Saturday, May 25, 2019

Super Bad Broads

Movies: Booksmart

Olivia Wilde's (yes, actress Olivia Wilde directs this film) Booksmart is doomed to be compared to 2007's Superbad. To be fair, the films share some pretty substantial similarities: both films depict two ride-or-die buds trying to make it to a big party during their senior year of high school; both films have a scene of a drunk person vomiting on/near their make-out partner; both films feature a high school party broken up by the cops; and both films share a sibling: Beanie Feldstein, who plays control-freak valedictorian Molly in Booksmart is Jonah Hill's younger sister.

But Booksmart has new life breathed into it. It is woker, gayer, and Gen-Zer-er than its predecessor. Gone is the homosexual panic and casual misogyny of Jonah Hill's Seth and Michael Cera's Evan and replacing it is a queer female main character (Kaitlyn Dever's Amy) who, by the way, is spending a gap year in Africa helping women make tampons, and a plus-size (which is never remarked on) female main character (Feldstein's Molly) who is bossy, whip-smart, and has a framed photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her bedroom.

But perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of Booksmart is the crucial scene on which the entire plot hinges: Molly is in a gender neutral bathroom listening to a couple fellow students right outside the stalls discuss how she is annoying and condescending. She comes out of the bathroom to confront them, rubbing her acceptance to Yale in their faces, assuming they--who have partied and goofed around the last four years--are far less successful than she. As it turns out, they too are accepted into Ivy League schools (except for the dude who got recruited to code for Google and was offered a six-figure salary right out of high school). Molly is, as the kids say, shook. She realizes in that moment how foolish she and Amy have been: they avoided partying and studied hard, assuming that because they are disciplined, they will come out much further ahead than their classmates. But, as one of Molly's tormenters says to her with a sneer, "Oh, we care about school. We don't just care about school."



This scene, which upends a huge high school movie trope that pits nerds against cool kids, is pretty great. It's rare to see a smart girl realize that maybe she actually doesn't know everything and has room to improve. Of course, instead of internalizing this information and using it to fuel empathy for others and herself, Molly's solution is to convince her more introverted buddy to party their fucking asses off on the last day of school so that they can say that, yes, the *technically* both partied AND studied in high school. Technically. Additionally, Molly wants Amy to hook up with Ryan, a skater girl whom Amy has a crush on. And Molly just might have a crush of her own, which she is too proud to reveal.

The movie mostly focuses on Amy and Molly's attempts to make it to a party thrown by Nick, a hot popular dude and the class vice president (of course, Molly is the class president). But since the two girls never socialized with any of their peers, they don't know the address and have to endure two additional parties in their quest to find Nick's party.

At heart, Booksmart, like Superbad, is about friendship. The relationship between Amy and Molly is not so different from Seth and Evan's. Amy is the more passive friend (like Evan) and Molly is the bossier, more aggressive one (like Seth). As a former (still??) bossy girl who borderline bullied some of my friends growing up, I felt a kinship to Molly. You rarely see a character like her--and even more rarely are you encouraged to empathize with a character like her. But her story arc is so real. Behind her driven, ambitious nature is a real fear of her peers and of not being good enough. So when her "thing" (being smart and successful) is basically revealed to be everyone's thing since many of her "slacker" peers turn out to also be successful and smart, her mind is blown and her armor has to come off if she wants to grow as a person.

Booksmart is wickedly hilarious and features some truly weird scenes (inadvertent drug ingestion leads to an animated hallucination scene) and lots of cameos from funny folks such as Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte. The best part is the all the different "types" of high school kids--the gay, flamboyant theatre people, the rich weirdos, the cool teacher, the stoners--all get mixed together into a really nice soup of humanity at the various parties. Rivals and allies change throughout the evening, so that even though there is plenty of conflict, it never feels like a tired "nerds vs. jocks" cliche.

Grade: B+

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Scent of a Woman

Movies: Her Smell

Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell goes from zero to one hundred in the first act and never takes its foot off the gas pedal. It's an intense, nervy film that follows the downfall of a riot grrrl rock goddess in the vein of Courtney Love and her climb back to redemption.

Elisabeth Moss, in a vanity-free and nakedly vulnerable performance, plays Becky Something, front woman to a 90s riot grrrl style punk band Something She. Becky's atrocious behavior--canceling tours, getting blackout drunk backstage--has reduced the once enormously popular band to playing clubs when they used to sell out theaters. Despite Becky's narcissistic behavior, bandmates Ali van der Wolff (Gayle Rankin) and Marielle Hell (Agnyess Deyn) have stuck by her side even though their manager, Howard (Eric Stoltz), is about to walk away after Becky's antics have nearly bankrupted his company.

Unwillingly along for the ride into Becky's descent into hell is her ex-husband, Dirtbag Dan (Dan Stevens) who is essentially raising his and Becky's young daughter, Tama, by himself. Becky's mom, Ania (Virginia Madsen,) also makes appearances, saddened--though not shocked--at her once sweet daughter's self-destruction.

Perry stages the 2 hour and 14 minute film over five scenes of about 25 minutes each, giving the film a very theatrical feel. It's effective--you get to know the characters right away and see what they're all about. Becky is the epicenter of a shitstorm of diva behavior and abuse, Marielle is the more enabling band member, and Ali is the band member who most aggressively pushes back (only to get dragged back in). The majority of the people in Becky's life are also financially dependent on her in some way or another which prevents many of them from writing Becky off and walking out of her life. They also, against all good sense, love her.

Her Smell (a title which I actually like, although critics have indicated they think it...stinks) is a story about addiction and how an addict--especially one with money and power, in Becky's case--can be a black hole to those around her, sucking up time, money, energy, emotions, and resources.

Her Smell, it must be said, shows how addiction affects rich, attractive, white people. Even after the worst of it, Becky still has a home, has access to her daughter, has friends who come to forgive her, and avoids prison (though she does not avoid lawsuits). Her Smell is *incredibly* white. All the main characters are white, with a bodyguard and a shaman (yup) as the only characters of color. While this might make a certain sense given the genre of music and time period, it was very notable. I mean, hell, the main character's name is fucking Becky. It's for sure a film about white privilege whether the director intended it to be or not.

It is nice to see a movie starring nearly all women that really isn't about femininity. Certainly, a viewer could read "mean girl" behavior into it, or see Becky as a "bad mother", but the film doesn't really make Becky's femaleness the center of things, but rather her addiction and her narcissism. It's refreshing to see a woman behave badly and not be killed or punished for it (but again, this is a white, attractive woman, so she already has a better shot than most). There's something thrilling and voyeuristic about the film, which also feels like a low-key horror movie with an unnerving soundtrack and a volatile main character.

I enjoyed Her Smell. It's not a great movie, but it definitely gets under your skin. Moss does a stunning job playing a woman you can't fucking stand but somehow still care about. And although her redemption does come off as a bit tidy, there's still enough uncertainty at the end of whether she'll be able to stay clean and keep her promises--or relapse into a monster once again--to leave the audience feel shaken.

Grade: B+

Friday, May 3, 2019

A Woman's Liberation

Movies: A Fantastic Woman

I recently had the honor of co-hosting a screening and discussion of Sebastian Lelio's 2017 film A Fantastic Woman at my job. This is the third film of Lelio's I've seen (he also directed Gloria Bell and Disobedience) and he is fast becoming a favorite director of mine.

*plot points are spoiled in this review*

A Fantastic Woman is about Marina, a trans woman with an older partner, Orlando. On the night of Marina's birthday, Orlando gifts her with two tickets to an exotic vacation. It's clear that they love each other very much and are serious about their relationship (they recently moved in together to Orlando's apartment). But later that night, Orlando wakes up feeling sick. He falls down the stairs as they head to the car. Although they make it to the hospital, Orlando passes away from a brain aneurysm.

From this point on, the film is about how Marina navigates instance after instance of transphobia--from the cops who suggest that the bruises Orlando sustained after falling down the stairs might actually be from Marina abusing him, to Orlando's ex-wife who forbids Marina from attending the wake and funeral--all while Marina is grieving and trying to find closure in her partner's death.

Although A Fantastic Woman is a wonderful, beautiful, deeply felt portrayal of a trans woman (played by a trans actress, Daniela Vega), it's not always easy to watch. Marina is misgendered, deadnamed, called a "perversion", forced to strip for an (unnecessary) physical examination, and even assaulted (though not beaten or raped, thank god). Some critics have suggested that the barrage of transphobia Marina faces is excessive, a kind of "tragedy porn" for the audience. But I felt that it was an unflinchingly real portrayal of what many trans people have to deal with in daily life.

Through it all, Marina never loses her nerve and the more she is insulted or told to go away, the more she rebels. She also has people on her side--her sister, her boss, her singing instructor, and her memories of Orlando.

In the discussion following the screening, we had a great discussion about the film, facilitated by three people with academic knowledge and/or personal experience in trans issues and their perspectives added to my appreciation of A Fantastic Woman. One facilitator pointed out the numerous instances when the director chose to focus on Marina's body when it may have not been necessary to do so and asked what the point of that was. There is an especially aggravating scene where Marina is forced to comply with a physical examination as part of an investigation about the bruises on Orlando's body. The camera stays on Marina's bare upper-body, as if to make the audience complicit in objectifying her and staring at her. I didn't get the sense that the director was trying to be exploitative in these scenes, but it most definitely felt uncomfortable.

Even if Lelio had blindspots in making this movie, overall I think it is an important film. For one, he actually cast a trans woman to play a trans woman (unlike many other movies about trans people where they often cast cis people to play a trans character). Secondly, Marina is a three-dimensional character. She is talented, in love, angry, grieving, scared...she is a human being trying to retain dignity while those around her treat her with contempt. Finally, A Fantastic Woman is not a cute after school special about "tolerance"--it faces transphobia full on, but never crumbles beneath the weight of hatred and ignorance. It has a happy ending for Marina and is a film that is full of hope, even in shitty circumstances.

Grade: A