Starring: Holly Hunter; Nikki Reed; Evan Rachel Woods
Director: Catherine Hardwicke
Rated:
Distributor:
Tonight: Holly Hunter watches with growing despair as her good little girl goes bad.
Hi there. Glad you could join me for our Tuesday Night Premiere of Thirteen – a film that some have labelled the ultimate birth control pill. Obviously it’s not a one hundred per cent effective contraceptive but it does make you think twice about having kids and dealing with their growing pains as they push on into puberty.
Co-written by teen babe Nikki Reed, who also stars as cool chick Evie, Thirteen is a semi-autobiographical coming of age story about a sweet girl called Tracy who falls hard under the spell of peer group pressure. Reed pumped the script out over six, full-on days with friend and first time director Catherine Hardwicke, who’d previously worked as a production designer for directors like Cameron Crowe and Richard Linklater. Here’s how Hardwicke explains the film’s genesis.
(C.W. 10:45 “Well I was dating…..help her. 11.19)
(N.R. 22.13 “Catherine helped me broaden….. whole character 22.40)
Tracy’s groovey mum, Melanie is played by Holly Hunter who won an Oscar for her performance in The Piano and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role too. Melanie is just one of many single mothers trying to raise kids in ultra urban environments, in this case, Los Angeles. And compounding the difficulty of her task is the barrage of contemporary influences on her offspring; like the proliferation of glossy advertisements featuring impossibly perfect, air-brushed models, and all the music video clips with lots of slutty looking women, often presented like headless pieces of meat. These are the role models that young kids aspire to these days and Holly Hunter saw them having an impact on adults as well.
(H.H. 7.07 It was interesting because………authority figures. )