I just saw Thirteen yesterday with a few of my friends. We thought it was a good film, and discussed whether the events in the movie could happen in an Asian family. Ultimately, we decided they were less likely to happen because of the disciplined family dynamic that Asians have. It’s probably happened to at least one Chinese girl, but not likely to have happened to a lot of them.
Basically: it’s about a girl who’s just entering high school, and wants to be popular. One of the older, more popular girls teases her about the socks she’s wearing. That comment drives her need to be popular at school. She gets a popular girl’s phone number, and catches up to the popular crowd at the mall one day.
At first, the popular crowd might not want her to be a part of them. Gradually, she goes into a downhill spiral and loses all the sweetness she has at the beginning of the year. She experiments with a lot of stuff, and ultimately has a confrontation with her mother and her friend. (the friend kind of betrays her at the end… can’t say how, or I’ll spoil it for you) The movie ending has elements of reconciliation of it, and the last shot was kind of confusing.
See the movie… it’s certainly thought-provoking!
I haven’t seen it, but I read an interview with the girl whose life it’s based on. She tried out for her own part, but was told she wasn’t innocent-looking enough to portray her own self! So they cast her in the role of the bad girl, Evie.
That’s all I can really say, having seen no more than the trailer.
It’s showing in Denver.
I thought it was a very well-told story, but it was a scary movie for any parent to see, especially a parent of a teenaged girl.
Those kids are definitely living in the fast lane. Sad.
Hmm… it is, eh? I’ll have to tell one of my friends about it, then.
My brother and I thought that our parents definitely wouldn’t like watching it!
Definitely a very well-told story, though we all agreed that none of the people we knew well in high school went through anything remotely like that.
I agreed with my friend Eric when he said that he was scared at the scene where Tracy used the razor blade to cut her leg. If she’d applied any sort of pressure, the results would have been fatal.
Eh, I didn’t like the movie. Maybe the chaos in the whole scenes and story telling seemed a bit unrealistic. I believe someone once said this movie was more like an “after school TV special” and I’d have to agree with that person.