Films to view

Life really sucks for a group of gay and lesbian teenagers living in Los Angeles. Their parents kicked them out, they're broke and bored, their lovers cheat on them, they're harassed by gay-bashers. If things are going to be this way, maybe suicide isn't a bad idea; at least not in the mind of Andy, our major protagonist, who gives the film its title by describing himself as "totally fucked up."

A popular high school girl is harassed by a delinquent boy until they are placed in creative writing class together. Through written words, they create a bond, but tragically a bond that cannot withstand her social pressures or his brutal home life.

Jay Hernandez stars as Carlos Nunez, a poor but athletically gifted Latino teenager who endures a two-hour bus ride every day from East L.A. to attend the posh, wealthy Pacific Palisades High School in Los Angeles on a football scholarship. A straight-A student, Carlos is focused and driven, but his future is cast in doubt when he becomes the flirtation target of spoiled, self-destructive bad girl Nicole Oakley (Kirsten Dunst), who's the daughter of a prominent congressman (Bruce Davison). When his friends, family, and even Nicole's own father oppose the romance for Carlos' sake, he chooses to ignore their advice and stubbornly pursues his relationship with Nicole, whose feelings grow from simple physical attraction to something much deeper.

Ken Park focuses on several teenagers and their tormented home lives. Shawn seems to be the most conventional. Tate is brimming with psychotic rage; Claude is habitually harassed by his brutish father and coddled, rather uncomfortably, by his enormously pregnant mother. Peaches looks after her devoutly religious father, but yearns for freedom. They're all rather tight, or so they claim. But they spend precious little time together and none of them seems to know much about one another's family lives. This bizarre dichotomy underscores their alienation # the result of suburban ennui, a teenager's inherent sense of melodrama, and the disturbing nature of their home environments.

At the edge of adolescence, Tracy is a smart straight-A student--if not a little naive (it seems...she smokes and she cuts to alleviate the emotional pain she suffers from having a broken home and hating her mom's boyfriend, Brady.) When she befriends Evie, the most popular and beautiful girl in school, Evie leads Tracy down a path of sex, drugs and petty crime (like stealing money from purses and from stores). As Tracy transforms herself and her identity, her world becomes a boiling, emotional cauldron fueled by new tensions between her and her mother--as well as, teachers and old friends.

A man about forty years of age tells the story from when he was a teenager in upscale suburban Detroit of his and three of his friends' fascination with the mysterious and doomed Lisbon sisters. In 1974, the sisters were seventeen year old Therese, sixteen year old Mary, fifteen year old Bonnie, fourteen year old Lux, and thirteen year old Cecilia. Their fascination still remains as they try to piece together the entire story. The sisters were mysteries if only because of having a strict and overprotective upbringing by their father, who taught math at the girls' private co-ed school, and overly devout Catholic mother, who largely dictated the household rules. The story focuses primarily on two incidents and the resulting situations on the girls' lives. The first was an action by Cecilia to deal with her emotions over her life. And the second was the relationship between Lux - the sister who pushed the boundaries of the household rules most overtly in doing what most teenagers want to do - and Trip Fontaine, he who could have any girl he wanted but wanting solely Lux.

At 17, high-school junior Shirley Lyner is thinking about college and running a babysitting service that provides teen call girls to the dads of young children. In a long flashback, we see what brought her from being a babysitter to organizing and running the service. It starts with Michael, the father of children she baby-sits. A cup of coffee on the way home from his house, a night visit to a train yard, and one thing leads to another. Shirley can be ruthless, and tension builds when some of the clients take the girls to a mountain cabin and bring drugs. Then, one of the girls tries to freelance. Can this end well: is it a tragedy in the making? Do we all have secrets?

Billy is released after five years in prison. In the next moment, he kidnaps teenage student Layla and visits his parents with her, pretending she is his girlfriend and they will soon marry (and forcing her to say the same).

The story of five teenage girls who form an unlikely bond after beating up a teacher who has sexually harassed them. They build a solid friendship but their wild ways begin to get out of control.

1986. Jack Slavin, an engineer by trade, and his mid-teen daughter Rose Slavin live in virtual isolation on what was once a commune that Jack and a group of others built in 1968 on sparsely populated Marsh Island off the U.S. east coast. Rose's mother abandoned them when Rose was five. Jack has passed to Rose a sense of ecological preservation, placing them at odds with Marty Rance, who is building a housing complex on the island on a wetlands. They are able to live this life on the commune property in their ecological bliss due to a sizable inheritance, Jack who will occasionally take out his checkbook in order to solve whatever problem he may be facing. Jack also took Rose out of school when she was eleven as he didn't believe in what the traditional school system was teaching. Their quiet life together is threatened by the fact that Jack has a heart condition which will probably kill him sooner than later. Wanting to ensure that Rose is taken care of after his passing, Jack makes the unilateral decision to ask Kathleen, a woman who he has been dating for four months, to move in, along with her two mismatched sons, half-brothers Rodney and Thaddius who don't much like each other. Jack tries to pass Kathleen and her sons to Rose as "an experiment" and the three of them solely as "guests", rather than the reality of them truly moving in. Kathleen, who had never met Rose before, agreed in her savior complex and in truly loving Jack, knowing fully the reasons for he asking her. These changes deeply affect Rose, who has had Jack all to herself for the better part of her life - she who threatens to commit suicide after Jack dies - and comes at a key point in her own life as she is just starting to explore her sexuality.

A gay teenage prostitute and another teen, both from the same small town in Kansas, narrate separate stories from their childhoods. The prostitute's story is about a disturbing homosexual encounter with his pedophile baseball coach, and the other teen's story revolves around an amnesia blackout during which he thinks he may have been abducted by aliens. Later, the second teen finds clues linking the gay prostitute (now living in New York City) to his possible alien abduction, so he tracks him down to finally seek out the truth.

They're in their 20s. He works in a video store; he's eager, chatty, sleeps in his car. She rents adult films, looks disheveled, rarely speaks. He chats her up, she brushes him off. He takes her address from store records and contrives to run into her. He rings her doorbell; she tells him to go away. He invents a story of a great-aunt who lives in the building and fakes her death to get the girl to let him in her apartment but holds a butcher knife between them. So it goes and he is no longer living in his car. He presses for a relationship; she ignores him, insults him, or yells. He's persistent, inviting her to get out of the apartment, cooking, washing her hair. Both have demons and, as their stories become more clear, his addictive personality and her sex nausea may be on a collision course.

Astrid Magnussen (Alison Lohman) is a fifteen-year-old girl, living in California. Her mother, Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer), is a beautiful, free-spirited poet and artist who also suffers from a borderline personality disorder (BPD). Their life, though unusual, is satisfying until one day, a man named Barry Kolker (Sir Billy Connolly) (that her mother refers to at first as "The goat man") comes into their lives, and Ingrid falls madly in love with him, only to have her heart broken, and her life ruined. For revenge, Ingrid murders Barry with the deadly poison of her favorite flower: the White Oleander. She is sent to prison for life, and Astrid has to go through foster home after foster home. Throughout nearly a decade, she experiences forbidden love, religion, near-death experiences, drugs, starvation, and how it feels to be loved. But throughout these years, she keeps in touch with her mother via letters to prison. And while Ingrid's gift is to give Astrid the power to survive, Astrid's gift is to teach her Mother about love.

Disturbing, dark, low-budget independent film about teen-agers in New York City. The story focuses on Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a teen who has a goal to de-flower as many virgins as he can. When one of his old encounters discovers that she is H.I.V.-positive, after only one encounter with a guy, Telly remains undaunted.

Shy, sensitive April is the class virgin, torn between an illicit flirtation with her soccer coach Mr. B and an unrequited crush on sweet stoner Teddy. Emily, meanwhile, offers sexual favors to every boy to cross her path - including both Teddy and his best friend Fred, a life wire without filters or boundaries. As one high school party bleeds into the next - and April and Teddy struggle to admit their mutual affection - Fred's escalating recklessness starts to spiral into chaos.

New Year's Eve, 1981, the Lower East Side. Monica's having a party, but as late as 9, no one's there. She stews (and drinks). Folks are on their way, all looking for love, sex, or both. En route, paths cross, gambits misfire: a performance artist, her boyfriend until today and his long-time pal Lucy, two Long Island high-school girls, two punk rockers, a bartender, a Scottish painter who's lousy in bed, a pretty face named Jack who runs when women say they love him, his cute but clumsy date Cindy, two trendy vamps, a loquacious cabby, the man-crazed Hillary, and Elvis Costello. Nearly everybody smokes, and nearly everybody scores. And all get who and what they deserve.

In the book Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda Sordino is forced into the worst year of her life. Her best friend, Rachel Bruin, has turned against her with all other of Melinda's fellow students looking away; not daring to take a single glance at Melinda. All because of one stupid end-of-summer party.

After her mother, Karen (Melissa Leo) gets married for the third time, 17-year-old Greta (Hillary Duff), who had witnessed her father kill himself, withdraws within herself, and turns rebellious. In lieu of boot camp she is sent to live with her maternal grandparents, Katherine (Ellen Burstyn) and Joseph (Michael Murphy) where she makes it known that she is determined to kill herself. She then falls for a cook, Julie (Evan Ross) at the local restaurant, much to the chagrin of her grandparents - especially when they find out he had been interned in a juvenile correctional facility. Faced with all-round opposition and unhappy with her life Greta plans her suicide during a boating trip - a plan that will not only expose closeted skeletons, but also shatter and change everyone's lives forever.