Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Beanie Feldstein

QuickView: Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

20 October 2024 | | Reading Time: < 1 minute | 0 Comments
Drive-Away Dolls posters

“I’ve had it with love. I know bards and troubadours are high on it, but I don’t believe it’s relevant to the modern 20th soon to be 21st century lesbian.”

Jamie

Ethan Coen’s first feature as a solo director is a delirious sapphic road-trip set in 1999 but frequently adopting the sensibilities of exploitation movies from the decades prior. Drive-Away Dolls follows two friends on a trip to Florida, pursued by inept criminals seeking to recover a briefcase hidden in their car. In terms of classic Coen styles, it leans more toward the screwball comedy of Burn After Reading than its crime thriller elements, while visually blending eccentric antagonists, lesbian dive bars and raunchy sequences into a Lebowski-esque 90-minute fever dream. At its heart is the central friendship between Margaret Qualley’s uninhibited fast-talking Texan and Geraldine Viswanathan as her reserved and repressed best friend — your enjoyment likely hinges on how you connect with these characters and the film’s earnestly tender moments between them. Particularly by Coen standards, Drive-Away Dolls feels rough around the edges but it brings a fresh energy to its atypical queer romance and seems primed for cult appreciation rather than mainstream success.

7/10

QuickView: Booksmart (2019)

9 June 2019 | | Reading Time: < 1 minute | 0 Comments

“We haven’t done anything. We haven’t broken any rules.”

Molly

Generally speaking I am not a fan of reductive descriptions like “a female take on Superbad” but in the case of Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut the comparison is apt, not only in its comedic end-of-high-school blowout premise but also in its prevailing themes of identity, social awkwardness, teenage desperation, and friendships on the cusp of change. Leads Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein are believable as studious best friends approaching high school graduation and questioning their decision to focus solely on academic success. After seeing her performance, it was little surprise to discover that Feldstein is Jonah Hill’s younger sister, with obvious similarities in their delivery. Although the dialogue lacks the realism of The Edge of Seventeen, the light and witty script keeps things moving at pace. Of particular note is the film’s ability to flesh out a number of its supporting cast beyond their initial one-note stereotypes, paralleling Molly’s realisation that she has done her classmates a disservice by underestimating them. I fear limited marketing may hold Booksmart back on theatrical release but I expect it to find cult success in home viewing.

8/10

QuickView: Lady Bird (2017)

9 May 2018 | | Reading Time: < 1 minute | 0 Comments

“I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.”

Marion McPherson

An alternative coming-of-age film, the focus is Catholic high school girl Christine (who has adopted the name “Lady Bird”) and her turbulent relationship with her mother. This is an unusually well-realised mother/daughter relationship, in which they both know they love one another, yet their strong-willed personalities frequently grate. Saoirse Ronan deftly avoids portraying Lady Bird as quirky for its own sake, instead making it a believable element of her awkward teenage self-expression, whilst still anxious about the perception of her wealthier peers. Religion largely takes a back seat to the more human elements of the story, in what struck me as a female counterpoint to Richard Linklater’s films about male adolescence.

8/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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