Filipe Manuel Neto
Sep 5, 2022
9/10
A very good comedy and generally palatable to almost everyone.
I just finished watching this movie with a friend of mine, and we were both pleased with what we saw. The film is an excellent comedy that manages to reach two different audiences: today's youth and their parents, who were young twenty years ago, because it makes direct allusions to various cultural elements that were very familiar to them. Personally, I was still very young in 2002, I was about to enter adolescence, but I was also touched by some nostalgic aspects.
The script is reasonably simple, but it works well: it all starts with Stephanie, and the way she decides to become popular and accepted after being snubbed at school. Things go well, and she becomes the archetype of the perfect teenager: sexy, blonde, cheerleader, sexually expedite, with an enviable boyfriend and a promising future. The icing on the cake was going to be her election as High School Prom Queen, and a massive after-party, complete with loss of virginity. It didn't happen: in an elaborate dance choreography, and by the work of a rival, she falls and ends up hospitalized, in a coma, for twenty years. In 2022, at last, she wakes up to a horrible reality: her body has changed, life has passed, her boyfriend married her rival, she is not the same and has nothing of what she wanted. So, she decides to go back to the High School, finish what she started and be Prom Queen… but the School has abolished that!
The script seeks to include a series of cultural allusions to the 90s and 2000s, ranging from films and series (Sex and the City, Deep Impact, Aly McBeal, Clueless), songs and musical artists (Britney Spears, Madonna, Mandy Moore) and objects of fashion and mass culture (the Tamagotchi, for example). We, who saw ourselves as teenagers between 2000 and 2010, know these things well, they were our fads and fashions. The film also criticizes the way today's youth view social and environmental causes, virtual life and social networks. In fact, it is easy to lose sight of reality when we have Instagram and Facebook full of thousands of friends and followers, and the film criticizes the young people who spend most of their time on these networks and the “influencers” who earn a lot of money at the expense of them, in addition to making jokes about the insincere way in which many young people face environmental and ecological causes, which they follow out for fashion and not because they are really aware of their importance. The film is very inclusive, and there are several characters that are of diverse ethnicities or homosexuals, explicitly or implicitly. This is something that Hollywood have been insisting on a lot after the Me Too movement and the Oscar boycott by black actors a few years ago, and I understand, although I don't like to see films used for political and social activism.
The cast has a powerful Rebel Williams in the lead role. She is not a rookie actress and has already shown us what she can do in other comedies like Hustle or in dance movies like Pitch Perfect, and I daresay she is one of the most promising faces of Australian comedy this year. time. The film also features excellent guest appearances by Justin Hartley, Sam Richardson, Zoe Chao, Mary Holland and Chris Parnell. They each did their work very hard, and Chao, Richardson and Holland deserve special praise. As for the younger cast, I would highlight the good performance of Angourie Rice and also Jade Bender. The film also has a cameo by Alicia Silverstone, who has made similar films in her past, as we all know.
Technically, the film appears to be very low-key, overall. The cinematography is regular, there are no major visual gimmicks and the camera opts for a conventional shooting style. Filmed in Georgia but set in Maryland, the film chose its filming locations well and builds many of its sets over green screen, in high-quality, expensive CGI animation. The soundtrack makes good use of popular pop songs, in recognizable voices, and there are some very good dance routines where Williams shines.