Thirteen

Rating:
Summary: Eye-Opener
Review: Thirteen exhibits teenage life perfectly. Every second of this film plays out the real-life feelings, desires, and attitudes of a teenager. Evan Rachel Wood does a fantastic job of portraying Tracy, and deserved her Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress. Holly Hunter does an amazing job of showing what parents of teenagers go through, and how tough it truly is. She also deserved her Golden Globe AND Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Rounding out the cast of main characters is Nikki Reed as Evie, who also wrote the film. Her script is sheer brilliance and is ultimately an eye-opener for all. And last but not least, Catherine Hardwicke does a great job of directing, and the use of only a digital camera makes the film seem so much more real.

Tracy as entered the seventh grade and quickly feels that she does not have the right friends. This movie shows how the desire to be accepted is so sick. Why do teens have to feel accepted by the popular kids to live and feel happy. The film also portrays teenage rebellion to the max and shows perfectly how badly it affects our caring parents. This film is riveting, and very very effective in all ways. It makes everyone, not just us teens, realizes how different our generation is from previous ones. Everyone should see this movie, because it will open the eyes of parents and make teens realize how they destroy one another.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: "Thirteen" is the most accurate depiction of life as young girl ever captured on film. If you don't think this happens to real people, then you need to open your eyes to the real world. Evan Rachel Wood gives a spectular, career launching performance that I will never forget. She was robbed of an Oscar Nomination, but she did recieve a Screen Actors Guild Nod(which usually honors better performances than Oscar does). Holly Hunter on the other hand did get nominated and gives a great heartbreaking performance. Catherine Hardwicke directs the film with a frantic brilliance. The entire film is done with a hand held camera. She deserved her directing prize at Sundance. Bottom line, everyone needs to see this film. Hopefully it will open your eyes to what is going on in your childrens lives(boys or girls). It is a brilliant, stunning, masterpiece that will be hard to equal.

Rating:
Summary: Boy, If That Was My Daughter....!!!!!!!
Review: "Thirteen" is a tale of a 13 year old girl that becomes friends with the wrong person and goes on a downward spiral through the world of drugs, sex and self-destruction. It's a well scripted, well woven drama that tugs at the heart and the mind. Sometimes, difficult to watch, but rewarding as well.

The thing to remember about this film is the acting and the script. Very well done on both accounts. I escpecially like the performance by Holly Hunter, who I felt, was very properly cast as the young girl's single mother. And brought quite a bit of realism to the whole thing. The acting on all the other fronts are quite good with the character of Tracy leading the pack.

The directing here has a very arthouse feel to it, which suits this movie just fine, I thought. Overall, a very realistic and entertaining film about a chunk of these people's lives. The only thing I thought would have been better is if the director took the experiences that Tracy had a little deeper and explained her state of mind and emotions more at the time of the incident, but again, I'm nit picking here.

If you're into real life dramas with a volume of risque material, then you have found a winner. Pick up Thirteen.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I know people say this movie seems to be overexaggerated but I beg to differ. I am now 20 years old and this movie was almost a spitting image of my life growing up. Believe it or not, this stuff (sex, drugs, cutting) does start to show its face at 13. One thing I must add though, if you or someone you are watching it with cuts themselves, it can be a very triggering movie to watch so be careful (the scenes are pretty graphic). The DVD is awesome, comes with both full screen and widescreen. Special features are pretty good you get the Making of, theatrical trailer, deleted scenes, and the commentary.
Even if this movie didn't pertain (sp?) to me, I would still have enjoyed watching it because it was intense. Who can honestly say they never wanted to be someone else? I believe that part was the truest of true.. Tracy saw who she wanted to be and is one of the many adolescent girls willing to risk it all to become that.

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant and Mature Portrait of Adolescence
Review: Having just watched Thirteen for the first time on DVD, I have to share my response with Amazon.com customers. Why? Because, quite simply, this is perhaps the single most accurate portrait of contemporary adolescence I've ever seen. Director Catherine Hardwicke tells her story of a 13-year-old girl, Tracy, and her descent into drug abuse, self-mutilation, theft and promiscuity, with a clear-eyed intimacy that neither glamorizes nor preaches.

This is an important movie that kids and parents can watch and discuss together. Unlike the "just say no" propaganda of government fiction, Thirteen doesn't lie. Instead, it tells difficults truths -- that adults can be flawed, imperfect, and sometimes just plain wrong, that it's natural to wish to alter our bodies and minds when we cannot change what's outside, and that love, courage and faith can still survive in the midst of this, our very human predicament. The acting is first-rate: Holly Hunter does a stunning job as Tracy's mom, a recovering alcoholic prone to some bad choices herself; cowriter Nicki Reed is disturbingly convincing as Tracy's best galpal and bad influence, and Evan Rachel Wood turns in an unforgettable Tracy. It's harrowing stuff and hard to watch at times, but you will not regret it.

Rating:
Summary: Recalls "Requiem for a Dream," instructively.
Review: i have never been a teenage girl, beset by peer pressure. likewise, i have never been a heroin dealer, a diet pill addict, or an elderly woman dependent on amphetamines as a catalyst to the love of son and peers. but, with confidence, i assert that every young person in America, every old person, and everyone who would not put themselves in one of these categories should see "Thirteen," for the same reasons they should see "Requiem for a Dream."

"Requiem" repulsed me from addictive substances more that eight years of D.A.R.E in elementary and middle scholl.. Likewise, I saw "Thirteen" today. The credits had not yet stopped rolling, and I began to write. This film, FILM, bears notice as an outstanding screenplay, which penetrates to the heart of an outsider's desire to Fit In.

Meet Tracy. An honor student, like so many of us were. Her mother's child. Again, as I was, perhaps you were. The bane of Mason's, her elder sibling's, existence.

Meet Evie. Evie is Cool. Not through any quality of her own. In fact, if I may foreshadow, the more we learn about Evie, we learn that nothing intrinsic to Evie makes her admirable. But the others, her peers, see her as such, and nothing more matters.

Evie mocks Tracy. Tracy seeks Evie's approval. She wins it through a single unethical act. But what matters ethics when acceptance hangs in the balance? Once Tracy is admitted into Evie's confidence, Tracy rebels in small ways. Each is justifiable as a reaction to a wrong done to Tracy, a minor act of rebellion. Tracy balances the karmic scale: she pierces her navel as a reaction to her mother's boyfriend, a former addict and a parolee. Knowing Evie or not, one believes that the world owes Tracy something for this.

Do not dismiss Tracy's mother's boyfriend yet. His self-knowledge serves as lynchpin for the film.

Mason's reaction to Evie, in particular, gives another dimension to this story. In the beginning, he delights in her; upon realizing what her influence has done to his baby sister, he disgusts in her.

Of the many, many remarkable aspects of this screenplay -- to recap, its truth, its genuineness-- most remarkable, it was written by Nikki Reed, whom viewers will know only as Evie. This young woman has taken an objective view of what, for any woman, would have to be a subjective, er, subject.

See "Thirteen." Then form your own point of view.

Rating:
Summary: Great Movie
Review: this is an awsome movie and i reccomend it to all teens!!

Rating:
Summary: Every parent's nightmare about how good girls go bad
Review: Evan Rachel Wood continues to make her bid to be the Jodie Foster of her generation in "Thirteen," a harrowing film about a good little girl gone horribly bad. Wood is Tracy, a seventh grader who lives with her single mom (Holly Hunter), a hairdresser who works out of the home. Tracy dreams of being cool, just like Evie (Nikki Reed), and when the opportunity comes to ingratiate herself with the cool girls, Tracy takes it and quickly moves from shoplifting, low-rise jeans and hoochie tops to drugs, body piercings, bad boys, oral sex, and worse. Evie even moves into Tracy's home, and it becomes clear that this is a troubled girl who has made shoplifting, drugs, and sex part of her daily routine.

The script for "Thirteen" was written in six days by director Catherine Hardwicke and Nikki Reed. Hardwicke had dated Reed's divorced dad and having known Nikki since she was a little girl was distressed when the kid turned 13 and starting having problems (problems like what happens to Tracy in this film). Hardwicke suggested Nikki keep a journal and intervened in the young girl's life, taking her to museums and exposing her to the larger world. However, it was Nikki's journey through the dark side that serves as the basis for this film.

The result is a story that retains its rawness even as we are mesmerized by the performances of the three female leads. For every "cool" scene, such as when Evie dressed for a date by taking off her skirt, moving her tank top down as a skirt and adding a new blouse, there are scenes that no kid is going to want to emulate, as when Tracy starts cutting herself. Meanwhile, her mother, a recovering alcoholic, finds herself helpless to do anything about her daughter's death spiral once she finally notices the radical changes that Tracy has undergone. It is not that Melanie does not care, but that she is powerless. Having been abandoned by her husband, Melanie finds her daughter has no use for her either.

The big question with "Thirteen" is whether young teenage girls who get to watch this deservedly R-rated film would understand that it was a warning or whether they would just filter the horror story through the prism of their adolescent notions of coolness. Hardwicke follows Tracy's descent but never buys into the idea it is a good thing. This is made clear by the opening scene where the two girls, while doing drugs, have made their faces numb so that they do not feel anything and starting hitting each other in the face, laughing hysterically all the time. The point of the opening scene is clear: Tracy does not know what she is doing to herself.

Hardwicke won the Director's Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Hunter is up for an Oscar, and Wood was nominated for a Golden Globe. "Entertainment Weekly" argued that Wood should receive serious consideration to become the youngest nominee the Best Actress Oscar in history and surprisingly that indeed happen this year, except that the nomination went to Keisha Castle-Hughes for "Whale Rider." Special mention should be made of Jeremy Sisto's performance as Brady, Melanie's boyfriend and another recovering alcoholic, who manages to play a pivotal role in the climax by providing the push Melanie needs to finally deal with Tracy. The "bad boyfriend" is a stereotypical role in so many films, that it is a shock to see one be different in such a subtle way.

"Thirteen" is a brutally honest film, the sort that you might never see again because once was enough, thank you very much. The emotional conclusion is powerful, but I would not say it qualifies as being truly cathartic. If there is a lesson here for parents it would simply be that when your children undergo radical transformations, of any type and in any direction, pay attention, because it could be too late sooner than you think.

Rating:
Summary: Realistic Look On Today's Youth
Review: I don't care what anybody says especially about this movie being unrealistic. Well I can tell you from personal experience, it's VERY realistic. From the sex to the drugs, it's all out there. I am a gay teen & even though I can't relate to these girls' story, I can tell you that my best friend in the entire world has gone through much of what these girls do in this film...from pot to cocaine to sex with boys AND men. It happens more today than anybody is willing to recognize. Speaking from MY personal experiences, I know that every teen at one point or another feels like losing control & just letting go. I know alot of people at my high school that have slit their wrists and overdosed on alchohol. As far as no teen going through ALL of what the characters in Thirteen do, if you believe that, you are blind and in serious denial. Some teens may really have a pretty healthy family life & might be comfortable with who they are, but most of them don't. Because adolescense is when you find yourself and instead of finding themselves, alot of teens lose themselves first.

As far as the performances, I was amazed. Evan Rachel Wood is just BRILLIANT as Tracy, especially in one of the ending scenes when things have just gone so far & her mom has come to realise what's going on. Her mom is played by Academy Award Winning Actress Holly Hunter who is superb in her part. Nikki Reed stars as Evie (and also co-wrote the film), a young girl with a harder life than it would seem to be. I loved how Evie so desperately wanted Tracy's mom to adopt her. Evie had told Tracy's mother that her mom had died and that her caretaker was her aunt. But really, her aunt WAS her mom...she just didn't want to live with her, because of all the abuse she was being put through. In the end when Evie is sent back to her mother, she turns on Tracy & exposes what they have been doing, blaming it all on Tracy.

The story is just so moving & really gives the viewer a look into what really goes on with teens today. All the time, it just seems to start at a younger and younger age. I know that this really happens, because it has happened to me and people all around me. This shouldn't be that surprising to people or parents and should really open their eyes and give them a look into the world that alot of troubled teens are diving into. I also loved how the media presence could be felt and seen throughout the entire film, especially those glamourized eyes. If you look closely, the picture that we see on the sign throughout the movie gets dirtier and more vandilized as Tracy loses herself more and more.

With that said, I think this movie is THE most realistic portrayal of teen life that I've ever seen. The DVD is brilliant also. The menu is set up beautifully & the special features are great also. There's audio commentary featuring the cast and the director/co-writer, the theatrical trailer, and the featurette "The Making Of Thirteen" which has great interviews with the cast of the film. This is a must see for everyone. Rent it at least, it's a treasure not to be missed. And there's no happy ending, giving everyone an easy solution. Just a simple scream, because as much as Tracy and every other teen in the world would appreciate a happy ending, there's still many years ahead & alot of obstacles to overcome.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, Shocking (to me)
Review: "Thirteen" may not shock you--I've read enough reviews on this site to know that--but the power of the three lead performances should stun you.

Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a smart, serious 7th grader with some aching holes in her life. Her mother (Holly Hunter) is loving. However she's a recovering alcoholic with a former coke-addict boyfriend and a very noisy hairdressing practice that she runs from her home. Tracy returns from school every day to total chaos. Tracy's father seems stable on the surface but he is struggling to stay employed and is often absent from her life.

At some point, Tracy snaps. She courts Evie (Nikki Reed), the most popular (i.e., sluttiest, fastest) girl in school by changing her clothing style and pickpotting money for an afternoon of shopping. From that moment on, the movie is a series of vignettes of Tracy's slide into sex, drugs, alcohol, and petty crime. "Thirteen" does not have a traditional plot: instead it takes you from point a to point b in Tracy's life with no neat resolution.

The three lead actors are outstanding. Evan Rachel Wood captures the heartbreak and the brutality of being thirteen: one minute you're a little girl, the next Lolita. Nikki Reed is a dangerous femme fatale in the style of Barbara Stanwyck. Holly Hunter captures a mother in denial beautifully. She knows but she doesn't know. And she really doesn't want to know.

I would recommend this movie to individuals who gravitate towards serious, art films. You don't need to be thirteen or have a thirteen-year old to appreciate it. In fact, by the end, you may be very glad that you're not either.