BEFORE: Will Forte carries over from "Booksmart", playing a dad two nights in a row. This was originally going to be where I would watch the film "The Laundromat", and put three Will Forte films in a row, but that's a key film that's going to get me from July 4 to the start of the documentary chain in mid-July, via another set of actors. So that film is tabled, and the chain closes up without it, putting two school-based films next to each other - and as a result, two actors carry over instead of one.
If "Booksmart" reminded you of "Superbad", you weren't the only one. I can't believe "Superbad" came out 13 years ago, but it's true - and it kind of takes that long for somebody in Hollywood to say, "Hey, let's do a female spin on "Superbad". And then it becomes a trend, and somebody else says, "Let's do a film like "Superbad", only with three boys instead of two, and they're all five years younger."
For bonus points, not everyone realized this, but Beanie Feldstein is the younger sister of Jonah Hill, who was born Jonah Hill Feldstein, and dropped the last name when he got into movies. So that's another reason "Booksmart" was reminiscent of "Superbad". I could have followed up with two more movies with Beanie Feldstein, recently added to my list - "How to Build a Girl" and "The Female Brain", but I'm going to table those, too. They don't link back to my chain, and I don't want to mess with my plans if they're going to take me all the way to the end of July. Plus they link to a bunch of the films in the romance category, so perhaps they belong in February.
THE PLOT: Three 6th grade boys ditch school and embark on an epic journey while carrying accidentally stolen drugs, being hunted by teenage girls, and trying to make their way home in time for a long-awaited party.
AFTER: Young Max finds himself at odds with his father, who doesn't seem to have proper boundaries, and finds it adorable that his son is, umm, getting in touch with his body, so to speak. Dad also warns Max not to fly his super-expensive rare drone that he needs to use for work, so you can probably guess what's going to happen, it's SO blatantly telegraphed here. Max and his two friends, who call themselves the "Bean Bag Boys", have managed to get invited to a classmate's party, where kissing games are going to be played. So they decide to use the drone to spy on the teen girl next door, who's bound to kiss her boyfriend at some point. Or maybe her girlfriend, which might be even more interesting.
This is a last-ditch, desperate move for the Bean Bag boys, after experimenting with a "CPR doll" (one that looks more like one of those "Real Dolls" that people have sex with, hmmm...) and then watching a bit of a porn movie online (where, it turns out, the people didn't even kiss - not on each other's mouths, anyway). So it's drone or nothing, and that's kind of the upside and the downside of a story about tween boys - everything is pitched as some kind of absolute. Everything they think they know, they claim to be experts about, and everything they don't know, they're totally clueless about, and it's an EMERGENCY that they find out right away.
I get what someone was trying to do there, capture the feeling of what it's like to be a young boy, to be clueless about some things (sex, alcohol, drugs) but an expert on others (umm, battle card games, video games, and thankfully, the new rules about consent). But then the things that they don't know about seem very important, and they'll look like posers at school if they don't at least pretend to understand how to "do the sex" or brag about how many tiny sips of beer they can handle. But my problem here is that most learning isn't binary, you don't not know something one day and then suddenly fully understand it the next, it's a constant process that, ideally, is going to take your whole life, or at least your first 18-21 years to start paying off.
I did like that these three boys had different interests, different personalities, different family situations, and that helped to create a bigger, richer tapestry for the story. Thor's into musical theater, but starting to question whether this interest is hurting him socially. Lucas is into following the rules, and Max is starting to dig girls, one in particular. OK, it's not much, but it's something - and they slowly come to realize that they're friends because they live together and their parents know each other, and maybe in time they're going to develop different interests and step outside their small social circle into a larger world, and that's OK.
But the misadventure with the drone leads to a terrible set of bad decisions in order to fix their mistake before Max's Dad comes home from a business trip. The teen girls decide to hold the drone hostage, so they steal one girl's purse in retaliation. This leads to the boys being in possession of a party drug, and instead of doing a quick trade for the drone, Lucas's penchant for following the rules makes him feel like they need to turn the drugs in or dispose of them, rather than give them back to the users. But then THIS means they have to buy another drone, skip school and ride bikes to the mall, raise money to buy the drone, contact a stranger over the internet, AND cross a six-lane highway to get to the mall. These are all the situations that they warn you about in school, and so quite ironically they have to BREAK all these rules in order to stay out of trouble. It's partially clever, but I could just feel all the parents out there, cringing while watching these kids do all the things that parents and teachers tell them not to do.
I've talked recently about cause and effect - if we see a kid race blindly across a highway, for example, and nothing bad happens to him, that kind of sends the wrong message to the audience, that doing this is not preferred, but it could be OK. Especially if the audience is young and impressionable, there needs to be a bad result, in order to discourage kids out there from repeating these fictional kids' exploits. I'm not saying all three boys should have been run over, but maybe something negative needed to happen. And NITPICK POINT, what happened to the kids' bikes at this point in the story? They rode bikes almost all the way to the mall, then suddenly they were on foot, crossing a highway.
I bet many parents would also agree there was too much sex stuff in this movie. It was handled sort of delicately, like the jokes were done in such a way that if you understood how to "do the sex", you might more fully understand the punch lines, but if not, a kid might not even notice that something went flying by over his head. Still, an easier way out would be to just not have so much sex stuff in the first place, kind of like the weird ending of "Sausage Party". (Note, this film comes from the same producers as "Sausage Party", and also "Superbad".)
A lot of other connections to yesterday's film, namely that getting to a party is the most important thing, the ultimate reward in the quest. Making out at the party, alcohol, drugs, all this carries over, too. One character taking the fall and getting in trouble to save the others is a key plot point in both films, and then in both cases, the punishment (grounding in one film, jail in the other) is quite easily dealt with. Another sticking point for parents here is probably seeing a very grounded Max leave his home quite easily, when another character points out, "What could possibly happen? Getting MORE grounded?" There they go, sending out the wrong message again.
Yeah, I know it's a movie and it's supposed to be funny, but then I don't really find the idea of watching 12 year olds sipping beer to be funny. Or playing "spin the bottle", for that matter - even though there it was a very forward-thinking thing to have the party host announce that by playing the game, people are consenting to kissing, but the random nature of the game itself means that someone could end up being forced by the game rules to kiss someone they didn't want to kiss, and that's edging toward behavior without consent. They can try to dress it up but they didn't change it. A better move would have been to find another kissing game that isn't so completely old-fashioned, because I'm not even sure today's kids still play this game. Are they going to also play with yo-yos and hula hoops? There was a VR game being played upstairs, why couldn't the kids who wanted to kiss play some kind of high-tech dating sim game, that would have really updated the plot.
Also starring Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "The Predator"), Keith L. Williams (last seen in "Lemon"), Brady Noon, Molly Gordon (also carrying over from "Booksmart"), Midori Francis (last seen in "Ocean's 8"), Izaac Wang, Millie Davis, Josh Caras (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Lil Rel Howery (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Retta (last seen in "Other People"), Michaela Watkins (last seen in "How to Be a Latin Lover"), Sam Richardson (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Macie Julies, Zoriah Wong, Lee Eisenberg, Benita Ha, Lina Renna (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Alexander Calvert (ditto), Christian Darrel Scott, Chance Hurstfield, Stephen Merchant (last seen in "Movie 43"), Mariessa Portelance, Enid-Raye Adams,
RATING: 4 out of 10 anti-bullying chants
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