Uh, so where's the "great movie"?

Rating: 3/10 (16 January 2005)

If a spoiler is defined as how the characters make out in the end, there is probably one or two here.
Now, I was flipping between a few things when I saw this on TV so I didn't see every minute of it, but I can describe my reaction in two words: Thoroughly unimpressed.
I just didn't like the direction the story was going, almost from the get-go. Why, at 17 minutes in, would any of them have any reason to cover for the guy who took the screw out of the door? It went more or less downhill from there, and just when I thought it was about to redeem itself and become this "great" movie everyone who was a teen in the '80s says it is, it didn't.
Bender is the type of student that would torture me in high school, if such a stereotype had actually existed, and to that degree. My high school self would have wanted to alternately try to beat him up (and fail spectacularly) or go tell the supervisor what was going on. He comes falling through the ceiling? Yeah, sure, like I'm going to cover for that.
The movie revisits, or perhaps imposes for the first time, the "values" that supposedly everyone has in high school, meaning none. Look down on virginity, smoke pot, and swear enough to turn March air in Illinois even bluer. Oh, and you can find a guy/girl by getting a total makeover and/or being one of the chicks who dig bad boys.
Anthony Michael Hall's character was alternately overexploited (is that redundant?) and underused. OK, so maybe a flare gun was all he had access to, not an unreasonable position for 20 years ago. But the revelation of that during the conversation pretty much ruined whatever the movie had going for it at that point. Then he willingly writes "the essay" for the group? Mm-hm. And on top of that, they expect me to believe that the nerd can dance. If you think about it, his situation is one of the most dated parts of the movie, since today he would probably have been shuttled off to a psychiatrist, put on Prozac, reported to the police, or all of the above. (The 'underused' part comes from the gymnastics one must do in the script to get a nerd in detention in the first place, which is where the flare gun came in, and then there's the problem of what to do with him after that.)
I'm not dismissing the possibility that I just don't "get it" for generational reasons, as high school came 15 years later for me. I'm also not dismissing the possibility that I don't "get it" because perhaps my experience and angst aren't like most people's experiences and angsts, or because being in a small high school doesn't lend itself to as deep divisions in the student body. (And Saturday detentions aren't part of the discipline.)
If anything, this movie has confirmed two things: I am most emphatically not a member of Generation X, and I should've know I probably wouldn't like this movie given my loathing of that other alleged symbol of teen angst, "Catcher in the Rye."