Review: Like was the case with high school itself, I had a hard time not judging this entire movie based on just the first thirty minutes of it, which came off as an attempt find a "unique" way to present the lives of these teens that ended up looking like a feature length episode of an overly hyper MTV show. From adding drama to the popular girl's character at the start by showing she just *has* to get into Notre Dame to showing the dorky students telling each other cliché things like this is going to be the best school year ever, the start of the movie paints these teenagers as exact copies of the "non-stereotypical" characters you expect to see in high school movies but whose every emotion has already been spoken verbatim by someone else in some other high school biopic. The film really does get better as it goes on, and the viewer gets to see the characters go through many popular dilemmas of high school (e.g. ridiculing the losers) and some more dramatic scenarios (e.g. the untimely death of a sibling). The large number of superbly good scenes the film captures struck me as odd as I was watching it, especially after the first half hour screams so loudly for legitimacy, and I wondered how likely it was that the camera crew really always was there for the key shots.  While my initial theory was the crews may have heard about dramatic elements and taped b roll around them afterwards, I later came to the conclusion that it makes sense that if they follow six high school students for a solid year there's going to be certain drama and regardless of how simply shocking it may be that they got these shots, the crew really just chose some good people. One of my more legitimate complaints (besides the fact that it appears to never get that cold in Warsaw, IN) is that the first half of the film relies on many computer animated sequences showing the characters' inner desires.  While this may have looked good at some point, the segments work against the film in the final cut.  Sure, it's an artistic idea but if they really had enough good footage for the whole movie, the crew should have found a way to show these thoughts realistically instead of in a fake cartoon-like setting.  The film does have many genuine moments, so these poorly contrived scenes don't serve the rest of the film or its characters well at all. Overall, the latter part of the movie successfully redeems the beginning and helps give enough reasons to add legitimacy to the film’s first half and other various errors throughout. Review by Ryan Pollyea Informative: 3.5- The film explains a few nice truths about life during high school but the film itself isn’t entirely Entertaining: 3- The first third betrays the rest of the well made and enjoyable documentary Technical: 2.5- Problems with focus and a computer animated theme that comes back to haunt the film marks a low point Overall: 3.5- If you can either get beyond the start (or appreciate it in a different way than I did) the movie overall will be satisfying and amusing
 
Format: DVD Year: 2008 Running Time: 95 minutes Distributor: Paramount Vantage Producer: Eli Gonda et al Director: Nanette Burstein Date Reviewed: 5/7/09 Story: A documentary crew goes to Warsaw, Indiana to follow six high school seniors that, at first glance, may seem like stand-ins for the cast of the Breakfast Club, but really have a lot more to their lives than might be expected or seen in the halls of Warsaw Community High School.