Post by Dracula on Dec 7, 2022 10:53:31 GMT -5
Not Okay(12/6/2022)
The movie Not Okay, which debuted on Hulu in the summer, opens with a content warning alerting the audience that among other things the film contained an “unlikable female protagonist” and that’s a pretty good hint as to what the film’s tone is going to be for better or worse: hyper modern satire plugged into “the discourse.” The film opens with a woman getting super publicly “cancelled” and we then flash back to see how she got to that point. Her offense: she faked having been the witness to a terrorist attack in Paris when she was actually asleep in her hotel room when it happened, and then used the public sympathy to boost her journalism career and social media profile. This was most likely inspired by that one comedian who claimed to have been at 9/11 and also on that one lady who earned the public’s ire when she made that one joke before a flight to Africa. The film doesn’t try to excuse this person’s behavior but does try to build a certain amount of empathy for what drove her, namely a desperate desire to be more interesting than she really is. People think that it’s easy to boost one’s self with social media these days but really social media popularity is pretty well correlated to actual popularity and it can often feel like if you can’t manage to get followers you don’t matter and that almost certainly burns all the more if you aspire to be a writer at some hip Brooklyn news magazine like this person does, and not all of us can live unique, glamorous, and dramatic lives. In that context it’s not too hard to see why someone might get it in their head “to fake it until they make it” but this lady plainly took it too far. Still, this is a tricky tone to set and writer/director Quinn Shephard does a pretty good job of it as these things go. Ultimately the film is pretty on-the-nose about most of its themes and its actual humor is rarely as sharp as its satirical intent, but I think it has a point to make and makes it in a reasonably entertaining fashion.
***1/2 out of Five
The movie Not Okay, which debuted on Hulu in the summer, opens with a content warning alerting the audience that among other things the film contained an “unlikable female protagonist” and that’s a pretty good hint as to what the film’s tone is going to be for better or worse: hyper modern satire plugged into “the discourse.” The film opens with a woman getting super publicly “cancelled” and we then flash back to see how she got to that point. Her offense: she faked having been the witness to a terrorist attack in Paris when she was actually asleep in her hotel room when it happened, and then used the public sympathy to boost her journalism career and social media profile. This was most likely inspired by that one comedian who claimed to have been at 9/11 and also on that one lady who earned the public’s ire when she made that one joke before a flight to Africa. The film doesn’t try to excuse this person’s behavior but does try to build a certain amount of empathy for what drove her, namely a desperate desire to be more interesting than she really is. People think that it’s easy to boost one’s self with social media these days but really social media popularity is pretty well correlated to actual popularity and it can often feel like if you can’t manage to get followers you don’t matter and that almost certainly burns all the more if you aspire to be a writer at some hip Brooklyn news magazine like this person does, and not all of us can live unique, glamorous, and dramatic lives. In that context it’s not too hard to see why someone might get it in their head “to fake it until they make it” but this lady plainly took it too far. Still, this is a tricky tone to set and writer/director Quinn Shephard does a pretty good job of it as these things go. Ultimately the film is pretty on-the-nose about most of its themes and its actual humor is rarely as sharp as its satirical intent, but I think it has a point to make and makes it in a reasonably entertaining fashion.
***1/2 out of Five
