Say Anything.
Not so much hanging outside my girlfriend’s window with a boom box aspect. But more the middle/upper-middle class “ordinariness” of it.
I also anticipated many D&C votes. And tho it was supposedly set smack dab in my HS years, I was surprised at how little I identified with it. Same w/ Fast Times. I think the main reason was the settings (Texas and S Cal) differed so greatly from my Chicago public schools. Living in Chicago and attending public schools, I couldn’t identify with all of these kids driving to school, living in these huge homes, having endless money… It seemed like HS movies that weren’t set in the S and W, were set in NY, which also feels quite different from Chicago. Yeah, there’s Cooley High, but that is not representative of the Chicago public school I attended.
My vote goes to Lucas, even tho it was set (I think) in the mid 80s, and I graduated HS in 78. Many aspects of it impressed me as less exaggerated than D&C or FT. More of the kids were more believable. Plus, it was set in the Chicago area. Actually, before my current home, I lived in the suburb where much of it was shot, and my kids attended the HS. So I admit that familiarity likely increases my affinity. But - as a Chicago public school student, I was far from a suburban kid. When our track team went to suburban or small town schools for meets, the many huge differences were striking.
I agree with the folk who offer Freaks and Geeks as a good representation of many aspects high school. For me, HS simply was not exciting enough to lend itself to good entertainment.
You know what movie always reminds me of my teen years -
Some Kind Of Wonderful
This was almost exactly what life was like in high school for me. In my school, you were either a jock or a stoner. I was neither, so I didn’t fit in very well. I had a small group of friends and we pretty much did everything together, and spent lots of time imagining what it would be like to date one of the rich girls from our school. AKA - Amanda Jones.
I went to a community high school, 4 different towns worth of teenagers, so the few friends I had were from my neighborhood. Seemed like everyone from the other towns all had parents with a lot of money - they had all the nice clothes, drove new cars to and from school while we took the bus.
This is going to be an odd response, but it really rang true for me. The 1999 movie Drive Me Crazy is that movie for me (I graduated high school in 2000). The setting, the characters, the types of ‘cliques’ in the movie…even the music really did reflect how things were, even though that was not really my favorite music. The writer of the movie created the Veronica Mars tv series later, which is a neat little twist.
I grew up in a very small, very rural town (about 1,000 people). And before anyone goes off on the “I would call that a village.” nonsense, it is actually incorporated as a city.
No movie matches my experience at all. If anyone made a movie that came close to my experience it would be the dullest movie in history. The director/producer/writer would actually have to have lived in such a place to be able to capture it. Anyone who lived in a city or suburb would have no clue.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a wonderful place to grow up and I loved it.
Election with Matthew Broderick and Reese Whitherspoon is the one I think most closely captures what my high school really felt like, although it came out about eight years after I graduated.
Heathers comes close to what I remember as well, although some of the fashion statements and ‘teen lingo’ was just a little too ‘on the nose’: True to the spirit of my high school years, just slightly artificial in the execution.
American Graffiti.
Freaks and Geeks and Stranger Things come closest to me. With a dose of Mallrats (1995) for the New Jersey feel.
I graduated in 1984.
The geekiness, D&D playing, exploring nearby creeks and marshes, hanging with both my geeky friends and the auto-shop/stoner kids like the older kids on Freaks and Geeks. This combo comes closest. None of the great 80s teen movies really were like my teen years in the 80s.
I would say no one movie captured my teen years perfectly, but if you mixed and matched parts of Dazed and Confused, and Freaks and Geeks you would be real close.
The cherry on top has to be Heavy Metal Parking Lot.
I graduated in Tx, class of '86
Adventureland for me. Possibly because I worked at a little amusement park through high school.
Toss in a bit of Heathers, too.
The thing about Freaks and Geeks that works for me is that lots of popular media makes a big deal about separation into cliques. There’s the stoners, and the jocks, and the nerds. Except those separations don’t really exist as walled cliques. There were plenty of stoner jocks, nerd stoners, and jock nerds and stoner jock nerds. You can turn from one to another just by hanging out with a slightly different group of friends.
I was a freshman in a small Texas town in 1976, so definitely Dazed and Confused. My brother saw it first and said “Hey, remember that guy from Howe who used to ride around in that Ranchero years and years after he’d graduated? This movie has a guy JUST like that!” I was the last class that had the freshman initiation like that. The paddling was outlawed about then, but we had days where we “had” to wear our clothes inside out and/or backward or do little songs or speeches whenever seniors said so. We definitely had some places out in the country where we gathered far away from parental eyes.
That’s interesting that those parts of the movie were so accurate. It certainly felt that way watching it.
Lucas (1986)
Warren Miller’s 33rd ski film Snowonder from 1982
Sybil - the 1976 two-part TV mini-series
And yes, my childhood was that messed up. I am still dealing with the damage.
Over the Edge for me, too.
New Granola may has well have been in Ohio.
I’m thinking River’s Edge is pretty close. None of my classmates killed anybody, (that I know about anyway.) But the attitude is exactly how I remember. Getting high on weed was the main occupation of a lot of my peers. The attitude was very much not giving a fuck about anything.
I can believe the kids I went to school with not reporting a murder to the cops, but bringing friends around to look at the body because dead bodies are cool.
The only thing different among my high school classmates and the kids in River’s Edge was I don’t think my classmates were that sexually active. But what the hell would I know, maybe they were.
I would say most of my childhood in the 1960s was like “My Three Sons” (only my parents were married for 53 years) with high school being like “Teachers”.
Super 8 - right time, friend making super8 movies.
Also being Australian Puberty Blues captured beach and surf culture at the time pretty accurately.