{"id":8123,"date":"2019-12-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-17T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8123"},"modified":"2019-12-17T08:34:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T13:34:00","slug":"booksmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/17\/booksmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Booksmart."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I wanted to like Booksmart<\/em>, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising \u2026 but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some of the films it rips off. (You can also rent it on amazon<\/a> or iTunes<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) are best\nfriends and massive overachievers who’ve spent their high school years studying\nand doing all the things you’re supposed to do to get into a good college, but\nnever doing anything fun, only to discover that a bunch of their classmates who\nhave partied their way through high school have also gotten into elite schools.\nMolly’s the Class President and has a crush on her Vice-President, Nick, who\nappears to be a dimwit but, of course, isn’t. Amy has been out for two years,\nbut has never kissed a girl, and has a crush on a classmate, Ryan, although she\ndoesn’t know if Ryan is into girls. The night before graduation, they decide to\ngo to a huge party at Nick’s aunt’s house, and spend about the half the movie\ntrying to figure out where the party is and then trying to get there. Once they\ndo arrive, they go after their respective crushes, only to have things not go as\nplanned (obviously) and then something else works out for each of them instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a lot of promise in this premise, and the two leads\nare both quite good. Feldstein is wonderfully annoying throughout the movie,\nand handles the transitions well from earnest to flailing to, at one point,\nshockingly rude to her closest friend in a way that makes the character feel\nentirely coherent and three-dimensional. Dever has somewhat less to do until\nthey get to the party, and even then plays an unfortunate second fiddle to Feldstein\nuntil she has her unexpected tryst and can be the main character on the screen\nwithout her co-star. Billie Lourd is hilarious as Gigi, a prominent side\ncharacter with the best running joke in the film, and some of the other kids\nare effective in narrow roles, although half of the actors are in their mid-20s\nalready and look it. There are a couple of gay kids in their class played by\nNoah Galvin and Austin Crute who play both their characters as if they’re acting\nin a play within the movie, and most of their scenes are well-written and funny\nin an absurd way. (I’d watch a movie that starred just those two.) In fact,\njust about all of the actors playing the students are good at what they’re\nasked to do \u2013 in contrast to the adults in the movie, most of whom look out of\nplace or uncomfortable, and all of whom are poorly written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is nothing you haven’t seen before, unfortunately.\nA couple of kids want to have fun\/drink too much\/get laid before they go to\ncollege, and have a hard time doing any of these things correctly at first,\nonly to get to the big party and have things go wrong before they go right. There’s\nsome witty banter early in the film, but the script can’t keep up the pace, and\nthings start getting progressively weirder as the film progresses. Their\nprincipal (Jason Sudeikis) moonlights as an Uber driver, and the situation gets\nkind of creepy. Another of their teachers has serious boundary problems, leading\nto a seriously cringey movement at the party. Amy’s big moment is sort of\nmarred by a bad writing decision at the end of the scene that was unnecessary. One\nof the girls ends up in jail \u2013 seriously, the entire plot is ripped from Can’t\nHardly Wait<\/em>, which isn’t a good enough movie to rip off in the first place \u2013\nand the way they get her out is a ridiculous plot contrivance. And how are they\ntotally unable to figure out where Nick’s aunt lives in an era where most\naddresses are listed online and everyone has the internet on their phones? Oh, in\nthe span of a few seconds one of the girls loses her phone and the other’s runs\nout of charge, because of course it does. These characters deserved a smarter story,\nright up to the resolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was just too easy a movie to pick apart. Very little of\nit seemed realistic, and the script couldn’t maintain all the energy from the\nfirst few scenes \u2013 especially the one scene in a classroom, where the one-liners\nare flying back and forth and the kids all show their most interesting sides.\nThis movie took in around $22 million at the box office, beating its budget\ncomfortably but spurring a weird\nsocial media campaign<\/a>, led by director Olivia Wilde, that made it seem like\nthe movie was a flop. The better explanation is that the movie didn’t find a\nbig audience because the script wasn’t good enough. Feldstein and Dever did\ntheir parts, but this is a forgettable entry in the sad tradition of mediocre\nteen comedies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to like Booksmart, now streaming on Hulu, and the first twenty minutes were so promising \u2026 but I don’t think it lives up to its opening, and while there are some clever running gags and a few good quips, in the end it’s another teen movie that’s just a shade smarter than some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1077,102,215],"class_list":["post-8123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-movies","tag-disappointments","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8123"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8127,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123\/revisions\/8127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}