a poignant and fresh take on this iconic, typically American experience. This low budget independent coming of age comedy from writer/director David Robert Mitchell explores the usual themes of teen angst, friendship, sex, and the search for love. Set in Detroit on the last weekend of the summer holidays before the kids return to school, the film draws upon Mitchell's own memories of his adolescence. There are a number of sleepovers, slumber parties and pool parties happening. The film follows four teens – Rob, Scott, Maggie and Claudia - as they hang out, talk about their fears and insecurities, crushes, and look for that elusive first kiss. However, unlike most comedies aimed at an adolescent audience this low-key film eschews the usual cheap scatological and puerile humour, opting for a more in depth exploration of their concerns. Mitchell demonstrates a strong understanding of adolescent emotions and desires that brings credibility to the material, and it reeks with a strong sense of nostalgia. Mitchell maintains a deceptively meandering pace as he juggles the multiple narrative strands and moves seamlessly between the various characters. The dialogue rings true, and Mitchell teases natural performances from his unknown ensemble cast. The Myth Of The American Sleepover is an honest and affirmative coming of age film that resonates.
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movieman_kev28 February 2012Various teenagers go to various parties, each longing to make the last night before school starts up again memorable in the slice of life drama. Those who are expecting American Pie type shenanigans to follow are best to look elsewhere as this film has more realistic, and dare I say, more noble goals in mind.
Almost every Tuesday Instant Netflix has at least one film streaming on same day as released on DVD, this week it's three films (this one, Wolf Town, and Beneath the Darkness) and while I can't vouch for the other 2 as I still have yet to watch them, I can give my enthusiastic thumbs up for this one. I found the film to ring true of the teenage experience of the average American teenager. The pathos, the awkwardness, the long & uncertainties are all on display. And frequently well-acted to boot. Writer/director David Mitchell is one to be on the lookout for if he continues to put out films of this caliber.
My Grade: B+ -
Sack-311 December 2011I admit that I'm a fan of school-age romantic comedies. I enjoyed this movie because a lot of the scenes rang true to my experiences at that age (except for the warehouse scenes -- hello creepy). I can remember putting my hand next to a girl's hand -- almost touching -- just to see if she'd go the last half inch. I can remember trying to get a do-over with a girl that I'd let slip away during high school. I can remember walking the streets of my town hoping to run into a pretty girl that I'd seen. I can remember picking the wrong girl because society told me she was cooler. And I can remember trying to catch lightening in a bottle on the last weekend before school starts. For some reason, this movie has slid entirely under the radar, but it deserves attention.
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Red_Identity16 April 2015Yeah, I sought this out because of It Follows, and trying to seek out what else the director had done. This is definitely not your ideal coming-of-age story. it seems like these days there are set rules on what those types of films are, and as good as they can be (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) they are also pretty predictable and follow a specific formula. This really strayed from that. Not all of the story lines work perfectly, but it very much feels like a film trying to show actual people interacting and trying to make the whole thing as honest as it could be. The characters are well-painted for the most part, and the film doesn't have the restraints of having to hit certain spots of points that a Hollywood film would try to do. Much of the human touch here would be further explored in It Follows, and so in that sense it's not entirely different. Very surprising, very good film
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StevePulaski1 March 2012The Myth of the American Sleepover plays like a toned-down, more modest version of Superbad. The parties are lighter, but are they more realistic? The language is softer, but is that reality? And the script is more controlled, but is it more fun to listen to? The main problem with the film is in the screenplay, which is slow, overly patient, and sometimes wholly vacant. There's something going on in films today that is beginning to aggravate me. It's the awkward silences. Being around the age of the teenagers in this film, I can safely say we don't talk like this, with long, abrupt pauses following every line. This was actually my main complaint in Terri, another dark coming of age film. The film would've been great if it would've replaced its pauses with some nice dialog to further develop the characters.
A film can't talk for the entire time, therefore, musical montages and sometimes long stretches of silence do take place. The only difference is, more often than not, they aren't continuous throughout the whole film. Just when The Myth of the American Sleepover starts to get interesting, it is plagued by a long, directionless silence.
Aside from that sidestep, the rest of the film is actually quite wholesome, surprising, and somewhat sweet in its poignant form. It depicts a wide variety of teenagers who are attending a sleepover, a house party, or a pool party during their final week on summer break. I love and hate movies like this. Love them because it lays the groundwork for a great anthology, and hate them because it makes for a challenging review. I've decided I won't go into any stories or characters to leave the experience as fresh as possible. All I will say is that some of these unknowns may possibly drift into wonderful character actors before they know it.
For an independent film, it has some very impressive, sunny cinematography. That seems like the least of ones concerns when watching a coming of age drama, but the cinematography here must be commended. The film always looks wonderful. It goes from warm, joyous, and simple with its pallet of vibrant colors, to cold, dreary, and a pessimistic tone with its darker pallet as time goes on. I'm not sure one has ever payed so close attention to photography in a comedy-drama.
Alas, what kills the film is just its inability to establish worthy or witty dialog. It's dark, yes, but even the darkest of comedies have their moments of wit and passion. The Myth of the American Sleepover doesn't, and that's disappointing. The film's message basically tells us the teen life isn't like Superbad or an Apatow comedy, which we're fully aware of. But it isn't as murky or as mundane as this presents it. It seems one of the few films to effectively blend realism with humor and believable characterization was The Breakfast Club. That had a lot of silence in the beginning, but it was fitting because these characters were just as foreign to each other as we were to them. By the end, they had talked up a storm with each other. While Myth is somewhat humanistic and poignant, it's also slow and for the wrong reason.
Starring: Claire Sloma, Marlon Morton, Amanda Bauer, Brett Jacobsen, Nikita Ramsey, Jade Ramsey, and Amy Seimetz. Directed by: David Robert Mitchell. -
MOscarbradley1 May 2019"American Graffiti"-lite. "The Myth of the American Sleepover" is about what boys and girls get up to on a summer's night and no, it's not what you might expect if you rely solely on the movies for your information. The closest they get to sex is a bit of petting; they drink beer and vodka but stop short of getting drunk and 'fighting' is limited to an egg and a slap being thrown. This was David Robert Mitchell's first film and it's a real charmer. Nothing happens but his delightful young and untried cast make spending time in their company a real pleasure and Mitchell is content just to let them be themselves. There are no dramas and nothing bad happens. This is a movie to make us think back to our own youth and smile.
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RockPortReview4 April 2012The coming of age story is a staple genre in film that seems to come and go with the times. The mid to late 1990's had "American Pie" and other such imitators, along with a revival of the teen horror movie. "Myth of the America Sleepover" is an independent drama that won a Special Jury Award at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival for Best Ensemble cast. The cast is populated with mostly real teens and non actors, giving it a very real and authentic look.
Set in the early 1990's in a middle class Midwestern town, this film looks like it could be an autobiographical account of director David Robert Mitchell's formative years. The story meanders through the lives of several teens on the last days of summer vacation. Everybody is searching for something in one way or another. Looking for adventure, a girl seen in the grocery store and for new friends. Mitchell's film is not exploitive of its characters and rarely resorts to cheap stereotypes. Although minorities are pretty much absent, we are given the usual token black person. This being said the authenticity of the film is quite impressive and similar to what I experienced myself.
This movie, unlike most, treats its characters like real people living real lives. The thoughts, anxieties and pressures are all there. This is a time before the internet and cell phones when everything was more personal and "real". But no matter what generation you grew up in there are still basic fundamentals of growing up that are universal. "Myth of the American Sleepover" is available on demand from Comcast and as always check it out! -
gwest-581605 September 2019Most of this film is guys with terrible hair stalking girls. The male characters in this film are so so so creepy. Like.. future sex offender or mass shooter creepy.
It's a string of pointless scenes with bizarre reactions and dialogue.
For example a close up shot of a girl passing a guy a lighter- and there's no significance of this interaction. Or when the blonde girl is looking in the other direction from a shooting star, then she says "did you see that?", the guy says "no what?", she says "nevermind". Firstly it was impossible she could have seen it from that angle, secondly why wouldn't she say "a shooting star".. as if he wouldn't believe her. Then there's the lake scene where she's dancing and they're all laughing and loving it. So weird. The film is full of bizarre scenes like this. And the ending is equally garbage to put the brown icing on the poop cake. -
juanmuscle26 February 2019I thought that was a masterly work of art, and yet when I came to this one, for some odd reason I absolutely fought it for no other logical reason than in short, I just thought this is going to be botched all up as so many teen type of flicks loaded with characters and dialogue usually are, and waht I mean botched up is cliched and boring; but this, after getting over myself, this was neither a botched job nor boring, it was magnificent!
I can't really go over why I absolutely loved it , I would have to go point for point with some double essay at length stripping all apart and then putting it back together and coming up with ways that make this masterly but... dang! lol
I just I don't know, it was excellent, sweet and just hit the spot!
One thing I might add, the coolest scene in the flic, and by coolest I mean when a character goes off on a tangent leaving behind her friends and plots and designs for something different and in this case, we have the cute lil' short haired blond whom I am sure we all fell in love with and pray hoped to see her in other projects but alas! that is not so, what happened? terrible, terrible dissipation of talent! Because her lil' dance to that cool music was irreverently flying against the face of all that is convention and just like this gem, it just worked!
Awesome! -
Some may view the struggles of adolescence with fond memory, as a time of innocence and a stepping stone to becoming an adult, others may see it as a collection of petty first world squabbles that we all must joylessly march through to enter the crushing world of adulthood. However you view it, the fact is we all must, or have underwent its trails, in our way
The Myth of the American sleepover tries to (and in my humble opinion succeeds rather well) in conveying this fact and gives us a sometimes startling accurate insight into how we used to think, behave and what we used to aspire too. Told in an episodic fashion with no real main character or plot, the movie instead focuses on characters, all teenagers, during one night, specifically the last night of summer vacation and set in that most barren of wastelands, the white American suburbs as they try to fulfil their desire before summers end.
Being that there is no set story or plot the movie ops instead for a series of episodic tales or parables if you will, each one involving a character searching for something, typically that which all adolescents search for love, excitement, friendship, or even just to end the summer with a bang. Its all very nicely handled with the stories being loosely connected to one another and switching back and forth in a relatively seamless manner so that you are never confused as to whats going on or whose doing what. This is further helped by the slow pace of the movie which ensures that everything flows slowly but smoothly, almost like a dream. Indeed the noted sparsity of dialogue and the cinematography does give the whole movie a dreamlike effect as each character searches for that which they desire before the sun inevitably rises and the dream ends.
However this slow pace and lack of any complicated plot may be a turn off to some people and i would be lying by omission if i didn't say that a heavy tolerance to "whimsy" is needed to appreciate or even tolerate this movie, and while some be put off by the very "indie" feel, with people talking about their emotions while looking at the stars etc i would however encourage these people to look a little harder because if so they will find that this movie actually handles teenagers very realistically, all least compared to some supposed "indie teenager emotion movies" like Garden State for example. At certain points the movie achieves the highest praise one can bestow upon a film, being that you forget your watching actors in a movie and not real people just being filmed.
Indeed the acting in this movie was really quite excellent given the age of the actors, director David Robert Mitchell really manages to capture the awkwardness and conflicting desires that plague those lost in the void between childhood and adulthood. But best of all he manages to capture this without crossing that line and becoming too whimsical or indie. Your not for example, as so many of these types of movies make you, rolling your eyes in disgust or throwing up at the cheesy, right on the nose, "emotionial" dialogue. Instead its all subdued and tastefully done, and as long as you give it chance then you can really enjoy it or what it is.
On the flip side of that however, the subdued and quiet pace of the movie, while one of its many strengths is also its greatest weakness, the movie lacks enough of a punch or "oomph" if you will, while a nice watch its not terribly memorable, which is a shame because it has some good actors and was all handled rather well. But in the end its not enough to make it stay with you or to stand out as unique creation.
So overall i couldn't recommend this to anyone whose looking for action or comedy or zany antics because id be a great big liar. However I would recommend it to anyone who wants to take a walk down memory lane and relive those glorious or torturous years, and remember a time when the biggest worry you had was if the girl at the supermarket noticed you or not, or when a social gathering meant sleepovers at your friends house and every beer was a little can of illegal debauchery and summer was your kingdom and you its sovereign ruler. -
Wow. Never been so bored in my entire life. If you can get through the first 10 minutes, good on you, but know the path ahead is no different.
Directing - Completely horrible Acting - Bad...but they seem convinced they're good. Script - I think the writer fell asleep honestly. Everything else - Average. -
Before I begin, I may be biased due to being from the same area in Michigan where this was filmed (the neighborhoods all looked familiar to me, etc)-- but this is a really good "coming of age" story.
I hesitate to even use that term, even though a lot of the tropes of the "coming of age/teen drama" are present; I think what I like most about this film was the atmosphere. The tropes kind of just pass you by and it's more about the atmosphere and pure emotion conveyed.
Just the atmosphere (and perhaps shooting location) alone made me feel some very strong nostalgia about the time I was around the age of the various characters.
Great atmosphere, good actors, good cinematography, and so on.
I can't really put my finger on it, but there is just something about this film that really hit me somewhere in the feels. Which is kind of strange looking at the film objectively. This film was the final nail for my decision to go to my High-school reunion (which I did not plan on going to).
It's hard to explain, so JUST WATCH IT... it's definitely more than worth the money.
I very much hope that David R. Mitchell makes many more films in the future.
I'd give this a 9.25 out of 10 -
I call this a "modern John Hughes" movie because, just like the John Hughes films of the 80's, they tell stories of teenagers that can hit home with many people. This film tackles some of the not only more modern issues with teenagers, but the deeper issues. I think where it misses its mark is with some of the characters themselves. The story surrounding them may be interesting, but the characters...not so much. For example, I thought the "twins" story line was interesting, but the guy who played the character which this plot surrounds wasn't very likable (perhaps due to his terrible haircut). I think a better casting could have improved this film. The movie looks at teenage life through a slightly nostalgic point of view, but I think it benefits from this. It also shows high school from different points of view, such as a freshman, a senior, or even someone who has already graduated from high school. This film had potential and some good moments, but overall didn't quite hit the mark.
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This is honestly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The acting is atrocious, it's like watching a cast comprised of entirely Kristen Stewart's not being able to display any semblance of emotion whatsoever. So incredibly boring with completely unbelievable dialogue (the little dialogue there was), even the ones who are supposed to be best friends speak to each other in a way that isn't even remotely grounded in reality. Mostly it's watching these kids barely talk to each other throughout the film. There is zero character introduction or background, none of them have any personality. It genuinely made me angry to watch this.I have never cared less about the characters in a movie in my life, I was rooting for everyone to lose.
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AMadLane7 August 2011I really did want to like it. It was all shot here in the Detroit area, but it doesn't feel like it -- it has more of a generic, anywhere feel, and that's okay.
My biggest issue with it is that the script rings totally false. These are young people anywhere from high school sophomores (thus, about 15) to about-to-be second-year college students (thus about 19) -- and they all behave like 11-year-olds. Are we really to believe that people this age get all put-offish over mere kissing?! What world does the writer/director inhabit? This opened the same week as the fine film "Terri," and that movie just crushes this one. Here, the editing is too loose, the acting is average at best across the board, and by the 20th time some guy announces "I want to kiss you" or the like, you're just so bored with it all.
A "freshman sleepover" in the University of Michigan gymnasium? With old women "chaperones" guarding/falling asleep at the door? May be, but I sure can't imagine it. -
SnoopyStyle2 October 2016It's the last days of the summer and high school is starting up soon. Janelle Ramsey invites new girl Claudia to her sleepover party but she may know Cameron's boyfriend. Maggie and Beth would rather not go to the sleepover. They get invited by Cameron to a party. Rob Salvati brags about fictional hookups. Scott Holland leaves college and becomes obsessed with twins Ady Abbey and Anna Abbey. His sister Jen tells him that they have left for college frosh week lockup. These and other young kids party at the pool, the makeout maze, and other places waiting for the end of summer.
This is a much-filmed genre. This has a few moments of interesting dialog or scenario. The actors are mostly amateurs. Filmmaker David Robert Mitchell pulls from quite a few coming-of-age stories. The production is generally professional. The use of new faces does give a sense of genuineness. However, following so many characters does scatter the tension. This may work better losing one main story and a couple of characters. The amateur high school actors have their charms but also have their deficiencies. -
gotoads23 January 2024If you are from Clawson, you will probably add a bonus 2 stars to your review like I did. As others have said, this film is basically a clunker with some weird, unexplainable charm. The characters are a mix of creepy and strange. Nothing seems all that realistic. The dialogue is sparce and stilted. The obsession the children have with booze is disturbing. The whole twins thing is positively bonkers. But it's unlike anything you've seen... until you watch 'It Follows', which has a similar vibe that has thankfully been refined. I will say that the actress with the pierced face was pretty good. I am surprised we haven't seen more of her since she made her debut in this movie.
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skpn1234 December 2018I have 3 teens and thank the G-ds it is nothing like this - slow, vacant and meaningless - and none of the characters draw you in or are likeable - in fact just plain ugly and boring despite the piercings
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Neon_Gold30 December 2021I don't know I just wasn't in the mood or something but this was boring to me. It just slugged along. The idea is really interesting and I thought I would have loved it. It really captures the last few days of summer perfectly. I felt like I was going back to school too in a couple of days. The whole atmosphere was perfect but the story was just uninteresting.