10 Movies Today's Teens 'Need' Less Than Love, Simon

Oh boy, what a film.

It makes clear strides towards recruiting a younger audience, with its attempted Amblin-esque marketing as well as casting people such as Maddie Ziegler, but is about as idiotic and harmful to an impressionistic youth as is humanly possible.

To be clear, the plot of this film involves a boy finding out that his underage next door neighbor is being sexually abused by her father, but then the boy dies of a brain tumor, only to leave explicit instructions for how to use a sniper rifle to kill the abusing father, for his mother to carry out. It trivializes sexual abuse and its victims, it makes a serious illness like cancer into little more than a lazy plot device, and it paints a grossly unhealthy picture of the kind of relationship a parent has with a child.

Every lesson one could possibly learn from this film is toxic and decidedly unhealthy. Teens 'need' films that tackle complex topics and moral lessons in intelligent ways, not ones that use all the subtlety of a sludge hammer to pound a single nail into place.