Not by design, I watched another of my 2019 favorites this week, the sublime teen comedy Booksmart.
I wasn’t updating this newsletter when it came out, so the only old “review” I can cite here is what I tweeted shortly after leaving the theater: “Booksmart > Superbad.” To be fair to Superbad, I’ve seen that movie less recently, but there’s room for both to exist in the high school movie pantheon.
Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever star as two dorky best friends who discover on their last day of high school that their studious college-minded avoidance of parties and romantic partners has been a waste; their classmates who actually had fun in high school are also going to good colleges, and so the overachievers decide to go wild while they still can.
Feldstein and Dever are incredibly likable, and even though some of their costars look a bit too old to be graduating high school, I don’t care, because everyone is funny. The scene-stealing MVP is Billie Lourd (who clearly learned a thing or two from her mother Carrie Fisher), playing the eccentric-and-then-some Gigi.