Forget Teen Movie Stereotypes, 'Booksmart' Is Warm & Empathetic

13 July 2019 | 10:18 am | Anthony Carew

"Where so many teen movies are built on hostility, 'Booksmart' abounds with empathy."

BOOKSMART

★1/2

If The Breakfast Club is the definitive teen movie, it’s no surprise the genre has been built on stereotypes. Echoing the way teenagers search for self-identity and belonging by adopting (and often discarding) guises, teen films have been a world filled with freaks, geeks, and cliques, the high school cafeteria a place where Mean Girls’ Lindsay Lohan or Me And Earl And The Dying Girl’s Thomas Mann can survey the teen species like an amateur anthropologist, listing a taxonomy of reductive types.

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, initially feels like a new polish-up of those old ideas, the simple jocks and nerds of yore swapped out for, like, self-branding hypebeasts, theatre gays, and non-binary skaters. But the charm of the film is the way it becomes an examination of those stereotypes, its great lesson being that to judge or pigeonhole is perilous to both those judging and those being pigeonholed.

The set-up is simple: Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever play a pair of overachievers who’ve spent their high school years in isolation from, and opposition to, their peers. They’ve avoided the regular rites of passage – sex, drugs, socialising with anyone outside their two-person bubble – in favour of a devotion to good grades and future careers. But, in the great first act revelation, they discover that all the kids who did the sex and drugs ended up at prestigious colleges too. So, on the eve of graduation, they pledge to cram a whole high school of partying into one night.

The result plays like a female spin on Superbad (Feldstein is even Jonah Hill’s sister). There’s comic hijinks, lawlessness, and misadventures, sure, but also a surprisingly deep study of a somewhat obsessive platonic friendship, wavering in the face of that great teen movie separator: going off to college. Our heroines have to learn who they are when apart, and in the world beyond high school. That discovery mirrors the great revelation that other people are complex, not so easily dismissed. It’s an empathetic approach to a familiar tale, illustrated by the fact that there’s no antagonist, no generic mean girl or jock bully. Where so many teen movies are built on hostility, Booksmart abounds with empathy.

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APOLLO 11

How could you make a documentary about the moon landing, and not even mention Stanley Kubrick, the guy responsible for faking the footage? Jokes aside, Apollo 11, at the very least, functions as a glorious rebuke to one of the paranoid internet’s most beloved, asinine conspiracy theories. Forget the tinfoil hats, here’s all the evidence you need.

Watching Apollo 11, what’s clear is that the entire mission to land a man on the moon was — as is the American way — an event made to be watched; this revolution built to be televised. Stitching together eye-opening archival footage, much of it shot on glorious 70mm, Todd Douglas Miller’s documentary is entirely assembled from in-the-moment footage. It’s a glorious shrine to the technological ingenuity of mankind and the cinematic wonders of thorough coverage.

Where so many post-hoc docs rely on talking heads and scant handfuls of black-and-white stills — at this point we should mention the complete absence of talking heads — Apollo 11 comes to you in wide-screen, brightly-coloured celluloid. Undertaking one of the most significant missions in human history, the boffins at NASA figured we should document the thing; and, thus, astronauts travelling into space and stepping onto a never-before-stepped-on lunar surface are handed cameras.

The resulting images are a weird confluence of technical minutia, all-too-human home videos, and IMAX-worthy large-format chronicles of the glories of the cosmos. And the resulting movie is one that feels as immersive as any world-building CGI spectacular; with images on such a grand scale as to summon Kubrick.

THE WHITE CROW

★1/2

For its first two acts, The White Crow — Ralph Fiennes’ chronicle of Rudolf Nureyev touring Paris in 1961— is overly stiff and utterly mannered. It’s a tasteful, polite period-piece that plays as so stilted it feels absent of any genuine humanity. With so many actors speaking in their second tongues, the performances all feel like they’re by people trying not to fuck up their lines, as opposed to losing themselves in their roles. Fiennes and screenwriter David Hare may jump back in time, breaking up the simple biopic chronology, but, midway into watching it, the film feels utterly inert; a well-dressed, buttoned-up, marketable failure.

And, then, The White Crow suddenly changes tack, and a lifeless movie comes to life. All the things that previously felt like fatal flaws — its stiffness, its awkwardness, its unreal air — suddenly feed into a finale. Ultimately, it’s a film in which Nureyev’s early career is all leading up to a climactic moment: the ballet dancer’s defection to the West. At the airport, our lead (played Oleg Ivenko) is literally torn between two nations: Soviet agents forcibly taking him back to (Mother) Russia, where he’ll likely be imprisoned; a glamorous Parisian pal (Adèle Exarchopoulos) hoping to find a way he can defect. In these scenes, a so-so balletic biopic turns into a classic Cold War spy-movie, rife with tension and paranoia. It makes for quite a reinvention, a final-act reversal that makes you forget, and forgive, just how dull its early stretches were.