Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Checked out the new A24 film: Eighth Grade. Another great coming-of-age story from the studio, this time focusing on a younger protagonist. While I don't think it's as masterful as Lady Bird, it's still a highly realistic and mature look at Middle School and does a great job at amplifying problems that wouldn't seem very consequential to someone who is not in Middle School. 75/100

I thought of it as Lady Bird meets Boyhood and it kicked Lady Bird's butt.

I thought Lady Bird was okay, but I had a number of issues with it. My biggest issue was that every character felt like it was written by the same person. All the arguments in the film where like battles of wits between people on the same level. The car scene and hallways scenes rang much more true to me than anything in Lady Bird. I also loved how everyone was age appropriate you didn't see any 22 year olds in the High School scenes and that was important.


Another thing that Eighth Grade excelled at was you didn't get all of these "character arcs" you didn't have five-seven characters going from point A to B to C. People showed up in the third act that had an impact on the story while other plot lines were just dropped because that's the more natural thing to happen.

Yeah, I guess Lady Bird is more conventional storytelling in that way, the highest point of praise for me for Eighth Grade was how good it was at dialogue, and those extended monologues were really something else, not the level of intelligence I would expect a 13 year old to have, but still very thought-provoking. I also really liked how realistic the film felt, a lot of those sequences took me right back to my Middle School years (Middle School was a huge roller-coaster, it was terrible and amazing all at the same time).

My only gripe with the film, is that it's so realistic, that a lot of the prolonged sequences did drain me out a little bit, it all became too familiar I wanted a more interesting event to occur. Although those embarrassing/awkward moments (as you said) made me cringe so hard, I felt myself actually squirming in my seat, so good job movie lol! Ending connected to the rest of the film beautifully as well. I don't know, I just don't really see myself going back to it as much as I did Lady Bird. Did you like Boyhood, which coming of age flicks in these past couple of years would you say you liked?

Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade opens with a scene in which a group of eighth graders are presented with gift-like boxes they’d constructed and sealed up years ago, addressed to their “future selves” and to be opened upon graduation. One of these students, Kayla (Elsie Fisher), was apparently a much more confident person at the dawn of sixth grade, certain that she would be, as the words on her self-addressed box state, “the coolest girl in the world.” But in the intervening years, Kayla became awkward and excluded, and now she spends her spare time making YouTube videos encouraging viewers to “be yourself,” which is ironic considering how uneasy she is in her own skin.

Eighth Grade doesn’t simply follow Kayla, but immerses us in the dynamics of the technologically accelerating world that influences who she is and who she wants to be. Self-presentation is ritualized throughout: Kayla wakes up, applies her makeup, and gets back into bed, modifying a selfie with an app while noting, “Woke up like this!” And we’re invited to chuckle at the ironies of Kayla’s hobbies and activities, but underlying such scenes is a strain of eeriness, as if the film were offering up a post-human spin on Pretty in Pink.

Kayla hungers for friends among her peers, and more than that, the attention of a wiry but fetching classmate, Aidan (Luke Prael). Whether online or in the real world, she fumbles to find someone to whom she can comfortably relate: Kayla struggles to text and emoji her way through social media exchanges, and when walking through a pool party amid fitter and more socially keen kids, she exudes tremulous longing, becoming a wallflower on the far end of the pool. As Kayla says at one point, “My life is like constantly being in line for a roller coaster but never having that feeling you have after the ride’s done.”

Underlying many scenes is a strain of eeriness, as if the film were offering up a post-human spin on Pretty in Pink.

Kayla’s alienation is most memorably framed in a sequence, set to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” that superimposes her smartphone activity over her face. This is an apt, if amusingly anachronistic, needle drop in that the girl is awash in some kind of mass-media ocean that rewires us year by year to adapt to a “new normal.” Adolescence has always been weird, markedly different generations having the same essential social anxieties. Hierarchies continue to be reinforced, only now it’s by who has the most “likes” on social media. Pervy dudes are everywhere, but the peeping toms with binoculars are now Snapchat trolls. And school drills are still arranged, though not in preparation for nuclear eradication, but for a random school shooting.

During one such drill, Kayla tries her hand at flirting with a glued-to-his-phone Aidan, who notes that he wishes this wasn’t pretend and there was a real shooter at their middle school. “Why?” she asks. To which Aidan responds: “Cuz then I’d **** him up.” The exchange is as funny as it is disquieting, exemplifying the discomforting shift into the new normal.

This sense of world-on-a-wire modernity is reinforced by a glossily plastic synth score, itself complementing the preponderance of facial modifications on characters’ smartphones. Everyone is self-augmenting to keep up, but no matter how hard Kayla works at it, she remains behind the pack. While social media feels like a burrow where her peers stock up on status, for Kayla it serves a quixotic purpose. Her videos are like rituals, as if she’ll become, in real life, the person she’s projecting onto screens. Even when she’s ostensibly untruthful—which is often—she curiously doesn’t exhibit guile.

Coming-of-age films typically mandate that its heroes charge confidently into the future. While Kayla finds that confidence here, Burnham’s screenplay is thankfully not so sentimental that it guarantees that life will get any easier for her. The sole child of an adoring, single father, Mark (Josh Hamilton), whose wife left long ago, Kayla was born into dysfunctional circumstances that naturally dispose her to waft further from any kind of coveted in-crowd. But in Kayla’s relationship with her father, Burnham illumines a ray of unequivocal authenticity. Crestfallen by her lack of social success, Kayla confides to Mark that she would regret it if she had a daughter who turned out like her. Baffled, he can only answer her with gushing pride and adoration.

This intimate scene, where Eighth Grade’s laptop and phone lights are eschewed in favor of a backyard bonfire, is extraordinary in how it dramatizes the unconditional love parents so often have for their children. Burnham’s film has laid out a perverse dog-eat-dog landscape of teen monsters and addictive machines where such an affirmation struggles to ring true, and yet it’s a suspended, poignant picture of rare honesty.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)