Review of The Myth of the American Sleepover (2011) by Rob S — 30 Dec 2011

This is really well made in most respects. I was even hooked by the writing for the first half. In, the end, though, something goes wrong. Or, rather, things don't go wrong where realistically they would.

If you watch a John Hughes movie, you have to suspend some disbelief regarding character. There's a reason for this. Dorks and outcastes need to be played by Anthony Michael Halls and Ally Sheedys in order to be interesting onscreen.

They need that unrealistic confidence and charisma underneath the veneer of insecurity. In Myth, we find similarly overconfident teens and adolescents. The problem, though, is that it's taken to a moral extreme.

The characters behave with the foresight and maturity of adults whose teen mistakes are behind them. The few onscreen bad decisions we do see get sugar-coated in terms of consequences, but the characters still seem to have learned from their mistakes.

If this is meant to be a model for teens to base their behavior on, then perhaps it succeeds (and indeed, toward the end a few scenes felt like those of an afterschool abstinence PSA or something). If its meant to reflect the actual experience of teens and adolescents, it fails.