The Real-Life Breakfast Club

The New Breakfast Club

If the poster on the left looks oddly familiar, it's because it's a rift on the movie poster for the iconic 1985 movie, The Breakfast Club. The John Hughes movie is one of my favorites, about 5 very different stereotypical high school students who are reluctantly brought together for detention and end up finding out they have more in common than they thought they did. The film for this poster is American Teen, and it's actually a documentary that won its director, Nanette Burstein, the Directing Award at this past year's Sundance Film Festival. American Teen examines a group of high school seniors in an Indiana town and their various cliques, and will be released in theaters on July 25.

There seems to be a lot of interest in high school life at the moment, with this new documentary being released to the WE network's High School Confidential to studies being done like this one. It probably has a lot to do with how fast kids are growing up these days, and how amplified the pressures teens face on a daily basis have become. Everything is harder, faster, and more intense than I ever remember it being.

I think high school is a fascinating time. For me personally, I did most of my growing up in college, a place where I was stretched and challenged and forced to grow up. I think for most people though, high school is that place. It's when you first start discovering yourself in relation to others who are also discovering themselves, figuring out your likes and dislikes, giving into/resisting peer pressure, and of course going through all those fun emotional, hormonal, and physical changes. I pretty much coasted through high school because I had a stable group of good friends and I found school to not be that difficult. But it always interests me to watch teenagers with experiences vastly different than mine. Whether or not you can completely relate to the teens being portrayed on your screen, everyone's gone through some sort of awkward stage in life, and I think that's what makes high school life so interesting to examine.