A movie made by a fringe group within a fringe group

Rating: 2/10 (5 March 2016)

Let me start by saying that I wanted to see this movie after watching an Emma Watson interview on some British radio. It was claimed that the movie is very moving and emotional, even made some people cry. I was curious what was so emotional about it. Well, I still don't know, because while I watched the movie my heart rate didn't change even a little bit. I felt like I've already seen this movie. Then I realized why I felt that way. The movie is very formulaic and full of modern Hollywood teen drama clichés. It's a product of detached from reality people living in already detached enough society. The main characters in the movie and their families are upper middle class suburban people, living in large spacious houses, on smoothly paved clean streets, with neat lush patches of grass in front of each house. They are teens without a single work day who drive huge pickup trucks, their goals in life are to get accepted in Harvard and become movie directors or writers. They recreate and enjoy movies about decadence and decay. They have it so easy in their life, that the only problems they face is their own budding sexuality and the fear that they will not fit within the massive rich-first-world-people cliché that their entire life is. The movie's pretense for drama is forced upon the viewer by creating a hardly believable plot of sexual mismatch, sexual intolerance, sexual depravity, relationship abuse, teen drug experimenting, a suicide and a car accident thrown in for good measure. The only thing missing was someone getting cancer and beating it through sheer will (or tragically dying). I think they just replaced it with a nervous breakdown. I could've forgiven this movie and its pitiful attempt to deliver a meaningful message if it wasn't the fact that they hired a mainstream actress famous for being the unfulfilled wish of hundreds of millions of heterosexual young males just to make sure someone will get duped into watching it. The movie's message (if there even was one) falls flat, because it's fake and shallow just like the fake and shallow characters of the movie. Everything about this movie is predictable and a cliché - from the title and poster to the last scene. It's a movie about the tragedy of being born in a rich family and having no one else to look up to besides other jaded, spoiled and detached from reality brats.