Tyler123
Member
BOOKSMART is the best YA comedy of recent years, or the best comedy of all time. It's really smart, but it doesn't give up every chance to be funny. It's all too easy to misunderstand, but misunderstanding is the theme of the movie. See it for what it is, and watch it for the full enjoyment.
A glamorous actress turned director, making her film debut; Four female screenwriters wrote the script; A comedy about two high school girls on their last night in high school who decide to play their nerdy lives. This description is fraught with misconceptions: the all-female cast represents a "feminist" film, full of angry jokes about castrating men; The best director is Olivia Wilde. Even if you're directing a bad movie, you can still say, 'she's new' or 'it's great that she's new'; The plot of two nerds who decide to spend a night in the gutter looks like a faux girl version of Superbad.
All of these guesses are wrong, and on the wrong scale -- even the phrase "the best YA comedy of recent years" is wrong. BOOKSMART is a comedy that's only been made in a few years, and it wouldn't have been made without the new wave of female self-consciousness that #MeToo has spawned. This means that BOOKSMART is a stand-up comedy for a generation, busily picking up on all of today's issues about girls, busily answering the awkward high school questions that every modern girl has to face, in addition to being funny, and even in the midst of it.
Everyone is embarrassed in adolescence, especially in this social network generation, and the worst is the girls of this awkward generation, who are basically an embarrassment composite: you either become an angry wench or you become a campus queen bee. You can only choose one extreme and develop your role in it, otherwise it's easy to fall into the awkward trap of being politically incorrect. Now there is no ordinary girl, everyone is a marginal girl, every other is the mainstream, but everyone in every type looks exactly the same.
BOOKSMART is one of the most myth-busting films of recent years, deliberately even provocatively, as if to shout "you don't understand modern youth." Of course, it just wants to tell you a timeless truth: "seeing is not believing." It's like the campus queen bee is actually kind and the narcissistic geek is actually intelligent. But we've seen this before, back in 1985, in "The Breakfast Club."
But while BOOKSMART doesn't offer a more definitive answer, it does offer a more recent application: the short hair tattooed skateboard girl isn't necessarily the t-girl; Anti-social awakening female wenqing is actually very gentle; Lesbians are not born knowing how to have sex with women; Faculty members have been underpaid for years, so much so that they can only work after class. The absurd debauchies fool students, in fact, have already been admitted to harvard, Yale and Stanford. BOOKSMART challenges our imaginations about homosexuality, YA movies, breakfast club, barbie dolls, fat-shaming and objectification of women's bodies. It hides these subversives in every joke and makes you laugh until you realize you were wrong all along.
A glamorous actress turned director, making her film debut; Four female screenwriters wrote the script; A comedy about two high school girls on their last night in high school who decide to play their nerdy lives. This description is fraught with misconceptions: the all-female cast represents a "feminist" film, full of angry jokes about castrating men; The best director is Olivia Wilde. Even if you're directing a bad movie, you can still say, 'she's new' or 'it's great that she's new'; The plot of two nerds who decide to spend a night in the gutter looks like a faux girl version of Superbad.
All of these guesses are wrong, and on the wrong scale -- even the phrase "the best YA comedy of recent years" is wrong. BOOKSMART is a comedy that's only been made in a few years, and it wouldn't have been made without the new wave of female self-consciousness that #MeToo has spawned. This means that BOOKSMART is a stand-up comedy for a generation, busily picking up on all of today's issues about girls, busily answering the awkward high school questions that every modern girl has to face, in addition to being funny, and even in the midst of it.
Everyone is embarrassed in adolescence, especially in this social network generation, and the worst is the girls of this awkward generation, who are basically an embarrassment composite: you either become an angry wench or you become a campus queen bee. You can only choose one extreme and develop your role in it, otherwise it's easy to fall into the awkward trap of being politically incorrect. Now there is no ordinary girl, everyone is a marginal girl, every other is the mainstream, but everyone in every type looks exactly the same.
BOOKSMART is one of the most myth-busting films of recent years, deliberately even provocatively, as if to shout "you don't understand modern youth." Of course, it just wants to tell you a timeless truth: "seeing is not believing." It's like the campus queen bee is actually kind and the narcissistic geek is actually intelligent. But we've seen this before, back in 1985, in "The Breakfast Club."
But while BOOKSMART doesn't offer a more definitive answer, it does offer a more recent application: the short hair tattooed skateboard girl isn't necessarily the t-girl; Anti-social awakening female wenqing is actually very gentle; Lesbians are not born knowing how to have sex with women; Faculty members have been underpaid for years, so much so that they can only work after class. The absurd debauchies fool students, in fact, have already been admitted to harvard, Yale and Stanford. BOOKSMART challenges our imaginations about homosexuality, YA movies, breakfast club, barbie dolls, fat-shaming and objectification of women's bodies. It hides these subversives in every joke and makes you laugh until you realize you were wrong all along.
