Stanley Kubrick audition
In 1984 wannabe thespian Brian Atene took bizarre accents and even stranger behavior to new levels in his video audition for Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

28. Stevie Ryan – Little Loca
Stevie Ryan is an out-of-work actress living in Los Angeles whose videos are consistently among the most viewed and discussed on YouTube (over a million viewers). She appears as different characters, such as the thickly accented Latina from East Los Angeles known as “Lil’ Loca.”

29. Chuck Norris
One of the most emailed lists ever, the “Chuck Norris Fact List” was original posted on website IRC. Partially inspired by Walker Texas Ranger jokes on Late Night with Conan O’Brien the the “facts” tend to involve absurdly exaggerated claims of Norris’ toughness, attitude, virility, and masculinity. Chuck appeared on the best damn sports show period on Fox Sports and read the list.

30. Karyn Bosnak – Internet Beggar
The website that put internet begging on the map is savekaryn.com, a website started by a young tv producer who had gotten herself into 20,000 of credit card debt. Her website asked for donations to help her get out of debt and she eventually reached that goal. Her website attracted a lot of media attention in 2002; it was profiled on CNN and The Today Show. It also spawned the parody website dontsavekaryn.com.

31. Spongemonkeys
Joel Veitch MA is an animator, commercials director and singer / songwriter. He is the creator of the cult website rathergood.com which he began in 2000. Since then its unique menagerie of animals and songs – particularly his singing kittens and moon-obsessed Spongmonkeys – have developed a worldwide cult following. Joel is a co-founder of Tomboy Virals. He is also lead singer of the band 7 Seconds Of Love.

32. Ryan Holt – Balloon prank victim
USC Vice President gets pranked when guys from the student senate fill Ryan’s room full of balloons and he starts yelling about the cost of the balloons and air. Look at him being serious!

33. Mahir Cagri
Turkish Mahir is looking for an American Woman, and what better place to look than the internet. Since starting his website where he looks for love he has landed on the Forbes 100 top celebrity list, been spoofed on SNL and put out a music video. Still single and trying to cash in on his popularity Mahir has been filming commercials in Europe and has several other projects in the works including a documentary on his life.

34. Chad Vader
Star Wars spoof featuring food co-op day shift manager “Chad Vader” Chad deals with his co-workers, does battle with his nemesis the night shift manager and tries to find love in this four part internet series.

35. Jenni Ringley – JenniCAM
From 1996 to 2003 viewers around the world could tune in 24/7 to see updated pictures of Jenni Ringley cleaning the kitchen, to taking a nap for 15.99 a year. Jenni closed down the site in 2003 due to pay pal’s pornography rules.

36. Andy Milonakis
Fame began as on-line phenomenon. Web clips like “The Superbowl is Gay” led to appearances on Jimmy Kimmel show.

37. Rags the boxing kangaroo
Kangaroo attacks Marty the Monster, mascot from Australian TV show.

38. Cindy Margolis – World’s Most Downloaded Woman
A pioneer in internet searches Cindy Margolis is by far and away the most searched person in the history of the internet. At her peak at age 34 in 1999 it was estimated persons were searching her name on average at a rate of 70,000 times per 24 hours. In 2000 the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records acknowledged her as the “most downloaded” person in 1999.

39. Ethan Chandler – Bank of America singer
Bank of America execs sing hilarious version of “One” with new lyrics about recent merger. Parodied by David Cross. U2’s publisher threatened to sue.

40. Joanna Repsold – Ate a praying mantis
On a dare to get two guys to go to church Joanna eats a live praying mantis.

3° In-Edit :: 2005: 

Algunas cosas son patrimonio del mundo. Generalmente, las mejores cosas lo son, y el hip hop es una de ellas. Porque, aunque nacido en el Bronx y armado de Pumas de colores, cinturones metalizados, breaks de funk y bailes crujenucas, el hip hop ya es de todas las partes, todos los países. Su lenguaje, las formas físicas (bailadores rotos-graffiti-pinchadisquismo-rimadores) que aquel adoptó para expresar una conciencia de clase, un estado de las cosas de la juventud negro-hispana en el entorno urbano de los Estados Unidos, es un lenguaje tan empático, tan adoptable, tan universal, que –aunque no podría haber nacido en ninguna otra parte- puede reproducirse por todo el globo. Puede reproducirse, en Sevilla, por ejemplo. Y cuando lo hace, lo hizo, fue de una manera tan natural que –como dice el lugar común- parecía que fuera vivido allí toda la vida. Esa situación, la de un rap y hip hop autóctono, andaluz, que es honesto y local y no trata de copiar dogmas ajenos, es la que se desmigaja en este magnífico documental de Juan José Ponce. En él, los raperos Tote King, el grupo SFDK- formado por Zatu Rey y Acción Sánchez -, Juaninacka y Dogma Crew (El Puto Largo, Hijo Pródigo, Legendario y Demonio), además de algunos graffiteros como Logan o SLK, cantan y pintan, se mueven ante la cámara, nos enseñan como se vive el hip hop en Sevilla City. ¿Y cómo se vive? En palabras de Tote King, “Rap es lo que hago, hip hop es lo que vivo, con el sol estudio y por la noche escribo, sé testigo del plan que persigo sin preludios, adjetivos calificativos para mi objetivo, vida sin interludios. ¿Ombligo del mundo? Soy algo más peculiar que el ego profundo de un rapper con fobia social; duermo en literas, mi cuarto es un zulo, formulo historias, libera tu mente como un móvil oscuro, con euforia”. Es un fragmento de su canción “Música para enfermos”, y refleja la actitud de todos estos pequeños guerreros del hip hop hacia su cultura, lo más importante para ellos, lo que les hace ir “p’alante”. Juan José Ponce no se detiene en pormenores matemáticos ni biografías extendidas; la suya es la visión fragmentada, vivida, que nace de la garganta del rapper sevillano, sin florituras ni zarandajas. Sevilla City, por todo lo argumentado, es un documental sincero y directo y muy recomendable, y en nuestras pantallas se antoja como el perfecto complemento a aquel celebrado Underground del pasado In-Edit que documentaba la subcultura Sevillana de los 70.

Sevilla City:

Moviemaker.com

1. Trust your script. It’s easy to fall in love with something that’s “set funny.” Trust the document that made you want to make the film, even if you wrote it yourself.

2. Make sure every scene has a beginning and ending. This could just mean someone closes a door behind them or puts down a telephone or enters frame. You don’t need to use it in editing, but more often than not, you’ll be happy to have it.

3. Be honest. Always ask yourself if the action/dialogue is honest and real to the situation and the characters. A funny line or a cool shot is not as important as preserving the tonal line of the film.

4. Be prepared. The morning of a shoot day, re-read the scene that precedes and follows the one you are shooting. It’s important to know where your characters just came from and where they are going.

5. Use a hard line on your headphones instead of a wireless set. You’ll hear the dialogue clearer, which is often a better way to measure a performance than watching it.

6. Don’t eat shellfish off the catering truck. Why chance it?

7. Relax. If you are lucky enough to be directing, your nightmares are other people’s dreams.

El neoyorquino Antonio Campos presenta ‘Afterschool’ como una «película abierta al espectador». El Comercio: “

Al director neoyorquino Antonio Campos le tocó ayer defender su ‘Afterschool’, su última película, casi como si su presencia tras los micrófonos fuera la de un experto en internet. Y todo porque esta historia hace inmersión en el gigantesco mundo de la red para hablar de las influencias del entorno, de la culpa del que observa y no interviene y del que consume aquello que critica. Y lo hace combinando las técnicas del vídeo y del cine, incluso de las grabaciones a través de los teléfonos móviles, arrojando por el medio del camino un discurso sobre la práctica cinematográfica que la descubre como un enemigo de la «perfección interpretativa». Así lo asumía ayer, antes de explicar que quiere dejar «abierta la película al espectador», para que cada cual interprete qué ha pasado, pues al final, también su producto es susceptible de una nueva reedición, como le pasa al protagonista de la película con el vídeo escolar.

Nanette Burstein Interview

Movie review: ‘American Teen’: “

The loveliest and most affecting character in a film so far this year is Hannah Bailey – and she’s a real person. She’s one of five Indiana high school students profiled in Nanette Burstein’s extraordinary study of senior year, “American Teen,” but Hannah is the one you end up loving and worrying about.

An artistically inclined teenager with a rebellious streak, Hannah is about to choose the course her life will take, and we see it all. We see it better than she can. On the one hand, she has all the radiant liveliness and sparkle that a human being could have, a vibrant energy that all but guarantees her a fantastic life. She’s witty. She embraces experience, and she knows, or at least strongly suspects, that in order not to feel like an oddball for the rest of her days, she needs to get out of Indiana – fast.

But she’s a kid, powerless and full of doubt. A romantic reversal leaves her emotionally crippled for two weeks, and she misses school. A relationship with a new boyfriend could easily derail her plan to move to San Francisco after graduation. Having lived nowhere but Warsaw, Ind., she can’t be sure if she feels strange because she doesn’t belong in this socially conservative environment, or because she’s simply weird. And as for her parents – they do everything they can to muscle their free-spirited child into a straitjacket of conformity.

Oh, what parents do to their kids. You see it over and over again in “American Teen,” and it’s enough to chill the blood. Take Megan Krizmanich, the social queen of the high school, the uber-Heather supreme. She’s rich, pretty and bossy, with a mean streak that’s not even a streak, but more like a wide stripe that goes from head to toe. Megan is about as lovable as Chucky from the “Child’s Play” series, and yet even she becomes a figure of sympathy when we see her stern father pressuring her to get into Notre Dame. After all, he went to Notre Dame, and that’s all there is to it.

And then there’s Colin Clemens. Great kid, affable and big-hearted, the star of the school’s basketball team. Colin’s father, who’s an Elvis impersonator, seems like a nice guy, too. But he keeps pressuring the kid to win a scholarship. Otherwise, “it’s the Army.” Later, he suggests “the Air Force.” Good move, Dad: There’s a war going on. Young people are getting blown up and maimed in Iraq, and he’s telling his son to join the military. Amazing.

But the worst – the most enraging, shocking, astounding and awful moment – comes when Hannah’s high-strung mother tells her daughter that she can’t move to San Francisco, that Hannah shouldn’t expect to get everything she wants out of life. And why? Three words: “You’re not special.” The night I saw this, the audience gasped. Everyone watching knows Hannah is special within 30 seconds, but her mother can’t tell after 18 years. At the movies in 2008, I’ve seen beheadings, dismemberments, multiple homicides and various generic acts of cruelty, but no screen depiction of injustice has landed with more force than those three words: “You’re not special.”

“American Teen” shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature. There’s Jake Tusing, a classic geek, who has horrible acne and a mouthful of braces, and says the creepiest things: “There’s a lot of grease on the table now,” he tells a girl, “because I put my face on it.” Yet he has a great longing for romance – will he find it? And will Mitch Reinholt, a superficial jock who runs with the cool crowd, discover that he actually has a soul, kind of like Andrew McCarthy in “Pretty in Pink?” Stay tuned.

But the biggest suspense surrounds the fate of Hannah. At 18, she has the world before her, but does she know that enough to ignore the adults around her, who tell her that she’s nothing? Does she have the courage to face loneliness and become her best and truest self? Anyone in the audience can tell that Hannah has a light inside. But whether she uses it to burn bright or just consume herself will be decided before the movie is over. No, you really don’t want to be a kid again.

From YouTube to Borat: The Jackass Generation :by Dave Roos

I don’t remember how or why I got there, but the fact is I clicked. After two hours on YouTube, you’re no longer responsible for your actions. Something primal takes over. The ancient need for distraction–Man’s Search for Funny.

The clip was called Molly Grows Up and was typical YouTube: Two dudes dug up an old, public domain, black-and-white “health class” movie about a prototypical ’50s teen coming to grips with puberty. Then they dubbed over the original dialogue with the sort of pseudo-stoner banter everyone recognizes as “bored, ironic hipster.”

I admit it was pretty funny. I even watched all two-and-a-half minutes of it (an eternity on YouTube). Nothing terribly original, but the pace was fast, the jokes mildly crude and the message clear: Eat more Wendy’s!

Eat more Wendy’s?

It turns out the clip in question wasn’t the product of two dudes in a basement in Bethesda, but 20 suits in a Madison Avenue high-rise. (On second viewing, they did mention Wendy’s 99¢ Super Value Menu more than could be reasonably explained by the munchies…) The whole thing–three YouTube clips and an equally low-rent Website–was whipped up by a division of McCann-Erickson, one of the world’s biggest advertising firms.

It’s called “Astroturf,” explains Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. “Fake grassroots media.” And its very existence begs an interesting question, says Jenkins. “What does it mean that we live in a world where very powerful players feel compelled to pass their work off as if it came from amateurs in order to get the attention that they think they might deserve?” It means that something strange has happened. Strange, but not entirely unexpected. Its influence is felt not only in advertising and marketing, but in every level of media and entertainment–from the lowest budget YouTuber to the most cash-bloated Hollywood movie studio.

The causes are many but the overall message is clear: If you want to reach this generation–especially if you want to make them laugh–keep it loose, keep it low-budget and keep it “real.”

Tom Lennon and Ben Garant have been doing their own weird thing for a long time. Original members of “The State” comedy troupe, the writing and acting duo also created “Viva Variety” for Comedy Central and “Reno 911!,” which is making the move to the big screen this February with Reno 911!: Miami. As smart and edgy as Lennon and Garant’s shows have been, nothing can make a couple of 35-year-olds sound like stale old greybeards faster than the subject of “Kids these days…”

The “Jackass” team, including Jason “Wee Man” Acuna and Johnny Knoxville, returns for Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass Number Two (2006)
“Kids are super smart and super critical and have a different type of aesthetic than we do,” says Garant, who plays dimwitted Deputy Travis Junior on “Reno 911!” “Kids that go to the movies these days never watched sitcoms. They see sitcom-scripted comedy and it feels like Shakespeare to them; it’s so artificial.”

When Garant talks about the “kids,” he’s referring to what we call “The Jackass Generation.” Raised on reality TV as the rule rather than the exception, they’ve been preconditioned to have, as Lennon puts it, “a very low tolerance for bullshit.” Dweebs like you and I may fall for the Wendy’s YouTube stunt, but not the Jackass Generation. The Molly Grows Up clip got a lot of hits, but just as many angry, anticorporate comments. The second and third clips Wendy’s uploaded simply sunk down into the digital dregs.

How Lennon and Garant get around the predictability of the traditional scripted sitcom or movie is, of course, to make up every line of dialogue as they go along. “The script for Reno 911!: Miami was really a 30-page outline,” says Lennon.

Obviously, they’re not the only ones in Hollywood to embrace improvisation. Will Ferrell and the “Frat Pack” crowd are famous for going “off book.” A movie like Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, a Jackass Generation classic, is so packed with surreal comic moments one wonders if Ferrell and his writing partner, Adam McKay, even bothered with the outline. What the Frat Pack comedies do so well is use collective improvisation to sell the idea that here’s a group of friends–famous friends, sure, but regular guys at heart– who like to hang out, goof around and make each other laugh.

Seth Rogen, who had a small role in Anchorman, but starred alongside Steve Carell and Paul Rudd in The 40-Year- Old Virgin (which he also produced) and Owen Wilson in You, Me and Dupree, says audiences respond to that sort of comedy because it’s real. “That’s the most amazing part of the process. It really is fun and you really feel like you’re hanging out with your friends,” Rogen says.

Take the famous “Know how I know you’re gay?” scene from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where Rogen and Rudd question each other’s manhood during a PlayStation battle. “Paul Rudd and I actually are friends,” says Rogen. “When we’re talking it actually is just us trying to make each other laugh.” What does that mean for the Jackass Generation? It means that a kid like 21-year-old Dave Lehre in Washington, Michigan is encouraged to get together with his friends and do the exact same thing as the Ferrells, Carells and Rudds of the world–maybe even better.

Armed with cheap DV technology and fueled by abject boredom (“It’s either make movies or have some crazy house party in the woods,” says Lehre), Lehre and his buddies achieved YouTube stardom with MySpace, the Movie, a timely, satirical jab at the collective addiction of the Jackass Generation.

Garant and Lennon think that’s the biggest difference between themselves and the Jackass Generation. “When we were kids, there wasn’t a sense amongst us that ‘I could do better.’ We didn’ think that way,” says Garant. “Now they think, ‘Well, I’ll get a camera and I’ll put a skateboard on the roof and I can do better than “Reno 911!”‘” Maybe they’re right. Maybe they know something the rest of us don’t. Lehre signed a pilot deal with Fox (“The president of Fox’s son is a big fan of mine,” he explains) and just wrapped shooting in small-town Michigan. When he went out to L.A. to meet with studio execs, Lehre says, the suits were looking to him for advice.

“They’re trying to grasp onto something that’s taking flight faster than a rocket ship,” says Lehre. When he walked in and said he had a million hits on YouTube, they were flabbergasted. “‘How do you do it?’ they asked,” recalls Lehre. “Me and my friends just have fun. They’re like, ‘This doesn’ make any sense!’”

Mesh Flinders has been living with a 15- year-old girl in his head for longer than he’d care to remember. An aspiring moviemaker, Flinders has written “Bree” into three of his unproduced screenplays, but it took YouTube to bring her to life.

Flinders is the creator of LonelyGirl15, the teen video blogger whose cryptic Webcam diary continues to draw hundreds of thousands of hits–even after Bree was publicly unmasked as a professional actress.

What Flinders proved with the wild popularity of LonelyGirl15 is just how strong the lure of “reality” is to this generation. Even if they knew Bree was a little too good to be true, says Flinders, “People really wanted to believe in her.”

Sacha Baron Cohen and friend travel the country in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006).
Flinders credits some of the success of a movie like Borat to the fact that audiences buy into the moviemaker’s reality. “The audience is willing to suspend their disbelief, as long as you obey certain rules,” says Flinders. “Especially if you make it look like a documentary.”

The faux documentary technique is quickly becoming a staple of cutting-edge comedy. Jay Chandrasekhar, who writes for, acts in and directs all of the Broken Lizard comedies, including the cult hit Super Troopers and 2006’s Beerfest gained experience with the faux documentary style while directing a few episodes of “Arrested Development.”

“It just feels more naturalistic,” notes Chandrasekhar. “It feels more like real life. You get away with these jokes that are not really huge jokes on the page, and the audience is wondering, ‘Did they just make that up? Because that’s fucking brilliant.’”

“Reno 911!” is supposed to be a loose satire of “Cops,” so Garant and Lennon have always used a handheld camera to capture all the “real” action. But when they were filming the “Reno 911!” movie, they started second-guessing themselves, wondering if a “Cops” camera would go into people’s bedrooms and private conversations. But when they screened it, the audience didn’t blink. “It’s the way they expect to see things documented,” says Lennon. “A camera is seemingly always present.”

Aside from the obvious influence of reality TV, part of that expectation to see everything documented comes from the emerging YouTube “caught on tape” culture, says Jenkins. “We’ve all got cameras in our cell phones,” says Jenkins. When everyone everywhere has a camera all the time, everything’s fair game. “YouTube becomes an archival medium as a form of documenting culture.”

The other important quality of the faux documentary style is that it looks cheap. Jackass and Borat look and feel like do-it- yourself, guerilla moviemaking, even though they’re produced by major studies. For Jenkins, that makes Jackass and Borat prime examples of Hollywood “Astroturf.”

But like Flinders says, if the moviemakers play by all the rules and the audience buys into it, even the most expensive Astroturf can feel as real as the back yard. Broken Lizard’s Chandrasekhar is one of those audience members. “Borat is such an elegant movie in terms of [creating a reality],” he says. “What was written, what wasn’t, I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s just genius. They made it feel totally spontaneous.”

YouTube officially launched in December 2005. Less than a year later, Google bought it for $1.65 billion. How could such a simple idea–allowing people to post and share video clips–be so powerful?

“Every week we’re finding a new layer to what’s interesting about YouTube,” says Jenkins, whose most recent book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, explores, in part, how grassroots creativity affects mainstream media.

“Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen all this do-it-yourself media being made, but it’s all in these little niche corners of the Internet, where these groups are sort of hidden from each other,” says Jenkins. “Now they’re all thrown into YouTube as a sort of melting pot of grassroots creative expression and they’re learning stuff from each other very rapidly.”

In an article for Wired, Bob Garfield describes the ever-expanding YouTube community as the real-life equivalent of a million monkeys working at a million typewriters. What they’re coming up with certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but who cares?

Armed with cheap digital video technology and fueled by abject boredom, Dave Lehre and his buddies achieved YouTube stardom with MySpace, the Movie, a timely, satirical jab at the collective addiction of the Jackass Generation.
Think of YouTube as the world’s largest improv troupe. Just as all the great sketch comedians honed their skills and developed fresh ideas on the stages of “Saturday Night Live,” The Groundlings and Second City, the Jackass Generation is doing the same on YouTube, only to the 10th power. The comedy terrain shifts so quickly on YouTube (“old school” can mean last week), that the culture is continuously redefining “What’s funny this second.”

Jenkins provides an even more appropriate comparison: YouTube as 21st-century vaudeville. “Vaudeville was composed of very short acts, each very different material juxtaposed against each other,” explains Jenkins. “A lot of creative control in the hands of individual performers–a tendency to focus on shock, emotion, fascination with machinery and technological devices… bringing the world together on the same stage. In a sense, all of that describes YouTube very well.”

Of course, early Hollywood relied on a steady stream of performers who had made names for themselves on the vaudeville circuit. Not surprisingly, there has been tremendous buzz over studios possibly turning to YouTube for the next crop of fresh moviemakers.

“It’s kind of like the 1970s again,” says LonelyGirl15 creator Flinders, “when the cultural revolution took place and the studios went and hired all these ‘Young Turk’ filmmakers–Scorsese, Fellini, Coppola– and let them come in and help with big studio pictures. Hopefully that’s going to happen now.”

Flinders, who describes himself as a moviemaker, says he’s ready to make the transition from the Internet to the big screen. “People like me, who have done stuff on YouTube, are getting representation and getting in a door that wasn’t open less than even a year ago,” he says.

Tom Nunan, a film and TV producer (Crash, The Illusionist) who also teaches a combined course at UCLA for graduate film students and MBA candidates, says if your goal is to eventually make a lot of money in the mainstream, YouTube is a completely viable auditioning platform.

“All of the broadcast and cable networks are all over YouTube, trolling for new voices and new talent. It is absolutely a legitimate space for new filmmakers–or old filmmakers who want to reinvent themselves to prove their ground,” says Nunan. “People use it in pitches: ‘I’ve received 75,000 hits.’ And why wouldn’t they?”

Joe Bereta and Luke Barats just signed a pilot deal with NBC after their sketch comedy clips blew up on YouTube (Variety recently included the duo in their 2006 Comedy Impact List). Barats doesn’t think he and Bereta possess unusual talent, it’s just that YouTube has given them the distribution method to get their stuff out there.

“We”re young writers who have gotten a chance to see their stuff produced because we did it ourselves,” says Barats. “I think that’s the reason we’re in the room as opposed to some other young writer who hasn’t gotten his stuff exposed quite as much.”

For film critic and historian (and MovieMaker writer) Joe Leydon, the cross-pollination of Hollywood and YouTube is only natural. He calls the DIY clips on YouTube “the cinematic equivalent of garage band recordings. Just as there will be elements of garage bands that will be incorporated into mainstream music, there will also be garage bands signed to recording contracts with major labels,” says Leydon.

“I’m sure that some of the people who will be releasing summer comedies in 2008 are making little comedy shorts for display right now on YouTube.”

Lennon jokes that Reno 911!: Miami is really nothing more than big screen YouTube. “It’s shot with handheld video, sometimes it’s out of focus and every three minutes something either very violent or very sexy happens, which is generally exactly what YouTube is,” says Lennon. “I don’t know if we would admit that or are aware of it, but we’re certainly doing it.”

© 2008 MovieMaker Magazine

  Larry Clark (2006) – Short Documentary Filmografía: Kids (1995) Another Day in Paradise (1997) Bully (2001) Teenage Caveman (2002) Ken Park (2002) Wassup Rockers (2005) Destricted (2006) :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Larry Clark: Great American Rebel (2003) Pt 1 of 6 Pt 2 of 6 Pt 3 of 6 Pt 4 of 6 Pt 5 of 6 Pt 6 of 6 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Larry Clark Fotógrafo 

Artnet

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A Retrospective Shows Larry Clark is Hot for Teenage Decadence By David Amsden Published Mar 28, 2005

The Cheerful Transgressive

Ashis new retrospective at ICP makes clear, photographer Larry Clark was hot for teen decadence before the rest of the culture caught on. Larry Clark, the 62-year-old photographer and director known for his obsessive chronicling of desperate teenage lives, was at the gym, sweating on the stationary bicycle and staring at the television. Suddenly, the screen cut to an exterior shot of Locke High School, located in South Central Los Angeles—a shot identical to the opening of Wassup Rockers, the film Clark’s currently editing about a crew of straight-edge Latino skaters (played by actual Locke students) who find themselves objects of fascination by rich white girls from Beverly Hills. “So I turn up the volume,” Clark says, launching into one of his digression-prone soliloquies, “and it turns out there was a shooting at the school. A poor 15-year-old girl shot in the head. Some innocent girl! Anyway, it happened yesterday, right? Well, I was with a kid who goes to that school yesterday—he’s in the movie. So I’m talking to him for hours, because I’m trying to help him with school—he needs 180 credits to graduate—and he doesn’t even mention that someone got shot at his school that day. Not a word! Can you believe it? It just blew my fucking mind, man, and I had to call someone. Figured I’d call you . . . ” That Larry Clark still has the ability to be shocked by the detached nihilism of teenage boys takes a moment to process; it is, after all, the terrain he’s been exploring—exploiting, many have argued—for more than 30 years in beautiful, brutal work that’s influenced photographers like Terry Richardson and Ryan McGinley. “Larry Clark,” the first American retrospective of Clark’s work, currently on display at the International Center of Photography, demonstrates the richness with which he’s mined this single subject. Ever since 1971, when Clark published Tulsa, an austere series chronicling his meth-shooting pals in sixties Oklahoma, Clark has made it his mission to document teenagers at their most deviant, their most vulnerable, their most sexually unhinged. In 1983, Clark published Teenage Lust, portraits of Times Square hustlers refracted through his own emotional experience—he included family photos and shots of younger Tulsa junkies—and eventually moved into the (comparable) mainstream with the 1995 film Kids. That movie, about a crew of aggressively malicious and morally bent skaters, including an HIV-positive Lothario who preys on virgins, became a national symbol o f the directionless, self-destructive nineties youth generation. At its rawest and best, Clark’s work reveals a Lord of the Flies vision of being young in America—parentless kids fending for themselves, doing what they can to deny their own existences—one that’s often a few steps ahead of the news cycle. Nothing seems to make Clark prouder. “I don’t want to toot my own horn, because that’s stupid, but I’m just saying that I got there early,” he says. “When I did Tulsa, people thought that drugs couldn’t be happening with crew-cut kids in Oklahoma. Look now! Meth is the scourge of the Southwest! And when Kids came out, they said it was all about Larry, that it was the fantasies of an old man. Then suddenly the news was filled with school shootings, sex, AIDS—all the headlines were what you saw in the movie!” Then, without pause: “Wait a second. Why am I even talking about this? How’d you find me? I fucking hate talking about my work.” Clark’s work may still shock, but it looks different today, in our kid-fetishizing, exhibitionist age, when the squeaky-clean likes of Katie Couric devote specials to semi-anonymous 13-year-olds talking about blow jobs. Ironically, the increasingly titillating coverage of youth culture in the media, which, Clark says, “makes me just fucking cringe,” is what he’s been criticized most for doing as an artist—pawning off panty shots as profound art. His last film, the narratively challenged Ken Park, still hasn’t been released in America, “because of a music-clearance issue,” says Clark, though he acknowledges that the actual sex scenes, culminating in an extended threesome, are “hard for a lot of people to watch.” Ken Park came on the heels of Bully, a jarringly empathetic portrait of Florida teens derailed by a gratuitous sequence featuring a buck-naked Bijou Phillips pouring candle wax on her drugged-up boy toy. Clark’s the kind of artist one might expect to revel in his own moral ambiguity, but perhaps because he’s been criticized as pervy his entire career—inevitably more so the older he gets—Clark’s eager to defuse such thinking. “If it’s titillating? Well, sometimes I’m dealing with good-looking people having sex, sure, but that’s not the point. It’s the consequences.” “I never do anything just to shock, to get attention, to titillate,” Clark swears, though it’s a hard claim to take at face value. Clark may fit the mold of the transgressive artist, but he’s disconcertingly eager to argue that he’s not aiming at self-expression at all—his goal is more wholesome that that: “social commentary.” Tell him this—that his line of defense sounds naïve—and he recalibrates: “Yeah, you’re right. It’s like, I call myself a moralist and my friends fall down laughing. But it’s true! Look at the work—everyone always comments on the photo in Tulsa of a pregnant girl shooting up, like it’s exploitative. Look at the next photo! It’s a funeral. Of a dead baby. I’m always trying to get at the consequences of actions. And if it’s titillating? Well, sometimes I’m dealing with good-looking people having sex, sure, but that’s not the point. The point is the consequences.” Talking to Clark can feel like talking to a 20-year-old: He’s cocksure, combative without being provoked, funny, generous, and obtuse within the same sentence. You get the sense that he is both immensely proud and totally pissed off at being misunderstood. He’ll tell you how he didn’t even want the retrospective—“I got a lot of pressure from friends, from my gallery, from ICP”—but a few minutes later, he makes clear how much being accepted means to him. “Like at the Whitney, when [former director] David Ross was there, for years every time I’d see him he’d say he wanted to do a retrospective,” says Clark. “But he was always too chickenshit. And I like David, I do. Good guy. But ten fucking years! The bottom line was, he was too chickenshit to do the show, so they did Nan Goldin’s show. But come on! That’s safe as fucking milk!” (“A classic Larry comment,” responds Ross with a laugh. “I remember how hurt he was and have always regretted that we didn’t do the show. But, for the record, I don’t think Goldin’s work is any less safe than Larry’s.”) In another artist, such bravado might be exhausting. But Clark’s charm is that he seems impervious to this debate even as he engages in it; for all his self-consciousness about the morality of his work, he’s happy to bat around any theory—having too much fun staying in the swim of it to fret about his legacy. There was a telling moment during the opening when a group of lanky teens, skateboards tucked under their arms, wound through a crowd featuring Lou Reed and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, eventually approaching two adults in their thirties to bum a cigarette. “Thanks,” one of the kids said, lighting up and taking a drag before adding, “And, yo, you guys should come to our party later. We’re trying to bring back the cool New York, the real New York, the New York of Kids.” That the New York of Kids is a place where a predatory skater deflowers virgins was a minor detail. Kids was gritty, and gritty is eternally cool. “If kids think my work is cool, that’s good,” says Clark, taking the comment, and all its misguided enthusiasm, as the ultimate vindication of his work. “It means I don’t bullshit, you know? Yeah, whatever, being cool is fine with me.”

50 Best High School Movies: 

This is the latest list comprised of the 50 best high school movies of all time, polled in the US. The source is found at official Entertainment Weekly website. Details for each movie are listed online.

1. The Breakfast Club – 1985

We see it as we want to see it — in the simplest terms, the most convenient definition: The Breakfast Club is the best high school movie of all time. It may lack the scope of its peers — the drinking, the driving, the listless loitering in parking lots — as well as any scenes that actually take place during school. But if hell is other people — and high school is hell — then John Hughes is the genre’s Sartre, and this is his No Exit. The concept is simple: one Saturday detention, five unhappy teens, and their scramble to prove they’re each something more than a brain (Anthony Michael Hall), an athlete (Emilio Estevez), a basket case (Ally Sheedy), a princess (Molly Ringwald), and a criminal (Judd Nelson). Following the farcical fluff of Sixteen Candles, the issues Hughes explored — sex, drugs, abuse, suicide, the need to belong to something — were surprisingly subversive and handled with bracing, R-rated honesty. ”’Kids movie’ was a derogatory term,” recalls Nelson, ”and Hughes was definitely not making that.” Thus, 21 years later, the film still sparks intense debates about the trials of teen life. (Sheedy’s goth freak gets a makeover, then gets the guy: well-earned happy ending or antifeminist propaganda? Discuss!). Never mind the serious sociological stuff. The Breakfast Club rules because watching the group dismantle/ignore the authority of Principal ”Dick” Vernon (Paul Gleason) is a vicarious thrill at any age. It rules because Simple Minds’ ”Don’t You Forget About Me” is a kick-ass theme. Mostly it rules because, as Hall puts it: ”In the end, you learn maybe we’re more alike than we realize, and that’s kind of cool.” Leave it to the neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie to get all cheesy.

2. Fast Times at Ridgemont High – 1982

When screenwriter Cameron Crowe went undercover to observe the species Teenagerus americanus, he returned with more than the usual grab-bag of anecdotes about horny, apple-pie-humping guys and the popularity-obsessed girls who must fight them off with a stick. He returned with 24-karat truth. To watch Fast Times today is to know exactly what it felt like to be fixated on sex, drugs, and rock & roll in Southern California circa 1982. It also launched careers and dished out still-relevant life lessons: Jennifer Jason Leigh (relax your throat muscles when fellating a carrot), Phoebe Cates (always knock before entering a bathroom), and Judge Reinhold. And Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli, with his checkerboard Vans and bong-hit grin, was a geyser of catchphrases (”Aloha, Mr. Hand!”). The film never strains for coming-of-age treacle. Maybe that’s why it still feels so…right. Especially Damone’s sage advice: ”When it comes down to making out, whenever possible put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.”

3. Dazed and Confused – 1993

Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson likes high school girls because even though he gets older, they stay the same age. We feel the same way about Richard Linklater’s minutiae-filled comedic epic about the last day of school in 1976 — we may get older, but Dazed is ageless. And for a movie featuring so many stoners, Dazed is mammothly ambitious: Few other films say as much about starting, sticking around in, and leaving high school.

4. Rebel Without a Cause – 1955

”You’re tearing me apart,” Jim Stark (James Dean) howls at his parents. For the new kid in school, it doesn’t get any easier. Though he finds a friend in the extremely troubled Plato (Sam Mineo), Stark gets into it on his first day with a gang of bullies, in a knife fight and later in a chickie run. Dean was a refreshing change from the well-scrubbed teens of earlier Hollywood films. Here was a character young audiences could finally recognize.

5. Heathers – 1989

For those who dream about offing an obnoxious classmate, Heathers is the ultimate fantasy. Full of mordant wit, shocking violence, and savvy performances by Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, the flick was the antithesis of the earnest ’80s John Hughes films — you’d never see Molly Ringwald serving up a kitchen-cleaner cocktail for Ally Sheedy. Even today, Heathers’ spin on cliques, teen suicide, and homosexuality still has bite.

6. American Graffiti – 1973

Graffiti’s cast of teens — including Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard — has serious decisions to make on a late-summer night filled with rock music and hot rods, the kind that can only be made if they stay up ’til dawn. Should they ditch town for college? Should they stay with their gals? Whatever the choice, it infuses this most innocently joyous eve-of-adulthood film with that bittersweet feeling of leaving one’s childhood behind.

7. Clueless – 1995

It’s a rare movie that makes you want to befriend the prettiest, most popular girl in school. But not all girls are Cher (Alicia Silverstone), who gets as many killer lines as fashion ensembles, learns that seeing the best in others is a way to better yourself, and discovers the joy of shopping with a well-dressed gay man — all at the ripe age of 15. Credit writer-director Amy Heckerling for making this modern-day Emma consistently smart and funny.

8. Boys N the Hood – 1991

Set in South Central Los Angeles, John Singleton’s Oscar-nominated directorial debut revealed what it’s like to come of age — and cram for the SATs — in a community plagued by crime, violence, and gang warfare. By contrasting the collegiate aspirations of bookworm Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and football star Ricky Baker (Morris Chestnut) with the self-destructive lifestyle of dropout/drug dealer Doughboy (Ice Cube), Boyz effectively pimped for education.

9. Election – 1999

Before taking on geezers (About Schmidt) and oenophiles (Sideways), director Alexander Payne in Election scabrously exposed the most embarrassing shortcomings of high schoolers in an artful, hilarious way. He doesn’t go easy on anybody — not Matthew Broderick’s weak, meddling teacher, nor Reese Witherspoon’s Fargo-accented student-council-president candidate. In fact, Election is as mean as high school at its worst.

10. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – 1986

Who didn’t want to be Ferris in 12th grade? Who wouldn’t want school to be a magical place where you could wake up and call in sick (with an awesome hacking-cough keyboard) and then see your name in a get-well-soon message painted on the side of a water tower by lunch, all while you were cruising through Chicago in a red Ferrari? Thanks to Matthew Broderick as Ferris, teenagerdom has never felt more fun or mythic.

11. Say Anything... – 1989

Go on: Hoist that boom box above your head and turn up ”In Your Eyes.” Stand motionless with a fixed expression of unrequited but determined love. And watch Cameron Crowe’s ode to young passion, which made John Cusack the thinking teen’s heartthrob and should have done the same for Ione Skye. If the postgraduation romance between an earnest kickboxer and a sheltered valedictorian doesn’t win you over, repeat steps one and two and listen closer.

12. Mean Girls – 2004

There was a time when Lindsay Lohan was best known for her acting rather than her party-hopping. Showcasing La Lohan in arguably her best role to date, this Tina Fey-scripted film also boasts a breakout turn by Rachel McAdams as evil queen bee Regina George (”Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”). While Mean Girls is technically a comedy, its depiction of girl-on-girl cattiness stings incredibly true.

13. High School – 1968

Although it was added to the elite National Film Registry the same year as 2001 and Chinatown, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary is — like many of his fly-on-the-wall nonfiction films — extremely difficult to find on video. But it is essential. Thirty years before reality TV, Wiseman took his camera to Philadelphia’s Northeast High School and shot what was there, editing it, without narration, into a devastating indictment of bureaucracy and enforced conformity

14. Donnie Darko - 2001

There are funnier high school movies, and ones with better soundtracks and more nostalgic value, but how many of those deal with time travel, alternate universes, fate, God, free will, therapy, censorship, teenage angst, falling airplane engines, pedophilia, and a scary freaking bunny? Point made. And while we still don’t necessarily understand it all, few films deal so matter-of-factly with the sheer dread (both literal and metaphoric) of teen life.

15. Carrie – 1976

School can be terrifying, especially when you’re an awkward telekinetic teen whose mother is a loony religious zealot. Poor Carrie White can’t even get through P.E. class without being viciously mocked by her peers. But in this Brian De Palma classic, the wallflower eventually gets her revenge in the spectacularly gory prom climax (even disposing of a Kotter-era John Travolta). Sissy Spacek’s Oscar-nominated turn in the title role is pure, silent rage.

16. Lucas - 1986

Sure, sensitive jock Charlie Sheen ends up shirtless for seven minutes due to a freak blender accident in Home Ec. But we remember Lucas for its smart scrawny hero (an affecting Corey Haim), who showed that the strongest kid is the one who walks through the halls knowing he’ll be teased. And that the most interesting person finds beauty where he can — even in the sewer system, sitting beneath a manhole cover, listening to a live symphony above.

17. Peggy Sue Got Married – 1986

Would you change anything if you could relive high school? Possibly hook up with that beatnik of a guy you always wondered about? Until Chevrolet makes an actual plutonium-powered time machine, we’ll have to live vicariously through this humorously goofy Francis Ford Coppola flick, in which Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) goes back in time to figure out whether pompadoured heartthrob Charlie (Nicolas Cage) is her one and only.

18. Rock ‘n’ Roll High School – 1979

Producer Roger Corman’s comedy is a jiggly love affair set at Vince Lombardi High and centered on matchmaker Eaglebauer (Clint Howard), whose office is a men’s room stall, and ”Riff Randell, rock & roller” (pre-Stripes hottie P.J. Soles), who must rebel against Principal Togar (Mary Woronov) to see a forbidden — and very excellent — Ramones show. Think Spinal Tap and Dazed and Confused skipping study hall together to get stoned.

19. The Last Picture Show - 1971

Peter Bogdanovich’s black-and-white film takes us to the tumbleweed burg of Anarene, Tex., where Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, and Randy Quaid vie for Cybill Shepherd, the town’s No. 2 seductress. (Her mom’s No. 1.) These horny, angst-ridden teens deal with sex, mortality, money, and a li’l Texas football by being themselves: subconsciously callous. But the witty banter, mostly by the grown-ups, makes it all less bleak.

20. Dead Poets Society – 1989

Perhaps the finest movie in a shockingly sparse mini-genre: the high school weepie. (After all, high school makes you cry sometimes.) Here, if Robert Sean Leonard’s suicide doesn’t get you (”My son! My son!”), then the ending — Ethan Hawke’s stirring ”O Captain! My Captain!,” Maurice Jarre’s blaring bagpipes, and teacher Robin Williams’ ”Thank you, boys, thank you” — will. Only somebody too cool for school could resist.

21. Grease – 1978

Still the top-grossing film musical ever, Grease may look too pure to be ”pink,” but listen to those lyrics (and watch John Travolta ogle Olivia Newton-John in ”You’re the One That I Want”) and you may find yourself blushing. Beneath the karaoke-heaven soundtrack lies a story with teen pregnancy, ”pussy wagons,” and a TV personality trying to put an aspirin in a girl’s Coke. Naughty but harmless, it’s just like high school should be.

22. American Pie – 1999

A frivolous teen comedy that left its mark: Jason Biggs taught us the dangers of webcam misuse (and baked-goods abuse), while the guy who’d become Harold — or was it Kumar? — popularized the term MILF. Pie was both funnier and bawdier than Porky’s, though that 1981 romp gets points for Kim Cattrall’s outrageous orgasm scene. But even she can’t top Alyson Hannigan’s perfect delivery of the line (all together now): ”This one time? At band camp?”

23. Cooley High – 1975

Written by Good Times co-creator Eric Monte and directed by Michael Schultz, this tearjerker provided the blueprint for Boyz N the Hood. In mid-’60s Chicago, geek Leroy ”Preach” Jackson (Glynn Turman) and hoop star Richard ”Cochise” Morris (Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs) struggle to stay out of trouble while prepping for graduation. The soundtrack, featuring G.C. Cameron’s ballad ”It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” remains as beloved as the film.

24. Rushmore - 1998

For some reason, Rushmore doesn’t quite feel like a high school movie. Maybe that’s because director/co-writer Wes Anderson’s wonderful comedy doesn’t feel like any other movie ever made. But it’s about school days: Just the fact that Jason Schwartzman’s tirelessly enterprising Max Fischer is a student at all becomes palpably bittersweet, since he’s too young to ever win Olivia Williams, the teacher of his (and anyone’s) dreams.

25. Hoosiers – 1986

Most school movie jocks are belligerent bullies. But Jimmy Chitwood (Maris Valainis) is part Larry Bird, part Rain Man, letting the swish of the basketball net do his talking. Hoops-crazed Hickory, Ind., adores him for it. His support of embattled Coach Dale (Gene Hackman) sways the town, and his skill transforms Dale from goat to genius. In the championship game, the Brylcreemed god overrules Dale’s last-second strategy with three words: ”I’ll make it.” Definitely.

26. Pretty in Pink – 1986

Perhaps the most controversial ending to a teen romance ever. (Behind Romeo and Juliet? Fine.) Should Andie (Molly Ringwald) have chased after rich, repentant Blane (Andrew McCarthy), or stayed at the prom with poor, devoted Duckie (Jon Cryer)? That we, women now in our 30s, still care is a testament to John Hughes’ script about love across class lines (point for Blane); the meaning of friendship and individuality (point for Duckie); and the evil nature of wealthy high schoolers in crisp, white clothing (point for James Spader).

27. To Sir, With Love – 1967

Way before Mr. Holland began teaching his opus and Michelle Pfeiffer was molding dangerous minds, Sidney Poitier was taming a room of unruly British teens with his real-life lessons and tough-love tactics (a boxing glove to the stomach, anyone?). Having himself played an insubordinate kid in 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, the student masterfully becomes the teacher in this sappy but never maudlin tale of inspiration and tolerance.

28. Back to the Future – 1985

A.K.A. the coolest movie ever to feature a Huey Lewis and the News song. The film ingeniously literalizes high school’s sexual frustration and disdain for one’s parents by having Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly getting hit on over and over again by Lea Thompson as his young, future mother (thanks to that time-traveling DeLorean). It just goes to prove that the parental units were just as horny back in the day as we were.

29. Gregory’s Girl - 1982

Gregory’s Girl is short on stars, long on soccer, and it sounds like a Weird Al Yankovic parody of Rick Springfield. But it is also sweetly hilarious as gangly Scottish teen Gregory (Gordon John Sinclair) falls for an out-of-his-league girl. The result is guaranteed to make viewers feel much better about their own post-pubescent awkwardness — unless they, too, ever tried to romance someone with the information that ”When you sneeze, it comes out your nose 180 miles an hour.”

30. Bring It On - 2000

They’re sexy, they’re cute, they’re popular to boot! Kirsten Dunst plays Torrance, the bright-eyed cheerleading captain who must save her high school’s squad from a major cheeragedy: going down as the team who stole routines. In the end, we learn there’s more to cheerleading than loads of hairspray, teeny halter tops, and back-stabbing: These are athletes who know how to really bring it. We give this comedy five spirit fingers up!

31. The Karate Kid – 1984

We practiced ”the crane” and wasted money on a Bonsai tree. But the real reason this movie makes the cut: Rocky director John G. Avildsen understood that Mr. Miyagi (late Oscar nominee Pat Morita) had a lot to say — about finding balance, about choosing mentors wisely, about disguising defensive martial-arts techniques in home improvement (and yourself in a shower curtain, if it meant you could attend your high school Halloween dance undetected by Cobra Kai bullies). Perhaps that explains why only one of Daniel-san’s training sessions is set to music: When Miyagi talked, we, like outsider Ralph Macchio, listened.

32. Scream – 1996

Aside from the awesomeness of seeing Henry ”The Fonz” Winkler as a square principal, Scream is the supreme teen horror movie specifically because it is so self-aware of how ridiculous and formulaic teen horror movies can be — even those that are set outside of high school, in college dorms or summer camps. And if sex equals death, as fright flicks and parents alike have tried to warn us, then how cool is it (spoiler alert!) for Scream to make the killer Neve Campbell’s boyfriend — the one trying to get in her pants? Scary cool, we say.

33. Hoop Dreams - 1994

This documentary follows William Gates and Arthur Agee, two kids who avoid the pitfalls of growing up in the Chicago slums by living, breathing, and playing basketball. As with any kid who plays ball, Gates and Agee fantasize about one thing: making it to the NBA. For all audiences, this is a purely inspirational tale. For some, it’s nostalgic, bringing back dreams you once had of making it to the pros.

34. Get Real – 1999

A typical first-love-with-the-school-jock story, but with a twist. ”Sex on legs” track star John Dixon (Brad Gorton) really does fall for Steven Carter (Ben Silverstone), the bright, gawky student journalist who’s lusted after Dixon while tiptoeing around female classmates on platonic dates. Of course, Dixon also has an official girlfriend. But when our hero yearns for a romance that’s a little more public, the baton gets dropped in a way that’s touchingly, poignantly real.

35. Brick – 2006

”Nah, bulls gum it. They’d flash their dusty standards at the wide-eyes, probably find some yeg to pin.” The high school kids in Brick talk like this for the entire movie. With a femme fatale, a dead girlfriend, and a mysterious cape-wearing drug lord, Brick gives you a teen flick in the guise of a noir thriller where everything is all very life-and-death. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what high school is like.

36. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – 2005

No, we haven’t lost our minds. One of J.K. Rowling’s ingenious ideas was to blend two literary traditions, fantasy and coming-through-school fiction (à la Tom Brown’s School Days). That’s particularly true in Goblet, which depicts 14-year-old Harry’s heightened state of adolescent anxiety, about the big (Quidditch) game, about finding a date for the big dance, and about juggling homework while saving the wizard world from evil Lord Voldemort.

37. Friday Night Lights – 2004

Is there a sight more wonderful than kids playing a sport just for the sheer love of the game? That’s a vision entirely absent from Peter Berg’s superbly unsparing, based-on-real-events examination of the diamond-forming pressure present in small-town-Texas high school football. A great teen movie and a great sports movie, albeit one that may prompt more than one young ballplayer to switch to darts.

38. Bye Bye Birdie – 1963

High school is definitely more fun when you add a little song and dance. Ann-Margret is all big hair and energy as a lucky small-town teen who wins the chance to be kissed on television by Conrad Birdie, a thinly veiled Elvis copy. Unfortunately, her boyfriend is a tad jealous of her swapping spit with a celeb. What follows is a gleeful parade, perfect for viewers who always wanted to meet the high school star crush whose posters adorned their bedroom walls.

39. The Virgin Suicides – 2000

This one deserves to be on the list if only for the one terrific shot in which Josh Harnett, as heartthrob Trip Fontaine, glides down the locker-lined hall, with his leather jacket hung over one shoulder and Heart’s ”Magic Man” blaring on the soundtrack as all the girls turn their heads. If guys in high school don’t actually walk like that, they should. The rest of the movie, about gorgeous sisters in a death pact, is shot by debut director Sofia Coppola as teenage iconography at its dreamiest and most weirdly entrancing.

40. Risky Business – 1983

Long before Tom Cruise became a couch-jumping Scientologist, he came to prominence in this sharp satire of privileged suburban teens. The socks-and-undies dance scene is what everyone remembers, but this Reagan-era hit isn’t just another teensploitation flick. It’s about the soul-crushing pressure to be perfect, and the primal urges to rebel against a manicured, pre-programmed future — even if that means turning your parents’ house into a brothel.

41. Can’t Buy Me Love – 1987

Before he was Dr. McDreamy on Grey’s Anatomy, Patrick Dempsey won us over as the lovable lawn-mowing nerd Ronald Miller. After a failed attempt to buy his way into the cool clique, Ronny goes from totally chic right back to a total geek. Lesson learned: Sometimes performing the ”African Ant Eater Ritual” at the school dance isn’t enough to get you a spot at the right lunch table.

42. Fame – 1980

By today’s standards, this Oscar-winning musical is downright gritty, with its frank and often bleak depiction of arts-inclined teenagers. Sure, they sing and act and turn lunchtime into a funk jam, but they also have abortions, fend off predatory pornographers, experiment with drugs, and contemplate suicide. High School Musical, it isn’t. The potent shot of authenticity is sweetened by the memorable, soul-drenched musical numbers, which inspired millions to try and pirouette on a taxi.

43. Stand and Deliver – 1988

Any grandiose ”O Captain! My Captain!” speech would only invite a Dead Teacher’s Society beatdown at dilapidated Garfield High in East L.A. Instead, Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) teaches in a fast-food-worker uniform and inspires with math problems about gigolos. He gives extra textbooks to a studious gangbanger (Lou Diamond Phillips) in exchange for protection, and turns a mathematical truth, ”A negative times a negative equals a positive,” into a social one. That’s ganas, jefe.

44. Can’t Hardly Wait – 1998

It’s the last night of high school and the only thing left to do is party — and face the skeletons in the closet. By the end of this crazy bash, everyone succeeds: The nerd gets revenge on the jock, the nice guy snags his prom-queen crush, and a pair of unlikely old friends reunite. It may be a typical teen comedy, but the underlying message always rings true: Don’t let fate pass you by.

45. My Bodyguard - 1980

There’s something timeless for everyone when new kid Clifford ”Peachy” Peache (Chris Makepeace) enlists the mysterious, tortured class psycho (Adam Baldwin) to protect him from the school bully (Matt Dillon). Lifelong scapegoats will cheer the underdogs’ triumph, while former home-room villains of all generations will shed a nostalgic tear at Dillon’s showcase of evergreen bully tactics: the locker prison, the wet toilet-paper bomb, the bathroom surprise attack. Ahhh, high school: good times, good times.

46. Flirting – 1992

She’s a Ugandan beauty in a prep school populated by blond Aussies (including young Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts); he’s a gawky stutterer obsessed with Camus. Given their shared outsider status at their respective institutions, is there any doubt that Danny (Noah Taylor) and Thandiwe (Thandie Newton) end up falling for each other? Wryly tender and respectfully told, director John Duigan’s coming-of-age romance is a warm and fuzzy confection that stops short of being icky.

47. Napoleon Dynamite – 2004

The plot is insignificant, the lead character (Jon Heder) is a petulant spaz, and the pace creeps along just barely faster than a John Deere. Still, this sleeper hit succeeds because it manages to mock and celebrate high school geekdom with a bone-dry, unsentimental tone. The inane one-liners, absurd non sequiturs, and sheer stupidity of the characters don’t just bring back memories of adolescence, they make you feel like a teenager again, giggling at something idiotic without knowing exactly why.

48. Just One of the Guys – 1985

Every generation has its variant on the girl-dresses-as-boy, girl-as-boy-falls-for-boy, boy-freaks-out tale. And this immensely fun, if minor, romp from the ’80s perfectly captures the decade’s raunch-lite spirit and funky fashion sense. As the cross-dresser caught in the middle, Joyce Hyser’s aspiring journalist learns the hard way that there’s more to being a dude than just stuffing a tube sock down your pants.

49. Sixteen Candles – 1984

It’s tough to turn 16. But when your entire family forgets your birthday, it only makes that day worse. Molly Ringwald puts on a brave face as her character endures basically the worst week of her life, whether it’s having her panties taken by Anthony Michael Hall or getting groped by her grandma (”Fred, she’s gotten her boobies!”). The awkwardness is all hilarious, though, especially watching a young Joan Cusack attempt to use the water fountain in orthodontic head gear.

50. Splendor in the Grass – 1961

Young love — especially when it’s with the star of the football team — can make a girl crazy. Literally. In pre-Depression, small-town Kansas, good-girl Natalie Wood is so tortured by her sexual urges for beau Warren Beatty and conflicting pressure to be moral that she attempts suicide after a school dance and ends up in a sanitarium. It’s the ultimate depiction of overwhelming first love, and — sorry, religious right — a chilling PSA against the dangers of teen abstinence.