Booksmart

Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019) Two preppie straight razors, Amy and Molly (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein), reach the end of their senior school-year with a shared world-shattering epiphany: for all their efforts to be nose-to-the-grindstone students and at the top of their class, many of their fellow graduates will be going to the same prestigious colleges, but with the bare-minimum amount of work.

 

This is bad. Superbad, in fact. But, better.

 

Their reputations as by-the-book wonks firmly embedded in the zeitgeist of the student body (who have no idea they have a zeitgeist), the two decide that on the party-filled night before graduation that they will prove that they are party animals and try to fit in a night of fun to make up for all the time they spent in the library—the college library, for which they have bogus 24 hour access cards (that's as "radical" as they get).

Their goal on their penultimate school-night is to attend a party being tossed by student council VEEP Nick' (Mason Gooding)—Molly being president—who's aunt isn't coming home from her cruise because the ship's many heads have gone tail's-up. They plan to show all the popular kids that they can be just as wild and reckless as they can. Trouble is 1) they don't know where the party is and 2) they have no transportation. They tell Amy's parents (Will Forte, Lisa Kudrow) that they're going to the library. That's what they usually do, so no prob'!

They'll eventually hit three parties, become perpetually embarrassed in front of peers and mentors, ingest accidentally, trip badly, have their romantic hopes realized only to have them dashed irrevocably, get thrown in the slammer, and actually be late for something for the first time in their lives. And at the end of it, of course they graduate. They've earned it.

It sounds a lot like a lot of teen comedies from American Graffiti to Porky's to American Pie to all those terrible Cannon films nobody can find anymore to Superbad, but this is the teen Bridesmaids, where, instead of focusing on horny guys, it focuses on ambitious horny girls. You've come a long way, sista's, but one should make note of it, especially suffering through their male-centric predecessors for oh-so-many years. Sure, you can point to precedents, but one cannot deny that Booksmart is faster and more furious than any of those others, like one of those coming of age movies with an "Incredible Mess" storyline* at the pace of the original Deadpool, with performances that fall more in the Strangelove-Zero Mostel type of intensity. Credit must go to the screenplay writers, but also heavily to the cast (encouraged to ad-lib their lines at every opportunity) and the anything-for-a-joke direction of Olivia Wilde.

Wilde fills the frame to bursting at the same time that she's optimizing the "great-but-do-it-faster" style of directing. There's no hesitancy for laugh-pauses, no stuttering momentum. This is a pell-mell blitzkrieg of humor and if you miss a joke, then, well hell, that's why there's DVD's, slow-poke. And MVP awards should go to Deyer and Feldstein for their comedic pairing which has the same schlemiel/schlimazel drive of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in The Producers. 

Laugh? I thought I'd hemorrhage.

 

* Usually reserved for comedies—but they can be dramas, too—"Incredible Mess" movies are one where the protagonist or protagonists, for reasons of their own, get into a situation that makes their situation worse, which only becomes more intricately worse when they try to resolve it, leading to an escalating series of calamities that seem insurmountable. Good example? It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Dr. Strangelove. Risky Business. After Hours. Don't Look Up. Incredible Messes. But very good films.

The Boss Baby

They've made a sequel to this one—coming out (so to speak) July 2nd—but, like Problem Child 2 and Look Who's Talking Too (and most families), the sequel will probably get less attention paid to it, so I guess I better publish the "long-in-gestation" review of the original.

Enfant Terrible
or
"A Movie That Combines the Unbearable Smugness of Alec Baldwin with the Unbearable Smugness of...a Baby." -- John Oliver

So many movies have come down the pike, but few have touched on the first crisis in a person's life—that little slice of time when a kid goes from being "the pride and joy" to "the old baby." There are a lot of hard issues there—displacement, abandonment, and dealing with sharing the attention and affection that was previously exclusive. "Only child" is a lofty perch to fall from.

Take Tim Templeton (voiced by Tobey McGuire as an adult/Miles Bakshi as a 7 year old): he had the full attention of two (count 'em) two parents—dedicated employees of PuppyCo.—who would read to him at night and sing his favorite song to him as he drowsed to sleep (for the "record:" "Blackbird" by Lennon-McCartney, but...McCartney). Then, the "second child" comes along and things change. Radically.

It's hardly fair. Tim hasn't changed. He's merely...redundant. The "new baby" is Theodore "The Boss", inexplicably wearing a business suit—and in Tim's view, anyway—can talk (with the voice of Alec Baldwin). His parents (voiced by Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow) are seemingly oblivious to this, making the 7 year-old the only one who can see "the truth" about his younger sibling. This creeps Tim out, and he's determined to expose the truth about Theodore by providing proof of his abilities to Mom and Dad.

Already, a "Calvin and Hobbes"-ian kiddie-verse has been established, where the realities of kids is far different than that of the clueless parents. It's not as extreme as "Toy Story" where alternative view-point is that of inanimate objects, but, still the efforts it takes to keep the kiddie-world-view under wraps is far more complex than the Pixar's series' "Okay, toys! Drop in place!" Fortunately, the older generation has a low threshold for exhaustion, so while Mom and Dad conk out, the kids are unsupervised and counter-conspiring. Much like real-life.

Tim's initial strategy is to expose Theodore's ability to talk to the parents by gathering some evidence, which he manages to acquire when a "play-date" is arranged with other local babies. In reality—or the babies' reality, anyway—it is a BabyCorp. corporate presentation on the danger of a rival company, PuppyCo (why, that's where Tim's parents work!) that plans to create the ultimate pet to supplant babies for the little limited love the world has to offer—they don't say that, but it's my take on it. Theodore, because he doesn't react to being tickled, is one of the babies chosen to be management, and so, he's been sent to find out what's going on at PuppyCo. in order to...I dunno...start a Disney franchise about a fashion designer who kills puppies. Sounds reasonable.

Anyway, Tim and Theodore decide to join forces, so that they both get what they want: Theodore gets a promotion and a corner office, and Tim gets Theodore promoted and out of his house. Along the way, we learn that if you want to visit BabyCorp. all you need to do is suck on a special pacifier—which sounds problematic in a world of baby monitors—and that the Corporate babies at BabyCorp. stay babies by sucking on a secret formula that stops their aging process. It all sounds very complicated and messy, not unlike babies, but basically it boils down to Babies and Puppies are in a war for being the cutest generators of affection and that it somehow matters.

It doesn't. It really doesn't. While the idea of corporate robber barons being just big babies has a kind of snarky, cynical appeal, the machinations to create the house-of-cards plot are far too complicated to sustain. And while the film breezes us along, lulling us with jokes featuring big-eyed babies and bigger-eyed puppies, it can't completely stall the feeling that we're being had, with a combination of gooey sentiment and veiled sarcasm, to keep us from thinking about it too much.  

One always looks at movies with an appreciation towards the efforts to bring it to the screen. The voices are well-cast, the colors bright and the drawing/pixilation all imaginatively smooth and un-glitchy. I particularly liked its comic timing. That's a lot of effort. It's in service to a slight story, however, that doesn't have much internal logic to it...in this reality, or the alternate one it conveys.

I mean, if you can't believe in babies and puppies, what's the point??