Clueless is widely considered to be one of the defining teen films of the 1990s. Presenting the teenage social world of Cher and her friends through an array of comedic lines and references to popular culture, the film has become part of a lexicon of popular youth culture. Based loosely on Jane Austen's Emma. Clueless has gone on to become a cult film, acquiring a new audience among later generations.

The film is explored in this book from a number of perspectives, including gender, youth and popular culture; its relationships to earlier and later teen films; the use...

L'Auberge Espagnole looks at one of contemporary French cinema's most influential and innovative youth films. examines its themes of cultural diversity, celebrates its construction of a European transnational identity, analyzes its youthful visual and structural 'newness', and charts its production, distribution, and reception history.

This book examines a popular, divisive, and celebrity-endorsed filmic depiction of a troubled African American girl, focusing on the concept of African American youth film and genre hybridity; the adaptation of the film from its source novel; how it deals with issues of identity such as race, gender, and body size; the film's use of music and pop stars as spectacle; and how the film's critical reception brought back, and moved beyond, the old debates around positive representation of race.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Peter Kramer explains how American Graffiti came into existence, paying close attention to the small-town upbringing and previous films of its director George Lucas. The book also explores the film's story, style and themes; its marketing, critical reception, commercial success and cultural impact in the United States; and relates all of this both to the transformation of American cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and to the impact of the postwar baby-boom on American culture and society.

The Breakfast Club is often classified as a quintessential teen film. The film spoke to the generation coming of age at during the 1980s with a story that got to the heart of the conflict between adults and young adults, that understood both the camaraderie and the pressures of peer groups, and that unabashedly dealt with teenagers as real people with real problems. With writer and director John Hughes' particular voice at the helm, the film capitalized on a culture already targeting the youth market, but by telling its tale from a youth perspective, was able to leave a lasting...

This book examines American Pie (1999), a film that exemplifies that most disparaged of movie genres - vulgar teen comedy. Taking American Pie as its focus, Bill Osgerby explores the nature and appeal of gloriously 'grossed out' teen humour. The book considers the relationship between American Pie's success and broad shifts within both the youth market and the film business; it analyses the movie's representations of youth, gender and sexuality; and it explores the distinctive character of the film's comedy and the enduring place of such humour in contemporary popular...

This book traces the development of Richard Linklater's Boyhood from its audacious concept through its tenacious production to its celebrated reception, placing it within the context of cinematic parables about children to demonstrate its distinctive vision. Timothy Shary, author of numerous studies on the history of teen cinema, evaluates the film's many messages about youth and adolescence within the context of early twenty-first century American culture, illuminating how Linklater's singular vision of the otherwise ordinary life of a boy reveals potent universal truths about all...

This book offers the first in-depth look at the history, social context, and industrial practices behind this teen musical phenomenon to suggest that social change, especially in terms of gender and sexuality, comes to the surface despite the film's retro setting, blockbuster business model, and apparent nostalgic tone. The vast audience for this film over the last thirty-five years and the various -hopelessly devoted- fandoms indicate that Grease exceeds both the confines of its period and the limits of any one ideological message.

Rock around the Clock examines one of the earliest films made specifically for young audiences in US cinema, paying particular attention to the exploitation film production company that made the film, the ways it represented young people, especially in terms of their association with rock 'n' roll music and culture, and the ways in which the film was received by the press of the time and by more contemporary critics.

This book considers -The Hunger Games- as an intertextual field centred on this blockbuster film franchise but also encompassing the successful novels that preceded them and the merchandised imagery and the critical and fan discourse that surrounds them. It emphasizes the place of -The Hunger Games- in the history of youth-oriented cinema, in the history of speculative fiction centred on adolescents, in a network of continually evolving and tightly connected popular genres, and in the popular history of changing ideas about girlhood from which a successful action hero like Katniss Everdeen...