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Undescribable Perfection

That was an excellent one.

good back-story, and good acting

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Just saw this film on TV the other day. This movie is almost a Documentary considering how realistic it is. Kids today have no idea how wild things were back in the 70s. It portrays the Suburban Wasteland in the most authentic way I've ever seen. Parents are still clueless when it comes to their children. Matt Dillon seemed to be in every teen movie of my youth & was great in this one. The only problem I had was with the riot towards the end. It was too over the top. But the dialog spoken by these young actors was almost perfect. This could have had an "After School Special" feel to it but the drugs & general Apathy of the film are what stays with you most. I remember having that sense of "what's the point" growing up in the 70s. This film is very relevant today. I highly recommend it. Watch it with "River's Edge"

i love this film, my childhood was exactly the same, this movie should be talked about more and seen, its the best high school teen movie ever made. big influence on the larry clark films, the smells like teen spirit film clip, over the edge was the inspiration. think fast times at ridge high, but serious. movies like KIDS, BULLY, were inspired by this film. for 1979 it was way ahead of its time, the high school movies made now are a joke, schools should use this film, its perfect, not one ounce of sentimentality if i was a 16-17 year old i would love this film. sad thing is the film has become just a footnote, rather than a genre definer, if you kids think breakfast club is cool, once you have watched this you will change your mind

Carl (Michael Kramer), Ritchie (Matt Dillon), Claude (Tom Fergus), Johnny (Tiger Thompson) and the other neighborhood kids are restless and rebellious against their suburban lives. They do drugs and hang out at the rec center. They get into trouble and hassled by the cops. After an incident, a curfew is imposed. After Carl gets beaten, cops close the rec center. The clash between the kids and the establishment only escalates.It's Matt Dillon's debut. He's not the lead but he steals the movie. There is some good music but only in the background. The material is edgy for its era. The kids are doing more than a little weed. It's got an indie feel with real amateur kids playing the roles. It reminds me of Kids (1995) except it's in suburbia. It does need to play up the rock music of that era. When Carl gets beaten up, traditional classical music gets played. It's the wrong idea. That violence needs to be backed up by a pounding rock anthem. There is too much traditional scoring. Otherwise, this is a really interesting cult classic.

Matt Dillon made his acting debut in Over the Edge playing a punk kid, a character he would parlay into a few more coming-of-age movies in subsequent years. He managed to have a pretty fair career despite the typecasting. Here, his nascent bad-boy personality and charm kick the movie up a notch or two, making a household name for himself in the process.New Grenada is a fictional town in the middle of the desert, a planned community. There's nothing for kids to do, save for hanging out at the local recreation center - which inconveniently closes at 6 pm. It's only a matter of time before the garden-variety vandalism worsens, and sure enough, when two kids fire a BB gun at a police-officer's car from an overpass, tensions in the town become proportionally thicker.At the center of the movie is young Carl (Michael Eric Kramer), son of the homeowners' association president, who's trying to get Texas millionaires to buy some prime real estate in town (rather than build a bowling alley). Carl is described as a nice, smart kid who happens to run with a rebellious crowd, particularly the perpetually on-probation Richie (Dillon), who wears his damn-the-man attitude like a pair of tighty whities.The scourge of the kids' existence is authority in the name of one Officer Doberman (Harry Northup), who is not above harassing the kids any chance he gets. And, for much of the movie, he gets plenty of chances. And when the rec center is inevitably shut down (the better to prevent the rich investors from noticing the Kid Problem), all hell really breaks loose in a realistic, tragic denouement.The script (by Charles Haas and Tim Hunter) effectively illustrates the angst of late-seventies teens desperate to do something, anything, to entertain themselves, something that'll gain themselves notice if not notoriety. The movie is loosely based on an incident that occurred in a real-life planned community in California in the early 1970s and certainly still rings true today.