Young Adult

Saw Young Adult, a sort of anti-romantic comedy. It follows the ghost-writing author of a semi-popular young adult series. She is living a life in the big city of Minneapolis that would be pretty sweet for, like, a college freshman but is kind of listless for an adult. The film drops its first notes of deadpan observational comedy in the decor of her apartment: the ubiquitous Ikea furniture, the tiny little dog, uggs, her aging and finger-smudged macbook. It's pretty funny in its perfect box-ticking. She even meets with up with a friend for starbucks who speaks to her in a bored, glottal fry.

Her obvious arrested development is underlined during the credit sequence where she drives home, rewinding a mixtape over and over again to hear the chorus of a song. She is on a mad adventure to rekindle a high-school romance with some once-football captain. The film more-or-less subverts the rom-com archetypes. There's the old love but it's not really there anymore. There's the romantic rendezvous undercut by mercenary-feeling beautification montages. There's also a pseudo-gay sidekick who was bashed for being gay but is actually straight. She's so out of his league though, she considers him essentially sexless anyway.

So, the film tries to do the high-wire act of both subverting and using the cliches of the genre and I think it more or less succeeds. It's hard for me to tell though because the film feels so ephemeral and substanceless that I frankly have a hard time focussing on it (then again, I am pretty tired right now.) I was entertained, I just don't think that I was challenged in any way. I enjoyed the experience nonetheless, but then I enjoy seeing women be cruel and vicious (in films) more than I enjoy seeing women be delightfully wooed and charmed. Here we get the protagonist calling her not-gay bestie a "piece of shit." He toasts to that. It's definitely still strongly chick-flick-flavored, but it's boozy and grumpy and at least not as cutesy-poo as most rom coms. Also, this is written by Juno-author Diablo Cody, so the writing is pretty snappy. Not a great film, it's essentially a contractually-obligated throw-away I think, but not too bad a flick for all that.