Booksmart

BOOKSMART 

Director: Olivia Wilde. Cast Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jessica Williams, Lisa Kudrow, Jason Sudeikis.

Nothing about this film inspired me much, from the title, to the cast, to the trailer… Not even the poster looked that good.
I thought “Do we really need another teen-comedy, about people graduating from high school, trying to go to parties and have sex and being as rude as only kids can be at that age?”
Well, apparently we do.
Not for anything “Booksmart” ended up on Obama’s list of his favourite film from 2019.
Obviously, every film needs to be judged according to his genre (if any). You can’t really compare a horror with a comedy or a documentary and so on. But this is certainly one of the strongest coming-of-age/teen-commedy of the last few years and it will probably end up being used as a sort of milestone for this decade, the way Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Breakfast Club were for the 80s, Clueless for the 90s and, like or not, Superbad for the 00s (thought, I can assure you, this is A LOT BETTER)
This is a comedy which is so effortlessly inclusive and progressive that it doesn’t even have to make a point about by drawing your attention to it: it just is.
The humour is always sharp, yes sometimes crude, yes often puerile, but never cheap and always advancing the story or its characters… and most importantly, quite fun too!
The script is honest and smart as it plays with tropes and archetypes and doesn’t just subvert them but gives a whole new fresh and modern twist.
Yes, we still have the “graduation speech” scene at the end and the “learn about myself” moment and rivals will inevitably become friends, but for most of it, the film just hangs all the superficial assumptions and the clichés at the door and let the real kids step forward, and boy the kids of today are a lot smarter than we were! 😉