When people ask me my favorite movie genre, I always tell them it’s the coming-of-age stories, but that’s a cheat answer. Whether it’s Spiderman, Lady Bird, Star Wars, or American Pie, every genre fosters this storyline, and we love them because we all had a unique one of our own. Seeing the wildly exaggerated studio hits, the jarringly authentic indie darlings, or the anything in-between style is like a home-base for movie-goers. The latest and greatest in this category is Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, which takes a premise you know and brings it not only into the zeitgeist of Gen Y and Z, but is current up to the meme, lingo, and even social issue of the minute.
Anyone who's seen it would quickly surmise the same thought, that Booksmart is basically the female Superbad— the brazen and the timid going through life together and encouraging the best for one another while still maintaining that selfishness that all teenagers inherently have. While Booksmart is moderately racy, as opposed to Superbad coming in at downright filthy, the two do share strikingly similar expositional qualities. Being off to college soon with a secret kept by the timid that isn’t let out until the end, both pairs of best friends set out for the last party of the year before graduation, and naturally, their last chance to take a risk, get laid, get arrested, what have you. And whether they’re doing donuts in a cop car or tripping off drugs that are “like ayahuasca, but Asian. Asian-huasca,” they’re doing it with hilarious chemistry. Beanie Feldstein’s portrayal of Molly is basically the counterpart to her brother Jonah Hill’s character; not in ambitions necessarily, but in the over-the-top display of idealism. With Jonah’s false high of thinking he’ll get the girl by supplying alcohol at her party, and Beanie’s false low of thinking she screwed up high school by not partying, the two charge headfirst into proving— something— to themselves. These siblings have a knack for comedic timing and dynamic, and if I don’t see them collaborate as onscreen brother and sister in the next few years, I may scream. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal did it in Donnie Darko, and it was amazing, and that was just for comic relief. If we could get straight to the hilarity, please. Booksmart takes everything we love about a comedy and fuses it with the most relatable moments of life. Amy watching her crush do a kick-flip in the quad in slow-mo set to a psychedelic reggae beat, or Molly falling into an immaculate fantasy dance sequence with her crush when she sees him across the room, are the kind of introspective scenes I like to see played out. They actually evoke something other than just sexual energy, and we deserve to be seeing a more 360 view of how people fantasize, rather than a basic emerge-from-the-pool swimsuit scene from a male gaze. It made sense in Fast Times, but with the accessibility of porn nowadays, it’s probably good that we’re digging a little deeper. Superbad was the first real conduit between Seth Rogen’s mind and the general public, and it was iconic. Every college freshman getting a fake ID considered, if even for a half-second, being a 25-year-old Hawaiian organ donor named McLovin. It’s hard to forget that blood stain on Jonah Hill’s pants, just as easy as it is to remember the cringe-worthy peace sign that Kaitlyn Dever throws up as she’s backing out of a bad encounter with her crush in Booksmart. Having had the absolute privilege of working on that campaign, the amount of times I paused the movie at my desk to repeat a line to my coworker was innumerable, and even after the four months I spent with it, I still took my cousin to see it in theaters a few weeks ago and watched as she had to put her head between her knees from laughter more than a few times. I hope she never forgets that viewing experience, because I sure won’t. The first time I saw Superbad was consequently the first time in my recollection that I felt like I’d actually stepped inside of a dude’s mind, which is perhaps unfortunate, because I saw it on accident at the prim age of eleven. But I’ve always appreciated honesty; in life, yes, but in film too, and Seth Rogen certainly nailed the “bro” dialogue. However, Katie Silberman of Booksmart raised the bar; the personalities given to at least five other high school classmates, secondary characters at best, still make them feel like stars of the movie because of the authenticity that seeps through. I’m talking slang, speech patterns, even nuanced body movement written into an action line, or directed, or improvised by the cast. I’m thinking Silberman and Wilde may have had to go Drew Barrymore from Never Been Kissed to make this, or more likely, they’re just geniuses. If you’re like me and love to see the coming-of-age stories hit theaters, go see Booksmart. Re-watch Superbad, then go see Booksmart again. Hearken back to your own unpredictable life at 17, and relive that. Appreciate the lack of censorship in both, because a squeaky clean coming-of-age story is downright fiction. In an age now when we all share our inner thoughts online without being asked to do so, Booksmart may not have the same shock value for guys as Superbad did for me, but as I’ve said before, I was indeed eleven, so I might be an outlier. But, both films will certainly make you laugh at every un-sanitized thought spoken aloud between best friends.
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October 2023
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