As high school zeitgeist stories go, Remember the Daze holds no great secrets or revelations, no iconic characters or “American Pie”-style set pieces, but it demonstrates considerable promise on the part of its director and her up-and-coming cast.
A generally entertaining but half-baked variation on Richard Linklater’s high school period piece, “Dazed and Confused” (made in 1993, set in 1976), Remember the Daze (set in 1999) takes its cue from the earlier film in an excess of ways.
40
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
Remember the Daze has the irony-free, instant-nostalgia earnestness of your high school yearbook, but watching it is not likely to conjure your own youthful emotions -- it’s more like flipping through the generic memories of a complete stranger.
40
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
The original title of Jess Manafort's directorial debut was "The Beautiful Ordinary," and she shouldn't have changed it. After all, her cast is beautiful and her movie is ordinary.
38
New York PostKyle Smith
New York PostKyle Smith
We keep waiting for a story, or at least some comedy, but none ever materializes. The dialogue makes Algebra II seem fascinating by comparison.
If you swiped the most insipid dialogue of the teenage-angst movies of John Hughes and Kevin Smith and Amy Heckerling, you would still have a script -- and a movie -- far superior to the newest of the genre, Remember the Daze.