Beyond Clueless

New this week:

The clever opening to the essay film Beyond Clueless brings all those ’90s and early 2000s teen movies together at last.

Charlie Lyne’s Beyond Clueless, an essay film that dissects a defining post-Hughsian decade of teen movies from Clueless (1995) to Mean Girls (2004), is now in previews in the UK and expands in the weeks following. According to the film’s web site, the film has Canadian, French and German distribution but we’re totally buggin’ that there’s no US release on the schedule yet.

As we wait our turn for teen screen enlightenment, here’s an interview with Lyne published today in The Skinny. 

…Teen movies, [Charlie Lyne] claims, almost become an echo chamber between the audiences and the filmmakers – where teenage life imitates art, and vice versa. “They massively inform the way that the people who watch them then approach their own adolescent lives.”

There’s also our April 2014 interview with Lyne on the occasion of his festival tour. Excerpt in Lyne’s own words below.

The great thing about teen movies (especially those of the ’90s and ’00s) is that the major things that link them are cosmetic — the high school corridors, the glitzy prom nights, the keg-fuelled house parties. Stylistically, on the other hand, they’re a wildly disparate bunch. So although Beyond Clueless is set in a single ‘location’, for want of a better word, it flips between moments of humour, horror, optimism, despondence and everything in between. Just like a real teenager.

UK quad for BEYOND CLUELESS (Charlie Lyne, UK, 2014)