We the Party

Name: We the Party
Director: Mario Van Peebles
Released: 2012

Mario Van Peebles

2012

Synopsis

In Los Angeles, five high-school friends deal with romance, money, prom, college, sex, bullies, social media, fitting in, standing out, and finding themselves.

Your Movie Library

Cast

Recommendations

88
Chicago Sun-Times
Despite its flashy cinematography and colorful sets, it contains a great deal that is serious about growing up in America today.
75
Slant Magazine
While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.
75
The A.V. Club
Van Peebles compensates for his stylistic clunkiness - the film overuses split screens and sometimes looks so bright, it could be a '90s sitcom - with funny, unexpected sparks of life.
50
The New York Times
Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.
40
Time Out
The movie spends almost as much time allowing the filmmaker, playing a progressive-minded teacher, to push his students to be better citizens by interviewing homeless people on skid row (!) as it does watching the younger generation trying to get some. It's an uneasy mixture of crude yukking and mixed-message uplift that satisfies on neither level.
40
Village Voice
Van Peebles's heart is probably in the right place, but his attempt to wed his kids' generational moment to a classic coming-of-age template falters in its message-obsessed execution.
40
Variety
This South Los Angeles-set dramedy flirts with terminal stereotypes and high-school movie cliches right and left.
40
Los Angeles Times
The naughty-yet-nurturing tone is certainly unusual, but in working so hard to be the adult who "gets" kids yet lectures them at the same time, he's ended up with a colorful but superficial mess.