Whatever
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“There Had Never Been A Really Realistic Depiction of the Teenage Girl Experience As I Remembered It”: Director Susan Skoog Looks Back on Whatever
Susan Skoog’s underappreciated teen drama Whatever opens on a moonlit image of two lovers on a field of grass, he on top of her, in what appears to be flagrante delicto — but which is revealed shortly after to be a train run on an unsuspecting teenage girl. Disenchantment is the bedrock of Skoog’s unsparing debut, released by Sony Pictures Classics in 1998 but taking place in the early ’80s. Liza Weil — most famous as Paris Geller on Gilmore Girls — stars as Anna, a 17-year-old who loves listening to Chrissie Hynde, smoking Newports, partying and painting. She dreams […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Nov 10, 2018 -
Without Frills
As a teenager going into a movie theater, I was looking for some true reflection of the absurd darkness that had come on seemingly overnight. I was looking for a place to rest my pimples from the light and to be told that others had survived similar such onslaughts. For some before me it was James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Molly Ringwald in all them John Hughes movies. Then it was Claire Danes on TV in My So Called Life. But for me, it was the actor Liza Weil in Whatever. I was 19, hadn’t graduated high school, […]
by Noah Buschel on May 29, 2014
