BookSmart (2019)

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The Spanish title translation is more accurate.

I dunno, like it's solid. But I felt the trailer oversold it somewhat as an amazing movie about smart girls partying hard.... "Getting straight As, giving zero F's..." So I kinda thought this was going be about smart girls partying as hard as they'd studied. But lo, it was not really. It was more about a pair of nerdy girls coming to full grips with their social inadequacies, and then back to grips with their graduating lives. And Pandas.

There were a fair few funny bits, but it was all a bit hodge-podge. They had these great characters but they kept them mostly in this limbo space, not quite straight-faced yet not cranked right up to caricatures. Kind of a series of sketch comedy bits.

There's all the standard sex-positive gags you get in this kind of coming-of-age film now days, although I don't think these were nearly as well done nor had nearly as much heart as the same stuff done in Blockers (2018). In some ways this feels like it tried to hard to be indie? I don't know, I'm sure it's all about my overblown expectations, but this just didn't land right for me. Felt like it never quite hung together. Could be entirely generational.

It did have a whole new thing I've never seen at the end-credits, which is a special sticker for Gender Balanced Production - if you're interested in that see more here:

J* gives it 3 stars.


PS. I was expecting something more like Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) but with girls.

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