Film: Remember the Daze

While I’m on a roll of personal anecdotes, let’s go with this one: I finally watched Remember the Daze (also known as The Beautiful Ordinary) yesterday. It boasts a mostly all-(B)star cast, with one of its lesser characters played by the now most famous Leighton Meester.

The straight-to-DVD film is about the last day of high school, 1999, in a sleepy town in Anywheresville, USA (portrayed quietly by Dawson’s Creek ... or Wilmington, North Carolina). It follows a spider web of mostly rising seniors over the course of twenty-four hours and unravels, slowly, the complicated simplicities of being seventeen. There’s the overrun character of Julia (somehow named “Lucy” on IMDB), played Amber Heard, who is your every-blonde. She could be Blake Lively in The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants or, um, Amber Heard in Hidden Palms: carefree, careless, overtly sexual, and mostly devoid of personality. There’s the goofy group of African-American guys and their wangsta friend ... admittedly a little out-of-place in the world of popular Californian blondes like Julia (and decidedly not Anywheresville, USA), the underage promiscuous girls, the overachievers, the crazy annoying cheerleader, the emo rock banders, the quiet Asian freak (at least he’s artsy this time around) ... a lot of high school stereotypes wrapped up in one stoner house block party.

But somehow, it isn’t saccharine – it’s kind of just all-out ridiculous. (You can thank Marnette Patterson’s overacted Stacey, the insecure, whiny and high-strung cheerleader.) But believable. Perhaps it is the nostalgic and yearningly cool soundtrack (Sublime, Meredith Brooks, Feeder). Most well-played were the closeted lesbian bff-couple played by Melonie Diaz and Lyndsy Fonseca. Melonie is always on-point in her roles, but Lyndsy was surprisingly refreshing as the jealous girlfriend. Brie Larson, too, in the small role of Julia’s completely irreverent but simplistic younger sister, Angie, is surprising and entertaining.

As the “beginning of the end” draws to an end, the film picks up pace and neatly ties together the haphazard web of transparent emotions in both an aesthetically pleasing and age-appropriate way. It is almost as if the 2007 film had been captured by a production team with the aesthetic vision of a dewey-eyed college freshman and not by someone who has presumably been out of college for an eternity of three years. The resulting message is clear, but not simple; sweet, but not nostalgic.

Two-and-a-half stars (of four)
Remember the Daze (official DVD title)
2007
Jess Manafort
First Look International