Hacker Cinema
Booksmart
2019 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Olivia Wilde
Two academic teenage superstars realize, on the eve of their high school graduation, that they should have worked less and played more. Determined to never fall short of their peers, the girls set out on a mission to cram four years of fun into one night.
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10 comments on Hacker News
Some that I've enjoyed recently (or rewatched):
Good One (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30319516/
Strange Darling (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt22375054/
The Creator (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11858890/
The Night House (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9731534/
The Empty Man (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5867314/
Possessor (2020) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5918982/
Booksmart (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1489887/
Volition (2019) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6385952/
Welcome the Stranger (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5716280/
Time Trap (2018) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4815122/
Wind River (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/
A Dark Song (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4805316/
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4303340/
Midnight Special (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2649554/
The Devil's Candy (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4935372/
Mr. Holmes (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3168230/
The Witch (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4263482/
A Most Wanted Man (2014) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340800/
Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Pandorum (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/
The Fall (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
In a Savage Land (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151047/
Office Space (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/
The Double Life of Véronique (1991) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101765/
Don't have Netflix so not sure what's available there, and several might not be wife-friendly. Also I enjoy weird, so YMMV.
I’m no expert but two things seem likely:
1. Genre popularity seems to move in cycles of trends. We’ll certainly look back at the Marvel eta as the time when “the nerds” took over and dominated media. My wife often remarks “I never thought I’d live the day when I saw a serious, high budget interpretation of $ {something that seemed totally underground when she was a teenager}.” I’m sure there’s a market/economic explanation for this, where Studio A and Studio B release popular movies of similar genres around the same time so Studios C-Z plan their releases accordingly. If comedy is waning right now (and I’m not sure it is) it will probably swing back around, just as fantasy and action and horror all have.
2. This article strikes me as being akin to the old “music isn’t good anymore, everything after $ {year} is trash” argument. It’s easy to look back at earlier times, pick out the gems, and decide that it was some magical time. All you have to do is forget about all the crap. (See also: Woodstock 1969 and claims of “life was simpler” about any era imaginable.) It’s hard to compare the current comedy environment to past “golden eras” while we’re still living it.
I can’t say I’ve come across too many recent comedies that absolutely killed me but they’re out there. “Booksmart” (2019) was easily the best new comedy movie I’ve seen in years. Profane and hilarious. Nora from Queens is high up there, too. We probably won’t remember this decade for comedy but I’m sure we’ll look back and identify some clear winners.
Every era is an era of horrible films. That’s Sturgeon’s law for you.
Looking at the 2010s as a whole, we got to watch some amazing films.
We got great hard sci-fi like Gravity, Arrival, Ex Machina. The coming of age genre saw entries like Ladybird, Eighth Grade and Booksmart. Animation reached new heights with films like Inside Out, Spider-Man into the Spiderverse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
We got comedies like The Artist, Grand Budapest Hotel, Death of Stalin, and Jojo Rabbit. Dramas like Moonlight, Fences, Spotlight, Parasite, Blue Jasmine.
Even in the ever-popular comic book genre, we got Logan and Joker playing at a very different level.
But also, it was the decade of the MCU. Let’s not underestimate what Disney has achieved with that — one big overarching story spanning over twenty films, bringing much deeper character development and more serious themes than what we’d gotten used to from blockbusters.
Death of Stalin, Booksmart, Jojo Rabbit are definitely smaller independent comedies, but compare:
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
All of those are in the same rough ballpark, but Superbad had 70% of its box office revenue in the US+Canada.
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
Booksmart was the first thing I thought of too when he said, “since 2012, the only successful comedies have been animations aimed at young children.” (edit: I mean to say, you can still see movies with originality even if they're not "successful" i.e. blockbusters)
In 2018 when I originally got AMC A-list subscription, I tried going to 3 movie a week at first, so I went to a lot more movies I was unsure about but they were very original and memorable, but they weren’t super popular (at least I was the only person I personally knew who had seen it).
Sorry to Bother You ($18 million)
Blackkklansman ($93 million)
Eighth Grade ($14 million)
Crazy Rich Asians ($238 million)
Comedies have most certainly not died. They've just changed in tone.
A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.
The self-censorship point is completely ridiculous, and borders on complaining about "cancel culture'. It literally mentions Superbad as an example of a film that can't be made today, entirely ignoring that it got a spiritual successor two years ago in Booksmart, which was amazingly funny without punching down.
this reminds me of the scene in the movie Booksmart where the nerdy girls who did nothing but study and work towards their academic dreams found out all the "dumb" party kids also got into top tier schools while also having fun.
> J.J. ABRAMS > > When you have a movie that’s as entertaining, well-made, and well-received as “Booksmart” not doing the business it should have [the teen comedy underperformed at the box office despite critics’ raves], it really makes you realize that the typical Darwinian fight to survive is completely lopsided now.
The fact that critics, a very insular group of people, liked the movie doesn't mean it is good or will please the public at large. Booksmart is a prime example of the « Get woke, go broke » adage.
I assumed they were already doing that. I've seen several TV shows or movies (recently Booksmart) where "I can't use uber because of my low passenger rating" was used as a plot device.