How do you make a John Hughes-style teen rom-com in the new millennium? Judging by Jonathan Kasdan's " The First Time," with a self-consciousness that's sometimes painful and very occasionally true to the characters. Dylan O'Brien and Britt Robertson are the two suburban high schoolers who meet at a wild party and spend the next 48 hours falling in chatty, awkward love -- he's a reedy nice guy with the requisite eccentric friends (one a snide Brit, the other a giant silent African American), she's a winsome alt-girl with a middle-aged screenwriter's taste in music. (As in: Leonard Cohen. On vinyl.) The performances by the leads are earnest and very sweet, and Kasdan knows his Hughes ready-mades: The "older guy" boyfriend of Robertson's character is a ringer for Michael Schoeffling of "16 Candles."
Sundance 2012 Day 4: Sex, drugs, and teens
So why did I feel like the movie kept checking itself in the mirror like a 14-year-old girl searching for acne? Why was I constantly waiting (in vain, but not really) for O'Brien to show up on Robertson's lawn with a boombox? The only scenes in "The First Time" that feel freshly observed have to do with the couple's first sexual experience, and the only shot in the whole movie that actually felt real was one of Robertson looking out her bathroom door at O'Brien waiting on the edge of her bed and letting out a nervous little laugh. Some people love the movie, but there were also a lot of walk-outs at the screening, mostly, it seemed, from middle-aged men who may not want their precious pop memories tampered with. I kept wondering what my own teenage daughters, who certainly know their Hughes and can quickly sense when a movie's bullshitting them and when it's not, would make of it. They might think, like me, that the artificiality is sometimes teeth-grinding but worth wading through for the stray pieces that feel true.
The documentaries at Sundance, by contrast, tend to know what they want and get it done with less fuss. "The House I Live In" is a lucid, long-view unpacking of the War on Drugs from Eugene Jarecki, who ably dissected the lead-up to the Iraq War in "Why We Fight." The movie marshals a wide selection of talking heads, from Oklahoma prison guards and Reagan-era appointees to street dealers and Jarecki's own nanny, who lost her son to drugs and now regrets working for her white employers at the expense of her own family.