Are You There God, It's Me Margaret Review

 

Perhaps the greatest thing about Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is that it’s a film about a 6th grader, that ends in 6th grade.

Who knows what Margaret will grow up to believe or become. Who knows if she’ll have that date (or it’s 7th grade equivalent) with Moose? Instead, the film captures a snapshot of childhood in the way a handful of great novels have done throughout history.

There’s no doubt that this book reached a large swath of a certain generation of pre-pubescent girls facing the terror of puberty, and I imagine (as someone who hasn’t read the book), that that is due to its universality. However, the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles (and I’m paraphrasing here) once said that if you really focus on the specificity of your setting, it becomes universal.

That’s where this movie meets its strength. Margaret isn’t just a stand-in for every girl going through puberty. She’s doing it in the disconnected suburbs of New York in milieu of 1970 when a mother like Barbara (Rachel McAdams) was catching distant whiffs of feminist liberation and a young couple was breaking free of their past generations’ view on religion.

More than that, it’s a story about the fleeting and wondrous nature of youth. In one scene, Margaret professes she’s miserable. In another letter, she tells her teacher that she’s lost her belief in God and it goes unresolved. The only resolution we see is her taking the time to compliment him on being a great teacher on the last day of school. She has a massive realization that her friend is evil and decides to switch her friend circle. But still hangs out with their mutual friends and it’s hard to tell if there’s ever a big “The Reason You Suck” speech.

But that’s how life goes when you’re a sixth grader. Without a doubt, the most eventful years of your life are when you’re young. At that age, you have 800 times more good and bad things simultaneously happening to you all at once. It’s all a vast contradiction that even if you’re processing so many negative things, you are still experiencing and growing at a rate most of us adults can only dream of. It’s the reason that most of our dreams (at least mine) or my favorite memories are from our youth.

I’d probably classify my freshman and senior years of high school and my sophomore and senior years of college as the best years of my life. But there was plenty of stress and misery in those times too. During when unplanned gap semester in college, I voiced how miserable I was to my uncle and he bemusedly smiled and said “it sounds like you’re really growing and doing well.” I didn’t understand it, and I doubt that some adolescents will understand it either.

It’s the reason I told my niece, who was similarly hating 9th grade, not to be in such a hurry to grow up.

Reviews of Super Mario Brothers, Beau is Afraid, Tetris, Air

Super Mario Brothers-Chris Pratt, Charlie Day, Anya Taylor-Joy, Seth Rogen, Jack Black

This animated movie isn’t just a filmic homage to the Super Mario Brothers game you grew up with as a kid; it’s hodgepodge of every video game with the Super Mario label. Kind of like Ready Player One except there’s thematic consistency. And that nostalgia factor lights a bulb in your brain. And talk about that score! It’s almost worth the price of admission to see the most memorable tunes of the early 90s outside of the Billboard top 40, to be put to orchestration. As for the story, it’s pretty typical but not lazy enough (from an adult perspective) to have made a negative viewing experience for me.

Air-Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Tucker, Chris Messina, dir. Ben Affleck

In the mold of films like Syriana, Moneyball, and Ben Affleck’s own Argo, this latest edition of Ben Affleck is simply about a man (or group of men) and his goals. It’s in the tradition of 70s anti-hero films like French Connection, Marathon Man, China Syndrome, and especially All the President’s Men where character development is secondary to action. And Air is definitely worthy of all its predecessors: It’s paced very well and the stakes are high. Sonny Vaccaro is a fascinating rogue of a character who plays a hell of a game of speed chess against bigger companies to land the greatest player of all time. Ironically, for a film that lionizes athleticism vis-a-vis Michael Jordan -- Vaccaro’s big speech is about how no one really matters in that room but Michael Jordan, how much of that entitlement has produced college athletes who skip classes and add to rape culture?—Jordan himself wasn’t evolved. I couldn’t help but feel the film was too afraid to touch a societal golden cow.

Beau is Afraid-Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPonte, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister, Parker Posey-Jones, dir. Ari Aster

Not a fan but it wasn’t that far away from working. The film’s marketing describes the movie as about a lonely man’s odyssey home, and the director described it as a “nightmare comedy” on press tours. I would classify it as the kind of ride that amusement park’s convert into a haunt-fest for Halloween. Only it lasts three hours, and it was seemingly co-written by Carl Jung and Franz Kafka for maximum symbolism. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man who’s ill-at-ease with the world. It’s kind of justified, however, because, he seems to live among the worst possible humans alive and Murphy’s Law appears to be in hyper-drive around him.  It isn’t all miserable; he’s saved from near-death on a couple occasions and finds the occasional moment of love from a stranger.   The best I can say about It, is that at three hours, it doesn’t feel that long. I was genuinely on the edge of my seat trying to work out where things would go. But at the end of a day, I’m usually not satisfied with the genre of reality-bending films. Perhaps, it was one twist too many.

Tetris-Taron Egerton, Anthony Boyle, Neketa Efremov, Oleg Stefan, Sofya Lebedeva, Tobey Jones –

Without overthinking it, I’d say this is the best film of the year so far. It’s hard to understate how impressive it is to take a subject that bores me to tears and make it a gripping thriller. Of course, it helps that the real-life story is equally mind-boggling: In order to acquire the rights for Tetris, Henk Williams mortgaged his house, risked trouble with the KGB, and was initially dependent on a company that was actively trying to screw him. When he finally broke free and secured the rights with the Nintendo company, he realized he didn’t have the rights because he was lied to. Although it’s easy to root for him in retrospect, movies like these often overlook that these bold risk takers simply can’t be classified as responsible adults. I’d love to see a deleted scene between Henk and his financial advisor. Throughout the film, Hank is in a bidding war with two other parties and the film makes great use of dramatic irony: The narration is omniscient enough to let us know what’s happening with all three parties, but the POV is tilted towards the hero and away from the villain (Anthony Boyle) as he generally knows the least of the three.  My only problem was why that I spent much of the film wondering why cast Taron Egerton when Shia LaBeouf is still alive? Egerton’s makeover here feels like he’s entering a Shia LaBeouf look-alike contest, and who needs him when this is the kind of part LaBeouf would kill?