crystalcharee

I started watching this show, thinking it'd be another high school drama with pretty twenty-somethings acting out a middle-aged dude's regurgitation of every other high school drama. I figured that if it didn't suck too bad, it'd be good to have on in the background while I did other things. Instead, I found myself just stopping to watch. Everything about the show, the writing, acting, cinematography, design, etc. captures the tiny moments they way they feel instead of what they look like. It's like life. Beautiful, bland, and, oh, so painful.

I didn't realize that this movie was made by people who are related to each other until I read some of the reviews but that explains why the chemistry between them felt so natural and strong. I was happy to see Leah Thompson again, as it had been a while since Caroline in the City which was one of my favorite shows when I was young.

I loved this movie. It was pitch perfect from beginning to end with no false notes either in the acting or the writing. I don't know much about cinematography but nothing felt bad about that either. The plot isn't super-compelling; a young woman dates a string of losers and finds herself at the end -- we've seen it a million times. But it was nice to see it done so well. This movie wasn't a product, trying to sell a happy ending or a sad ending or the idea of true love or girl power or sister power or action figures, or anything.

It was just a story about a woman growing up and getting an idea of who she is. Her relationships both with herself and the people around her are believable, and she is quirky and likable and selfish and introspective and poetic and angry without being cartoonish about any of those things. It's audacious to expect a plot like this to hold the attention of an entire audience, or at least it would have been two years ago. This is exactly the kind of story we need in 2018 (and it came out last year, so it's perfect timing).

Someone else described the movie about a woman who ruins her relationships with a bunch of men but that's not accurate. The men were mostly terrible, except for the last one, all seeing her as an appendage that either completes or doesn't complete them. To be fair, she sees them the same way, again, until the last guy.

No one, from the newly-gay mom to the movie-star sister felt over-the-top or one-dimensional. Some of the tertiary characters were less dimensional, but they should have been, as the story wasn't about them. But they all felt believable, as though there was more teach each of them, like they all were main characters of their own stories, which was underlined by the candid interviews that each of her love interests had with an unidentified documentarian or viewer.

I actually liked this because I relate to the habit of talking to an imaginary interviewer about my life in the past tense as a way of trying to figure out how I feel about things that are happening in the present. Not sure when or why I developed this habit but I think a lot of people do it, so I wasn't confused when I saw it on screen. It also helped underline how each of the men saw the main character as a reflection of themselves and what she was to them instead of an actual, autonomous, multidimensional human being.

I also really liked the famous-sister aspect with the paparazzi being present almost as scenery. Usually a movie about a movie star or her not-famous sister will center around ambition and jealousy and this didn't. It was just the sister's job to be a movie star. So the setting and some of the plot meandered into movie making but the focus never did.

I think my favorite part was the relationship between the sisters. They had a kind of semi-functional dynamic in the beginning, which changed and repaired throughout the movie. Whatever silent resentments and baggage they had about each other, which naturally build up over a lifetime for any siblings, weren't exaggerated or made the focus of either the plot or their relationship. They liked each other and sometimes didn't, respected each other and sometimes didn't, and loved each other -- always.

Anyway, I don't write reviews very often but I wasn't expecting much when I clicked on it and ended up really enjoying the movie. I was curious about who wrote it, which is how I ended up here and it upset me to see the bad reviews, and as much as those people are entitled to their opinions, I thought I'd add mine to the mix and balance out the overall impression of the move to anyone else stumbling across these reviews.