With every generation comes a string of movies centered around the transition from high school to the real world. To name just a few, American Graffiti, Grease, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Say Anything, Can't Hardly Wait, Dazed and Confused, and American Pie all tackled life, love, and, to varying degrees, the trials of stepping into the future as an adult. Although not really in the same ballpark, even Rebel Without a Cause was a high school movie. The most recent dramatic high school exploration is first time director Jess Manafort’s Remember the Daze now out on DVD in a nearly-bare-bones release, which jumps back to 1999 to focus on several suburban teens in the last 24 hours of their life as high schoolers at the turn of the modern century.

If you could peel back the paint from the hallways of every high school in America, you'd find generations upon generations of rich, emotional drama and raw conflict of all forms. It's the stuff that turned writer John Hughes into the best high school based writer of our time. But most of the Hughes movies were warm and fuzzy. Larry Clark, on the other hand, got inside the grittier aspects of ‘90s teen life with the acclaimed Kids (albeit unbelievably so) preceded by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s Can’t Hardly Wait. Since then, though, society has been turned on its head thanks to technology and the evolution of the social dynamic on the internet.

For many who look back on their own lives and the last 24 of high school, the time was undoubtedly filled with sex, booze, drugs, and anything else you could cram into one day (and your body) to go out with a bang. When the party’s over, some go on to college, others straight into work, and some don’t have a clue where to go once they’re left to fend for themselves. That’s the relatable territory Jess Manafort has chosen to mine, as she explores teenage indulgence and ponders the future along with the characters as they stand of the edge of safety looking into an unknown horizon. Given the Y2K scare back in 1999, the many end-of-the-world conspiracies didn’t make things any clearer. Thank god that wasn’t my senior year. I might have put off going to college in favor of building my own bunker to celebrate graduation with a bong and a battery powered radio.

So, where does Remember the Daze rank among the memorable high school coming-of-age movies? Aside from featuring a contemporary cast of young up-and-comers in today’s suburban Hollywood landscape - Amber Heard, Alexa Vega, Leighton Meester, Melonie Diaz, and many more - it doesn’t rank at all. The movie just floats out there in its own reflections. What the aforementioned high school movies of the past had going for them that turned them into timeless classics was a compelling story with characters you could empathize with, and most of all something other than just “situation” to care about. Just because a movie features booze, mushrooms, and a ton of partying doesn’t instantly make it “cool”. But that’s what some teens have yet to discover, and will at some point.

While Manafort deserves credit for exposing the damage of some stereotypes by showing the destructive nature of inflated high school ego and such interesting dynamics as the fact that really it’s okay for popular kids to mingle with the unpopular crowd and that sexual exploration IS something to talk about (in this case acting on girl on girl impulses), it’s the characters that grind the film to a halt; both in sheer numbers and superficiality. Why care about the predicaments of eighteen kids when a better dramatic investment could have been made in three or four. Also, given the fact that boozing and getting high plays such a huge role in the film and the final 24 hours of high school (albeit a true fact of high school life), Remember the Daze was predestined for mediocrity. Arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, whiny drunk and stoned underage suburban teens might look cool from a freshman perspective, but it’s hard to stick with when there’s nothing to care about except a bunch of people trying so desperately to be adults before they get there.

As a DVD, the disc does give you something extra to care about in the form of a candid 11-minute "behind-the-scenes" segment, which explores the production on-set in North Carolina from Day 1 to the end of the nearly month-long shoot. Here is where fans of the movie meet the actors as they get into character, prepare for their sequences, and bond with their cast mates while the production crew sets up various shots (high school hallways, the gym, cheerleading sequence, etc) and director Jess Manafort watches the dailies and keeps everything on track. Since it shows the teen actors in a real situation, they’re more refreshing to watch here than anywhere else.

What is interesting about Remember the Daze, however, are the questions posed to each character at one of the most crucial periods in life. They’re all relatable questions that some can’t answer, which is where the drama wants to spring from. Also, the movie’s cinematic style and storytelling perspective makes for a fresh, unique, and contemporary experience from a presentation standpoint. Overall, the movie’s much like the many "seemingly untouchable" drop-dead blonde bombshells that roamed the hallways in almost every high school (I’m stereotyping, I know... but go with me here for a second) - nice to look at, but once you spend more than five minutes with them, you (sometimes) quickly realize there’s nothing there. Remember those daze?