BEFORE: I know, I know, I said "No more high school romances" but I said that after I'd set up this year's chain, and I had plans to get this franchise crossed off from my Netflix list. If I don't watch them now, they're just going to linger there forever, and I want my pop-up list to stay fresh, and not be filled with films way past their expiration dates. So I'm just going to have to endure three more films about high-school kids falling in love. OK, four this week, but that's it. I'm way too old to understand or even watch these films.
Joel Courtney carries over from "Players". I think when I set up this chain I confused him with Jai Courtney, who was in "Suicide Squad" and "Divergent", but this is a different guy.
THE PLOT: A high school student is forced to confront her secret crush at a kissing booth.
AFTER: I'm shocked that this got made at all, in this age of woke-ism and stuff. Wouldn't you think that the "Me too" movement would have killed a plot based around a kissing booth? Forget the fact that it's a practice of selling kisses at an event to raise money, which is a bit too close to prostitution for a high school fund-raiser to even get involved with, but it removes that barrier of consent, it's more like compliance if you're the one working the booth. You HAVE to kiss this person, on the lips, even if you don't want to. This is surprisingly icky when viewed through the modern lens. OK, so we're teaching high-school kids important lessons, like that person has five dollars, so pucker up, buttercup, the PTA or the drama club needs cash.
It's all window-dressing here, unfortunately, for just a simple old-fashioned love triangle. You can cover it with kids playing "Dance Dance Mania" at the Santa Monica Pier or being on the soccer team, but this isn't "She's the Man" or "A Brilliant Young Mind", this is just about a junior girl being attracted to a senior boy, who is the older brother of her best friend. Oh, if only the two friends weren't born on the same day, to two women who were ALSO best friends, and raised almost as if they were siblings! That's just going to make things awkward and complicated, and if only the two friends didn't have a secret RULE about dating each other's family. Which is really backwards, because it's clear that these rules were reverse-engineered by the screenwriters to forbid EXACTLY the situations that they wanted to bring into the story.
Everything then was put in place BEFORE the romance between Elle and Noah, to make it all the more forbidden and naughty-like once it comes to pass. The big football-player Noah beats up anybody who threatens his little brother Lee, and also forbids any other boy in school from asking out Elle, because she's like his little sister in a way. (Ooh, that's also going to make things more forbidden and naughty when they get together...). So Lee's mom is the surrogate mom for Elle, because her mother died in a very "Beaches"-like fashion, and the two families have been hanging out together ever since. Well, if anybody understands complicated, problematic teen relationships, it would be Molly Ringwald, wouldn't it?
Since Elle's always over Lee's house, swimming in their pool, there are a lot of opportunities to see big brother Noah walking around wearing very little, and she's in her swimsuit, so yeah, stuff is bound to happen. And then when Elle and Lee hit on the idea for the kissing booth to raise money at the school carnival, and for some unknown reason the school with the strict dress code allows it, well, everything's going to come to realization, isn't it? Elle had to manifest her fantasy relationship with Noah into the real world via the kissing booth. But honestly, with Elle constantly getting drunk and nearly taking off her clothes at every party, something was bound to happen sooner or later, even though Noah wouldn't let anybody even look at her. Good thing, if it weren't for him she probably would have been sexually assaulted at a party due to her inability to keep her clothes on and her habit of blacking out.
Noah gets accepted to Harvard, not quite sure how that happened. Maybe they finally decided to get a football team and they needed to enroll some jocks to explain the game to them. But that's going to put a time limit on Noah and Elle's relationship, as he's got to leave for Boston at the end of the summer. (Funny, we saw prom and then it was summer, but we never saw Noah's graduation. It's a strange omission, but he was absent so much in those last few weeks of school, maybe he missed it.). When he finally gets on the plane, Elle is unsure about the future, but she knows that she'll always remember her time with Noah.
Now, the formula dictates that Elle should end up with Lee, Noah's brother and her best friend. But we don't get there in the first film, however I took so long to watch this that they did make two sequels, which are also on Netflix. I want to predict that Elle will eventually end up with the younger brother who is also her best friend, but perhaps there are a few more twists and turns in the story before we get there. Then again, this first film got slammed for being clichéd in addition to sexist, so who knows, maybe that was the original plan but it got changed up, there's really only one way to find out.
And to think it all started with a kissing booth. An outdated, sexist, misogynist, straights-only kissing booth. It sure seems like an idea that had its time and place, only that was long ago and we should all be past this sort of thing by now. It feels like maybe the writers grew up in the 1950s, or reading stories about the 1950s, and they didn't realize that times have changed?
Directed by Vince Marcello
Also starring Joey King (last heard in "Despicable Me 4"), Jacob Elordi (last seen in "Saltburn"), Meganne Young (last seen in "The Giver"), Stephen Jennings, Chloe Williams, Carson White, Molly Ringwald (last seen in "Teaching Mrs. Tingle"), Morné Visser (last seen in "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom"), Jessica Sutton (last seen in "Escape Room"), Zandile Madliwa, Bianca Bosch, Michelle Allen (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Joshua Eady, Byron Langley, Judd Krok, Frances Sholto-Douglas, Evan Hengst, Sanda Shandu, Hilton Pelser, Trent Rowe, Nathan Lynn, D. David Morin, Waldemar Schultz, Megan du Plessis, Lincoln Pearson, Jack Fokkens, Michael Miccoli, Juliet Blacher, Jesse Rowan-Goldberg, Chase Dallas, Lindsey Abrahams, Robin Smith (last seen in "Invictus"), Khanya Kerwath, Alex Henry (last seen in "Irresistible"), Dan Elijah Rudin
RATING: 5 out of 10 Halloween costumes
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