Just a few picks off the top of my head. How would you rearrange it? What would you add?
S: Booksmart, Raw, Thelma
A: Ladybird, Rushmore, Breakfast Club, Eighth Grade, Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
B: The Edge of Seventeen
What does S, A, and B stand for?
It’s a tier/rank naming convention where S is the best and it goes down to F.
I see three you’re missing straightaway: The 400 Blows, Stand By Me, The Squid and the Whale.
I would put The Edge of Seventeen and Lady Bird higher and Booksmart lower.
I watched Booksmart yesterday for the first time and as Dingus would say… I’m just crazy about this movie.
I’d put Spider-Man: Homecoming at S (for Superior), and Spider-Man at A. Easy A at A for how easy the A is. Ten Things I Hate About You at A. Brick at S. Sixteen Candles at… b? Is that how the ranking system goes? Dazed and Confused as S, Everybody Wants Some at B, Boyhood and the Up Series should probably be on here but I haven’t seen them yet.
Times like these, I wish Bill Dungsroman were here to weigh in…
Graded not for the overall quality of the movie necessarily, but as a coming of age film:
F: Pan’s Labryinth, Hanna
D: Home Alone, Home Alone 2
C: The Professional, 500 days of Summer
B: To Kill A Mockingbird, Kick Ass, The Freshman, Higher Learning, Clueless
A: The Breakfast Club, Pleasantville, Life is Beautiful, School of Rock, Stand By Me, The Namesake
S: The Scent of a Woman, The Graduate, Boyz in the Hood, Rushmore
My Life As A Dog
E.T.
Lucas
Au Revoir Les Enfants
How Green Was My Valley
Rank them where you will!
Boyhood […] should probably be on here
It should!
Hackers, rated H for young hackers coming of age, just turned 25. Those whippersnappers really knew how to dress back when they were growing up.
Those outfits! That music!
I unironically love Hackers so, so much.
Is Say Anything a coming of age movie? Is The Graduate?
I see what you did there, and also I’d pay real money to read an old school Bill_D rant about The Breakfast Club. Which, ugh. The bottle episode of the John Hughes “angsty wealthy teens” series. Parts of it almost work as satire.
I read a list once with Carrie on it, which was cute.
American Graffiti qualifies, doesn’t it?
Well, whatever the tiers, Breaking Away is tops.
I don’t know if Breakfast Club was actually representative of American High Schools or not, but I appreciated it as a foreigner (at the time) for giving me insight into American High School archetypes. For that alone I would rank it pretty high.
I feel like The Graduate is.
Say Anything could be seen as a coming of age for Diane but I feel like it fits more into the generic ‘teen romance’ genre. Although since all teenagers are by definition coming of age, there’s liable to be some overlap…
It’s a highly schematized depiction of high school social strata, but I suppose there are some grains of truth in there. In my experience though jocks and nerds generally got along better because jocks were sometimes high achievers who were also doing well academically.
Interesting. It was the same in my schools in Pakistan and in Qatar. In general the people who were the best at sports were also the ones who got the highest scores in class on exams as well.
One that never gets mentioned enough, but should: The Year My Voice Broke, which is an early John Duigan movie from Australia – with a pre-teen Noah Taylor and a fresh-faced adolescent Ben Mendelsohn. It’s a tough movie to find in the States, but it is worth seeking out.
I suspect that would make Dingus quite happy.
I don’t recall any indication Emilio’s character was getting bad grades though. My memories of (middle) school are that jocks/nerds (is Anthony Hall the nerd in this case?) had alpha/beta relationship, not that they had zero interaction at all.