How 'Heathers' Changed Teen Movies Forever

Our friends at Grolsch Film Works have a website where you can find out what they’ve been up to and read/watch interesting stuff about films. Every week we'll be plucking the highlights. This is that.

We've got so much to thank this 1988 classic for. Not only is Heathers one of those movies that everyone who's ever been worthy of social interaction loves, but it's a sort of landmark in the history of teen movies.

It might have initially been a box office flop, but VHS was its saviour and, combined with frequent TV broadcasts, it finally achieved reverent cult status as the '80s came to a close. And with that status came an influence which cannonballed us out of the sugar-haze daydream of John Hughes movies and into the sharp cynicism of the slacker generation. Without Heathers, there'd be no Clueless, there'd be no Mean Girls and teenage cheerleaders would have nothing to quote in their yearbooks except badly paraphrased Ghandi. So let's raise a glass to this genuine game-changer. You're beautiful, Heathers.

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First love – in all its loose, messy, tear-stained and snotty-nosed glory, has long been a central subject of cinema. And why wouldn’t it be? When you’re under its spell, absolutely everything feels cinematic – from a brief glance that turns your stomach to a sideways touch, these emotions tint everything with a brighter colour, a deeper shade, some kind of obscured meaning behind the mundane. And this very filmic flush of first love and despair is what Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche captures in his three-hour epic love story Blue Is The Warmest Color.

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We all love the Internet, right? But we also know how addictive and dangerous it can be when put in the hands of an impressionable teenager, or a moron who intends to exploit other users.

Described by Julian Assange as "the biggest spying machine ever created", the Internet is placed under director Beeban Kidron’s microscope in her compelling and topical documentary InRealLife. We spoke to the filmmaker about Facebook addiction, regulating sites like Twitter, and her hopes of getting teenagers angry about being manipulated.

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Just yesterday at TIFF we caught the amazing documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which tells the extraordinary story of a nanny-turned-street photographer whose work was only discovered in 2007 by a geek searching for historic snaps of Chicago in a small auction house.

Intriguingly, here is the first glimpse of the photographer's highly observational short films, via Nowness, which highlights Vivian's unmistakable eye, reflecting the way she saw people in the street.

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Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.