Dreizehn (2003)

Dreizehn: Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. With Nikki Reed, Evan Rachel Wood, Vanessa Hudgens, Holly Hunter. A thirteen-year-old girl’s relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex, and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled best friend.

“ONE STAR on both the technical and emotional levels.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eIf it is possible to have a fake reality show (all reality shows are largely fake, trust me I know from relatives in the business, they are scripted and edited, with a few real unscripted moments left in), then this one resembles a totally faked reality show. The target audience seems to be other teens with microscopic MTV-level attention spans.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThere is no real introduction to the characters; we are launched into a set of jarring moments in the life of these characters that we are given no reason to care about. I thought this was a piece of MTV-era trash from the first minute of the movie, and hoped I was wrong.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWhy are we supposed to care about two airheads when from the beginning when we are given no emotional reason to sympathize with them? If a car had hit them by surprise I would have cared more about the horror suffered by passing children.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThey did not use a simple steadycam. Could they not afford one? No, we are supposed to think this is cool. The camera rolls so badly early in the film, I felt like I was back on the lurching deck of a little scuba boat in the Caribbean that made me heave over the side. It made me ill and I had to look away from the nauseating screen. Did they think that made the scene real?u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eFurthermore, in several scenes, the characters go in and out of the frame and the cameraman seems to be refocusing the camera as the characters move. Is this supposed to be MTV genius or just incompetence because someoneu0026#39;s Mom did the camera work?u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe sound quality is sometimes atrocious. I just turned the subtitles on to catch the occasional whisper or slurred speech. Didnt they know about voice-overs, or is this another failed attempt to seem real?u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eWe are supposed to be shocked, shocked that mere thirteen year old white girls that look pretty normal have a secret life drinking, taking drugs, stealing from a store, using the u0026quot;F wordu0026quot;, and kissing black boys in a kind of group grope on the lawn. I never suffered from the illusion that teenagers were ever angels. I used to be one and nothing is wrong with my memory of that warped era of desperate conformists looking to get laid and sometimes drunk and high. But these girls were not those typical ones I recall from my high school.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI know what my Mom would have called these girls when I was in High School: u0026quot;Just low class trash. Avoid them.u0026quot; This film, like so much trash from Hollywood, takes the lowest dregs of society and tries to convince us that this is the norm.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eI get the sense that another fake u0026quot;reality showu0026quot; at the high school level would be more real than this. The Osborne kids kept it more u0026quot;realu0026quot;, despite their freaky appearance.”