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High School Record
High School Record
directed by Ben Wolfinsohn
2005, 75 minutes, USA
Factory 25
Where the Wild Things Are tried to emulate the untamed insecurities of childhood via impressionist sun flares and the pageantry of imagination, but it was a blockbuster rumpus too overearnest and laboriously designed to evoke such emotional authenticity. Far more successful in exposing the raw-nerve anxieties of youth onscreen is an older, rougher, hipper kind of wild thing altogether, Ben Wolfinsohn"s High School Record, which could still be about King Max if he grew up to be a confused, complicated teenager who finally discovered garage rock. Neither caricatured like Napoleon Dynamite and its whitewashed imitators with hand-drawn titles, nor played for teens-gone-wild shock value (Afterschool, Kids), Wolfinsohn"s naturalistic, semi-improvised series of awkward comic vignettes at a performing arts school absolutely nails the liberating/frightening social moments of post-pubescence in all their riches of embarrassments. Having not seen the inside of a locker since the mid-"90s (which reminds me of some sample dialogue that ages me, between two girls who hooked up with the same dude: "You wanna be his girlfriend now? That"s so "90s!"), I still recognized enough of my younger unsure self that I was occasionally and unexpectedly laughing aloud.