Movie – Assassination of a High School President (2008)

I had heard good things about Assassination of a High School President, so I checked it out.  While it was different from what I had expected, I liked what it did.  How is it different?  It has a sense of humor.  I would go as far as calling this a comedy/drama, while at the same time still being a noir film set in high school.  It’s not a spoof of noir movies, though.  The humor comes from the situations in the film.

Movie – Cherry Crush (2007)

I had never heard of the film Cherry Crush when I found it in a bargain bin.  While this isn't usually a good sign, I've seen enough decent films in these bins to not immediately ignore a DVD I find there.  Sometimes these are films that didn't sell because they didn't fit into any standard genre like romantic comedy or action.  Like I mentioned with Brick, this is an R rated movie with teens as the leads, two things that would have limited its audience.  I saw this movie had Nikki Reed in it and from the description I could tell that it was a noir-like film.  Looking for another movie like Brick (2005) I did a blind buy on it.  While it’s not all that I hoped it would be, I still liked it well enough to include it in this category.

Movie – Brick (2005)

The movie Brick was quite a revelation for me.  If you had told me before I saw it that a Maltese Falcon type of film could be translated to a high school setting I would probably not have taken it seriously.  Luckily I knew nothing about the film when I rented it, other than it was a whodunit.  I immediately recognized the speech patterns of the characters as being right out of film noir.  At first it was a little strange to be seeing teenagers talk this way, but after a few minutes I got into it.  As the film went along and more and more noir conventions appeared, translated to being relevant to the setting, I enjoyed myself more and more.  This is definitely a movie that anyone who likes film noir should see.

Teen Noir Movies

“Mathematically, it’s a percentage of your life.  Four years, 48 months, 1,461 days.  High school is prom, football games, boyfriends, girlfriends, party at the rich kid’s house.  Fun, simple, wholesome.  But it’s really anything but.  High school might be the least wholesome four years of your life.  And there’s nothing simple about it.  High school is ugly, hard, and complicated.  As complicated as a conspiracy to assassinate the president.” – Bobby Funke (voice over), Assassination of a High School President

I almost went with the last line from this same film – “Forget it, Funke.  It’s high school.” because of the funny nod to Chinatown, but I decided I needed something a little more serious for my beginning quote.

Back in 2005 the movie Brick came out.  It starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high schooler trying to solve the murder of a former girlfriend.  People hadn’t really seen anything quite like it before.  Much like films had been translating classic literature to a high school setting (i.e. Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew became 10 Things I Hate About You), someone finally translated the conventions of film noir’s hard-boiled detective stories to a high school setting.

There is a large segment of the adult population that will not watch an animated movie because they think they are “just for kids”.  Many adults will not watch anything with a teen protagonist for the same reason.  Combine that with an R rating, which movie theaters have been strongly enforcing in the last decade or so, and this limited the audience for this film, despite the fact that it won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

Because of this I thought this kind of movie might be a one-off, but it was followed in 2007 by Cherry Crush and in 2008 by Assassination of a High School President.  While neither of these were as deep into the noir conventions as Brick, it seems likely that they were inspired by it.

I will be reviewing all three of these films.  Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other movies that I would classify as “teen noir”.  River’s Edge and Mean Creek involve teens and a dead body, but do not have the noir conventions.  If you can think of any other films, please let me know.

As I post the reviews, I will come back and post the links to them here:

Brick
Cherry Crush
Assassination of a High School President

On to the reviews…