BEFORE: Working every day this week, seven days in a row. It's thesis time at the college, so every day one class or another has booked the theater space, and the shifts are all LONG and each one is followed by a reception afterwards. So that's four late nights, I have to stay after each reception and make sure the porters clean up after. I'm halfway through the cycle, and I'm just exhausted. Took a quick nap when I got home from work today, but that wasn't much help. Three more days of "Hell Week", I think I can maybe allow myself one day off and still make it to my Memorial Day film on time, but I'm not sure if I'm going to need that.
Fred Hechinger carries over from "The Pale Blue Eye".
THE PLOT: An introverted teenage girl tries to survive the last week of her disastrous eighth grade year before leaving to start high school.
AFTER: Oh, God, this movie was just awful, and I try to not say that very often. Look, I get that being a teen girl is awkward, but just SO many cringe-worthy moments here, WAY more than in "Moxie", even with all its rampant sexism and sexual assault and women being treated unfairly and inequitably. This one just made me want to curl up in a ball and rock back and forth - not that it brought back bad memories of junior high, because I was never an eighth grade girl, but everything here was designed to make the viewer so uncomfortable, like as in "Why would anyone want to WATCH this?" Was that the whole point or just a random side effect?
Anyway, there's clearly an unintended theme for this week, what with all the self-sabotaging seen in the lives of the women in "Lovely & Amazing", that carries over here. Self-doubt, non-self-awareness and so much self-sabotaging, but Kayla's at that tough age where she realizes that nothing is going her way, but still she persists in making YouTube videos about her life, and acting as if everything's OK, but it's just not. She either needs to find a way to improve her life, or find a better way of dealing with how bad life can be, or seem.
Remember that trend a few years back, when people were making videos on the theme of "It gets better"? Those were for the LGBTQ crowd specifically, like maybe you're going through some shitty times now, people are mean and ignorant but eventually you're going to find your tribe or at least a few better people, or you'll learn better ways of dealing with people's ignorances and prejudices, so things are bound to get better. Maybe. Well, here comes this movie with a different message for today's teen girls, and that message seems to be "Things aren't going to get any better, so you'd better accept that, and maybe lower your expectations, because other people suck and they're going to continue to suck, so, really, change is going to have to come from within. Sorry."
(Also, your mother's not coming back, your father's going to continue to annoy you and the cute boy's not interested in you at all, so you'd better learn to have a relationship with the weird one. Not that that's all bad, some of the best boyfriends and husbands started out as weird geeks, and if you think about it, they may treat you better, over time, because the cute boys, the ones who can have any girl they want, won't appreciate you at all. Does that make you feel any better? Nah, probably not.)
This is listed as a "comedy-drama" but I didn't really find anything funny in it. At least it's right in pointing out that making video blogs is really self-serving, and as a coping mechanism for your problems, that process is not really going to help, not in any way. Try a movie blog, I find that helps with some of my stress and anxiety, any time I'm in a bad mood, I can just come here and type up a negative review - I still have my problems, but I do get rid of some of the anger by pointing out how awful a movie was. Same goes for doom-scrolling on Snapchat or Instagram, it will eat up a large portion of your time, but it's just not constructive in any way, and then you'll still have the same problems, but you'll be an hour older.
But really, this is shaping up to be "teens in crisis" week - after the actress with all of the anxieties in "Lovely & Amazing", there was all the sexism and patriarchy that caused Vivian to start her feminist club in "Moxie", and then there was the thing that happened to Mattie Landor in "The Pale Blue Eye", and then something similar happens to Kayla here, when an older boy offers to drive her home after she met with the high-school kids at the mall. This looks like a thread that will continue for another two or three days, depending. I didn't mean to set this up as a recurring theme, it just happened. C'est la vie.
This was filmed in and around Suffern, New York - I know a bit about the area because my ex-boss used to have a storage unit there, and we'd sometimes drive up to drop more things off there. The mall scenes were filmed in White Plains and West Nyack - I know the Nyack area, too because I used to have an aunt and uncle that lived up there. There's supposed to be a great BBQ restaurant in Suffern, so I keep trying to get up to it, but it's fairly out of the way for us. But mostly I'm done with this movie now, so thank God I never have to watch it again.
Also starring Elsie Fisher (last heard in "The Addams Family"), Josh Hamilton (last heard in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), Emily Robinson (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Jake Ryan (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Daniel Zolghadri (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Imani Lewis, Luke Prael, Catherine Oliviere, Nora Mullins, Missy Yager (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Shacha Temirov, Greg Crowe (last seen in "Freakonomics"), Thomas John O'Reilly, Frank Deal, J. Tucker Smith, Tiffany Grossfeld, Trinity Goscinsky-Lynch, Natalie Carter, Kevin R. Free, Deborah Unger (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Dina Pearlman (last seen in "Bad Education") and archive footage of Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?").
RATING: 3 out of 10 school shooting drills
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