Booksmart by Olivia Wilde
Booksmart or the establishment of a new era for coming-of-age movies
WOW. Olivia Wilde is a fantastic director apparently. Booksmart is an R-rated teen movie. How often does that come around? It’s witty, feministic, fashionable, smart, real & honest. Netflix is upping its game of original film content.
I’ve always been a huge fan of the coming-of-age genre. There’s smth innocent about it. There were the 80s with The Breakfast Club, Stand by Me, Ferris Bueller. There were the 90s with The Virgin Suicides, Dazed & Confused, 10 Things I Hate About You. There were the 2000s with Juno, Mean Girls, Superbad.
And there are the 2010s with an extreme shift in moods. Teen movies are never the same. No more PG-13 bullshit. Just over-the-top honesty. The Edge of Seventeen, Lady Bird and such. Every decade has it’s style. Dramas, Crime, Action movies stay relatively the same but teen genre shifts itself higher and higher with every generation. Booksmart is the culmination of 2010s.
You can be both smart and fun. You can party and get to Harvard, Stanford. There’s no need to be a bookworm and stay inside all the time to get into Yale or Columbia. You can fail 3 years in a row but get into Google. Choice is a mirage. You can do both. That’s the ultimate truth. Let’s do both.
Friendships, conflicts, stereotypes, relationships, teen sex, graduation, college, freedom — it’s all depicted in the most honest way possible. Kudos to Olivia.
*