BOOKSMART – Review by MaryAnn Johanson
The next great high-school movie is here. And I do mean great. Booksmart is that rare treat: a perfect film. Smart, funny, wise, sparkling with wit both visually and in its snappy dialogue, and far, far kinder than we have been trained to expect from movies about teenagers. Or maybe Booksmart is simply an authentic reflection of These Kids Today. Are they really this nice? They make me feel old, but also my heart breaks for them in the best possible way.
I’m tempted to call Booksmart the new Clueless. This movie is emphatically not about romance, but there’s a lot of overlap anyway, in verve and style. And also in how this movie’s jointed-at-the-hip bestie protagonists, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), are — like Clueless’s Cher — sailing through high school on a wave of popularity that has felt like success to them, until they now come to realize that they have both overestimated their own triumphs and underestimated almost everything about their friends and classmates. Continue reading…