Last Five Films I've Seen (Out of 5)
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse (Mackesy, 2022) 4.5
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (Crawford, 2022) 4
Confess, Fletch (Mottola, 2022) 3.5
M3GAN (Johnstone, 2023) 3.5
Turning Red (Shi, 2022) 4.5
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 5
615 Film
Letterboxd
Last Five Films I've Seen (Out of 5)
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse (Mackesy, 2022) 4.5
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (Crawford, 2022) 4
Confess, Fletch (Mottola, 2022) 3.5
M3GAN (Johnstone, 2023) 3.5
Turning Red (Shi, 2022) 4.5
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 5
615 Film
Letterboxd
Sweet and empathetic take--where everyone is proven to be more multidimensional and deeper than prejudices first allowed for. There's a few stumbles narratively (the Jessica Williams subplot adds nothing, isn't clever, and won't look good even two years from now; Nick leaving Molly at the pong table comes off as more dickish than oblivious) that prevent this from becoming this year's Ladybird in being empathetic to all, including the older generation.
Still, it's a lovely drawn arc of teenagers that respects the brains of its teenagers and seeks to explain how empathizing with everyone around you leads to a greater sense of control. It'll easily be around the bottom of my top ten when the year is over.
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
How do you guys think I did on my review? I ask because I'm tapped to review Late Night next and in the event I didn't articulate the female perspective well enough here, I'd review something else that week. No one on my staff is holding my feet to the fire or anything like that. I'm just more self-conscious about my writing in the current climate.
Last Five Films I've Seen (Out of 5)
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse (Mackesy, 2022) 4.5
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (Crawford, 2022) 4
Confess, Fletch (Mottola, 2022) 3.5
M3GAN (Johnstone, 2023) 3.5
Turning Red (Shi, 2022) 4.5
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 5
615 Film
Letterboxd
Very sweet hearted movie. Big yay for the two leads. Muted yay otherwise. But I laughed a lot.
The writing was shallow. Every scene plays like a good TV skit, with one joke and one payoff. No layers, all surface. That's fine as far as it goes and a lot of the jokes were funny, but it isn't good film writing.
You could re-edit most of this film and it wouldn't matter, because the script has no structure and the heroines don't particular want anything more definite than to get to a party.
The pacing was a little wonky. Kurdow, Sudekis, and Williams coulda been cut out entirely and the movie would have lost nothing. (And it should have lost about 20 minutes of runtime. Nobody needs a teen comedy that approaches the 2 hour mark.)
Wilde goes too heavy on the musical cues in substitute for real emotion, often overriding the truth of a scene with loud pop music.
I did like how the party argument was shot, with people in the background out of focus and gradually becoming away of what's going on as the scene continues.
There's was a certain unreality to this that was entertaining but otherwise empty. Every character turns out to be more or less a total sweetheart and fully emotionally aware and totally supportive. I don't know if that's a function of how teen movies have changed over the last 20 years, but I thought it odd this movie has no more ambition than to tickle the audience every 5 minutes. The mostly succeeded, though, so good movie? I guess.
ETA: For all the film's lip service to rah-rah girl power feminism, I did think it was weird that (a) the one girl's story centers around her getting laid, which isn't all that removed from 80s T&A exploitation films and (b) the way the film characterized the "theater kids" was really crass, pure stereotype, and it'll date badly.
Last edited by Irish; 05-27-2019 at 11:17 AM.
I really hated this. At first I was like, "hey Pop Trash, maybe you're just old and out-of-it and it's really you and not the movie that is the problem" but then I thought back on how much I loved other films of its ilk like Lady Bird and Eighth Grade, and was like "nah fam, it's the movie, the movie sucks."
It would be way too lengthy to get into why I didn't like this, but for one thing, the idea that a school has multiple people in the same orbit getting into ivy league schools (Yale, Stanford, Harvard) while seemingly being at a public school(?) seems glaringly out-of-touch esp. in light of the college admission scandal that just broke. Insanely unself aware about class.
Last edited by Pop Trash; 06-03-2019 at 05:47 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
^ Oh hey, I’m finally not alone on this, lol. I was beginning to wonder.
I know quite a few homeschoolers around my age ("BOOK SMART" kids, if you will) who went to places like Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Oxford. All from very humble homes- even farms. And my local high school had a lot of kids who graduated with my brother go to NYU, Harvard, and Dartmouth as well. Its all about... applying yourself? Plus wasn't the point that, even though Amy and Molly were totally focused on their education, that those kids also focused on their academic aspirations?Quoting Pop Trash (view post)
Nope. I call bullshit. I live in California and even the UC system is incredibly competitive (let alone Stanford). You would think the movie would be self-aware enough to at least throw a namedrop to the UC system (UCLA, UCB, hell even UC Davis... all of which are very competitive... I believe UCB has less than a 20% acceptance rate... also the UC system is at least a little more affordable for in state tuition, not cheap mind you, but more affordable than eg. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, USC, etc.). I know some very bright people who maybe didn't have a 4.0 but maybe a 3.5 or so from hs who got rejected from the UC system and had to go to the next tier down, the Cal State system (San Francisco State and the like). Mind you even these are perfectly fine schools, just not as prestigious as the UC schools, let alone the ivy league. Not to mention the fucking cost of these schools if they got accepted in the first place. Even if they got a scholarship they would have to figure out room and board and such. It's so tone deaf after the college admission scandal broke. The movie is so muddled about this. Like some witchy druggy burnout girl just miraculously gets into Harvard? Oh and don't get me started on the guy who gets a six figure job at Google right out of hs? It's actually -statistically speaking- harder to get a job at Google than to get accepted to Harvard. I constantly had to explain this to my friends outside of the Bay Area when they were like "hey, just work at Google between other jobs." Plus the school gave me serious Cali public school vibes, but the off the chart acceptance rate seems like some elite prep school? Anyway, fuck this movie. Worst movie I've seen in the theater since Green Book.Quoting Zac Efron (view post)
https://www.inc.com/michael-schneide...n-harvard.html
Last edited by Pop Trash; 06-05-2019 at 12:05 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
The movie premiered at SXSW the same week the college admissions scandal broke. What should Wilde have done, exactly?
Anyway, the college thing was a one-off joke and a plot catalyst. The film isn't terribly self-aware. The kids are to the hard left politically and pay lip service to all the right causes, but they seem pretty clueless about how well off they really are. (I mean, one of them drives an old Volvo to school, ffs.) But then the movie isn't about their class naivete.
I found the college acceptance thing true to life, especially around Triple-A and Nick, the two kids going to Yale and Georgetown. (I would have made the joke about Cornell instead of Georgetown, to take the obvious shot.)
A lot of the kids I grew up with and went to high school with attended big, brand name universities. A good chunk went to the Ivy League. Being accepted there is about the right zip code and the right skin color and the right masthead on your transcripts. Scandals aside, this isn't a mystery in America. Kids of affluent parents go to "good" schools. (But yeah, I will snobbishly suggest it's competitive in that the U.S. has a large college age population. You do need to front and put up a little more than a solid B average.)
The only thing I found false was Jared, the rich kid who tries and fails to throw a graduation party. IRL, he would have been one of the most popular kids around. For one, people are drawn to money. For another, his wealth would have meant easier access to drugs and booze and the out of the way places needed to enjoy them (like an enormous boat, unchaperoned and in the middle of nowhere).
It would have been tone deaf about class before the admissions scandal, I'm just saying it's even more awkward now that we are aware of all this garbage. I'm not anti movies about rich people per se (I like Clueless, but I think that movie is hyper self aware and smartly satirical of Cher being a total rich kid, and Citizen Kane is one of my faves, love the Social Network as well) but there seems to be a trend with recent comedies not really being aware of their own class issues (recently This is 40, Trainwreck, and now Booksmart have all really irritated me for this reason). They all feel ignorant of how the average American lives, and especially how the average Angelino or New Yorker lives... but these were all made by late period Judd Apatow and/or Olivia Wilde (with an assist by four screenwriters) so maybe I shouldn't be surprised.
Last edited by Pop Trash; 06-05-2019 at 01:23 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Totally agree. The timing is awkward and the perspective is insular and weird.
It made more sense when I discovered Olivia Wilde descends from Scottish nobility, boarded at Andover, was accepted to Bard, and later married a literal Italian prince.
When you're so elite Christopher Hitchens was your babysitter.
Last edited by Pop Trash; 06-05-2019 at 01:39 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
This is nails on chalkboard bad.
This was truly terrible.
And not to the fault of Kaitlyn Dever, who was actually grounded in reality. Everyone else felt like they were out of sketch comedy with very overthetop acting and dialog. There's definitely some truth to the above statements. I thought it was a dream sequence when everyone in the class was in these top colleges and google jobs, but nobody ever woke up from this. I'd be curious what the teen demographic thinks of this movie, because it feels very out of touch. Wherein Eighth Grade and Dope, two "current" teen films still feel plausible.
I cannot understand any raves about this movie one bit.
I had the exact same thought. Made me think of a scene from this much better teen comedy, one that is much smarter about class issues as well.Quoting Ezee E (view post)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfFoaijCerQ
The raves on letterboxd are insane and dollars to donuts most of those raves are coming from the Gen Z set (15 -25) this is appealing to. On the other hand, the movie is tanking at the box office, so the word-of-mouth from presumably the same Gen Z set must not be that great.
The history of this screenplay is interesting. Apparently it has been kicking around since 2009 or so and was regarded as one of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Initially it took place in Michigan over the course of a few months and the one girl wasn't a lesbian. Then it went through the Hollywood committee writer meatgrinder.
Last edited by Pop Trash; 06-06-2019 at 05:48 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Compared to recent teen films like Lady Bird and The Edge of Seventeen, this lacks the big picture theme/structure that would accumulate its individual set-pieces into something more, and I suspect that some aspects coming off as clueless might be borne out of this. But performances are all great and charming, and so many of those set-pieces are really hilarious; I almost cried laughing at the whole drug trip sequence. Apart from the humor, that sequence also solidifies to me how potentially fresh and funny a new voice can bring to the ol' raunch comedy formula. It's both very funny to hear unfiltered stream-of-consciousness thoughts from the two girls, and also fascinating because it's rare to see a mainstream comedy shares female ideals/fantasies like this through that scene. 7/10
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
I think this worked to a large extent because the two main actresses are great with each other. Their witty banter keeps the movie alive and funny, but other than that it isn't very good. It's obscenely long for one thing - almost 30 minutes longer than After Hours, the movie it's trying to be a female teen version of. Add to that a cast of characters that are forced to do what the script calls on them even when it doesn't fit them and basically every cliché of a teen comedy film, but LGTB-friendly.
My wife and I laughed a shit ton during this. The two leads absolutely killed this movie. Actually I though the entire cast was phenomenal. For a directorial debut, i thought Olivia Wilde knocked this out of the park. I got Edgar Wright vibes during the first half of this. Oh and excellent soundtrack; great choice of music during the swimming pool sequence.
Excellent point here and I've always noticed this but never really thought of it as a negative; if anything I perceived as Hollywood sucking its own dick in the same vein as La La Land.Quoting Pop Trash (view post)
Counterpoint- my class of 2002, had 255 kids... 7 went to Ivy League Schools.
At least you lived in the NE where that makes a little more sense.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
It does? Kids in that high school had a lot more money than anyone in my town. I didn't know anyone with a $30 million yacht.Quoting Ezee E (view post)
Well, if we wanna nitpick it further, the kid with the yacht wouldn't attend a public school.
Was that supposed to be a public school? I'm still unclear on that. It seems almost like a charter school or alt high school.Quoting Irish (view post)
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Doesn't Harvard or B/U factor in local Mass. kids as part of the admissions process? I would think it would. Pretty sure Stanford gives extra dibs to local California kids.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6