Booksmart - Review Thread

Hey I was born in 1985, that’s millennial!

I bought my wife a diamond engagement ring!

I really liked it. The main actresses are awful at physical humor but the movie doesn't exactly need them to hit those marks to be effective.

Great soundtrack, solid message, and I don't think it was necessarily preachy like say a cw show or Sabrina on Netflix is.

7.5/10 👍👍

It's been a while since I had to be the party-pooper on a well-liked comedy, but I have to be honest with myself: I didn't find Booksmart to be all that funny. Not that I outright hated the movie or anything, but it just didn't click for me. Credit where credit's due, both Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein do a really good job of anchoring the movie and turn in good performances. It's just most everything around them that didn't work for me. The two of them clearly have comedic chops and there were still moments and scenes that got laughs out of me, but Booksmart is yet another comedy that operates under the assumption that being loud and obnoxious equals being funny. Much like the characters themselves, the movie overcompensates by being at a 10 on the crazy scale when being at a 7 or 8 would've proved more effective. Nearly every character in the movie has to display some kind of over-the-top comedic trait that's almost immediately hammered over our heads (Skyler Gisondo, I'm looking at you) so that it quickly stops being funny. It's kind of telling that the best parts of Booksmart, the parts that genuinely work, are the quieter ones that just allow the characters to take a moment to be themselves and confront their fears and inadequacies. Those are the moments of the film that really sing. But when it's going for the yuks, there's often a feeling of desperation on the part of debut director Olivia Wilde to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. She gets some inspired flourishes, though, such as the Barbie doll sequence, but she has a much firmer grasp of what she wants to say underneath the jokes. And that's the movie I'd like to see.

Neglected to post my review of this.  Since the thread's been bumped:

Booksmart(5/23/2019)
Set Rogan’s Long Shot opened as counter-programing to Avengers: Endgame and was not particularly well rewarded at the box office, now two weeks later the Rogan-inspired comedy Booksmart is opening opposite the Aladdin remake and is not expected to do much better. When Blockers failed to gain any real traction last year I was pretty much resigned to the fact that this wave of post-Apatow R-rated comedies were kind of dead at the box office, but I still like them and will keep going to them as long as they’re being made and Booksmart is a pretty good one. Focusing on two high achieving teenage girls who, upon discovering that the slackers they’ve been sticking their noses up at have also gotten into Ivy League universities, decide they’re going to use the last day of high school to let loose and party for the first time but must go on something of an odyssey in order to figure out the address of the cool kids’ party. I can definitely relate to that same frustration at seeing people who do dumb stuff coasting to success, so this was in some ways a movie that was made for me and while I liked the film a lot I will say there were a couple of things keeping it from being as funny as it could have been.

I think one of those was that Beanie Feldstein’s character is painted a bit too broadly as a stuck up bully a bit too quickly and you sort of see her character arc and eventual conflict with Kaitlyn Dever coming from a mile away. A version of the film where you really come to like the character before realizing her dark side might have been a bit more effective especially since Dever’s character is rather adorable throughout, making the contrast in likability between the two really stand out. Aside from that I just felt like the jokes just weren’t quite as consistent as they could have been. Parts of it are extremely funny but other stretches are a bit short on laughs, and not necessarily intentionally so. In some ways first time director Olivia Wilde seems a bit more adept at the coming of age character-based material than with the comedy and I would be curious to see what a version of this which isn’t trying so hard to be the Gen Z Superbad would have been like. Ultimately though the film’s strengths are much more prominent than its occasional shortcomings and it proves to be one of the better made if not necessarily funniest films of its kind.
***1/2 out of Five