Olivia Wilde’s new film provides a hierarchy without the misfits, jocks and nerds that once occupied teen stories
Teen movies love to classify people into cliques and categories but Olivia Wilde’s new comedy Booksmart blows that all apart. It is a teen movie for the ages, mixing elements of Superbad, Dazed and Confused, perhaps a touch of Lady Bird, but, in its own unpretentious way, Booksmart is also a tale about the dangers of labelling people in the first place. It makes the teen movies of yesteryear look old-fashioned, because they are.
The film’s heroes, Molly and Amy (played by Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), are the dorky, studious types, who forsook partying for the library all through high school and earned Ivy League college places as a result. But their world falls apart when they discover that everyone else is going to good colleges, too. All the people they defined themselves against – the skater dudes, the mean girls, the rich kids, the drama gays, the girl with a reputation for giving out handjobs – they all studied and partied. Molly and Amy could be considered the classic “geek girls”. Critic Emily Yoshida puts them in what she sees as a new archetype of late-2010s teendom: the “socially conscious busybody”, in the tradition of Reese Witherspoon in Election, Saoirse Ronan’s Lady Bird and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. But maybe today’s fluid teens aren’t so easy to pin down.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2X8Cnrv
