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From
a first-time director and two teenage actresses comes a
raw and revealing insight
into urban adolescence in 2003, a provocative portrait of
what teens today are thinking, doing, feeling and going through.
Winner of the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival,
Catherine Hardwicke’s THIRTEEN is a unique project
co-written with then-13-year-old Nikki Reed who lived many
of the events seen on screen. Together, they forged a fast-and-furious,
unblinking picture of the cliques and clashes, hidden dangers
and secret rituals, dashed hopes and unrelenting dreams of
two American girls looking to make their way in a new world
for which few maps exist.
What does it mean to be thirteen
right now? It has always been the age when establishing
identity, individuality and
a sense of one’s importance in the world become the
imperative. But in today’s America, the pressures on
13-year-old girls – media-fueled expectations to be
sexy, gorgeous, cool and in control – have never been
greater. Low-rider jeans, body piercing and petty crimes
have become the outward symbols of a generation that is desperately
trying to find its own spirit.
Hardwicke explores this territory
with honesty, clarity and passion in THIRTEEN, using a
hyper-kinetic camera to
capture both the unhinged joy and high angst of hitting modern
adolescence full force. The story follows the transformation
of Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), who begins as a promising, pig-tailed
student still playing with teddy bears and Barbie® dolls.
But when Tracy enters the hyper-sexualized peer-pressure
cooker of junior high, she witnesses the power and hipness
of Evie Zamora (Nikki Reed, co-writer of the script), who
has become widely known as “the hottest chick in school.” Ultra-popular,
model-gorgeous and bewitchingly snobby, Evie represents everything
Tracy suddenly wants, and needs, to be.
At first Tracy has no hope of being
accepted into Evie’s
elite clique. She’s got the wrong attitude, the wrong
friends, definitely the wrong look. But Tracy learns to remake
herself, step by step, into the ultimate ideal of a 2003
teen. She discovers how to do the makeup, the clothes, the
hair, the act.
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