A Cheeky List of 90s Films About Fucking Teenagers!
With the Kavanaugh nomination fight we’re being reminded how openly exploitative ‘80s teen sex comedies were, full of nudity and what would now read as rape played for laughs!
But while young flesh may never have been as hot a commodity as the decade that saw top-line porn star Traci Lords revealed as 15 with a fake ID, and preteen sex symbol turned teen sex symbol Brooke Shields in her prime filming the “incestuous sexual awakening” movie Blue Lagoon naked, the ‘90s saw their fair share of adolescent sexuality, as the victorious young Pro- side of the Sexual Revolution inherited mainstream culture!
But with tumblr tots stumbling around scoffing that teenagers are MINORS, they’re SEXLESS INNOCENT UNDERAGE MINORS, we’ve obviously lost touch with the Miramax Age and need reminding, so check these out!
Aerosmith’s Alicia Silverstone Trilogy – “Cryin”, “Amazing”, “Crazy” (1993-1994)
When ‘70s groupie sex rockers Aerosmith looked to make a ‘90s comeback, they turned to the period’s leading art form - the music video. The music was bluesy crap, so good thing they had sexy sixteen-year-old actress Alicia Silverstone for these three videos!
Cryin’ – Tattoos, navel rings, flannel-clad teen suicide and bungee jumping! How ‘90s is that!
Amazing – A nerd uses video editing software to have VR motorcycle cybersex with the girl from the last video! How ‘90s is that!
Crazy – Catholic school girls playing hooky! Shoplifting! Stripping! Disrupting the farm economy! All with lesbian chic undertones! The other girl is lead singer/widemouth bass Steven Tyler’s 16-year-old daughter Liv in her breakthrough role! How ‘90s is that!
Mallrats (1995) – At one point the protagonists meet Trish “The Dish” Jones, a 15-year old representation of the transition from Kevin Smith’s burnout 80s adolescence to the new neurotic professional-bound model – she fucks a lot of guys, but diligently records it for a book she’s publishing (“Boregasm: A Study of ‘90s Male Sexual Prowess”) to feature on her college applications!
In the end this is how slacker Brodie beats the career-oriented-Ben-Affleck romantic rival who wants to steal his disaffected thus vulnerable girlfriend and fuck her in a very uncomfortable place: they interrupt a live filming of a dating show with the video of Ben Affleck having anal sex with her!
So he gets carted off for “statutory rape”, as if Trish weren’t the New Empowered Woman in control all along, serves him right for trying to play straight and uptight against the true “alternative” culture! So he gets thrown in prison! To be raped in the ass! All come no after Silent Bob slapstick slams through a changing room wall and sees some titties, and the boys go to a topless three-nippled fortune teller!
American Beauty (1999) - In this middlebrow masterpiece, dissatisfied Kevin Spacey wants to fuck his daughter’s cheerleader classmate, and has a famous fantasy sequence where rose petals fall on (and conveniently clump on) her naked body!
Meanwhile his daughter (Thora Birch)’s boyfriend makes a high school art video about a plastic bag so moving that she shows him her tits from adjacent bedroom windows in a scene I KNOW that “You Belong With Me” video director Roman White has seen!
Finally Kevin Spacey has a shot at the cheerleader and is like “nah, this is about my midlife crisis and it’s bullshit to put that on you”, then his Marine Corps neighbor kills him for not being gay enough!
Slums of Beverly Hills (1998) – in this coming-of-age film about class and belonging, Natasha Lyonne is a fourteen-year-old on the seedy edges of incredible wealth, complicated by the fact she’s horny as hell, just sprouted a huge pair of knockers, and it’s California in the ‘70s!
Dazed and Confused (1993) –That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I keep getting older, they stay the same age.”
In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!
Almost Famous (2000, cut me a break) – “Let’s deflower the kid!”
In this Richard Linklater movie a boy comes of age by encountering the rougher side of 70s good-times youth culture, buffered by the easy, giving sexuality of teenage girls!
American Pie (1999) - not only does it have Jason Biggs fucking a pie, band geek Alyson Hannigan losing her virginity talking dirty, and a “secretly broadcast the exchange student as she changes” bit that goes overboard when she starts masturbating, but also Stifler’s Mom, the zipless Mrs. Robinson who introduced America to the term “MILF”!
The Virgin Suicides (1999) – adapted from an acclaimed novel, shot beautifully by Sofia Coppola and set to a diaphanous soundtrack by Air, this feature-length Lana Del Rey video sees three mid-70s teenage girls mess up a trio of teenage boys for life by killing themselves ‘cause their parents don’t want them to fuck!
Romeo + Juliet (1996) - the teens are less nude and explicit than the ‘68 Polanski version, but this contemporary-set, contemporary-scored, original-dialogue Shakespeare adaptation is just a really really good movie!
Calvin Klein Jeans campaign (1995) – they’d gone to this well before with 1980 ads with Brooke Shields purring “Do you know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” (like panties!) but this mid-90s campaign used young models in an overexposed, wood-paneled basement responding to off-camera urging so as to evoke the aesthetics of child pornography, and were roundly protested by critics who apparently recognized the aesthetics of child pornography!
This was also the aesthetic of Fiona Apple’s 1996 Criminal video. Several years later these ads graduated from college and became American Apparel!
BONUS: Ghost World (2001) – From a graphic novel by Daniel Klowes, who with Klosterman and Kunkel was a backbone of the 2000s Brooklyn literary scene that inspired Achewood before it degenerated into girlblogging, a story of two outsider girls who meet in art class back when outsider girls dressed like Daria or Janeane Garafalo, and start sexually grooming a skeevy older man (Steve Buscemi)!
Scarlett Johansson plays a girl who hasn’t yet realized she’s Scarlett Johansson – in every scene you’re like “for a shirt that shows off what a great rack she has, it could show it off a lot better” – but for the second time in this list Thora Birch gets more action!