Love, Simon: Utterly adorable

Love, Simon (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for sexual references, mild teen misbehavior and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

Director Greg Berlanti’s teen-oriented charmer reminds me of how much I miss the great John Hughes years: the decade marked by Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful and numerous others.

Masters of all they survey (well ... maybe not): Simon (Nick Robinson, second from left) and
his friends — from left, Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), Abby (Alexandra Shipp) and Leah
(Katherine Langford) — chat while heading toward drama class, and another rehearsal
for the high school musical.

Back when movie teenagers displayed some intelligence, chatted using words of more than one syllable, and fell in and out of love in a manner that felt genuine.

No cheap vulgarity or offensively exploitative nudity. And none of the terminally ill — or already dead — kids who’ve been populating a recent sub-genre.

Indeed, Berlanti’s handling of Love, Simon feels like an engaging cross between Gregory’s Girl — now, there’s a classic — and Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, albeit reconfigured for the social media age. Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker have delivered a marvelous adaptation of Becky Albertalli’s 2015 young adult novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda; their script is funny, poignant, shrewdly perceptive and — on several occasions — devastatingly, hide-behind-your-hands shattering.

I wanted to sink through the movie theater floor at least twice. Been there, imagined that. Never made public mistakes quite so catastrophic, but hey: could have.

To cases:

Seventeen-year-old Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) lives a perfect life, blessed with kind and progressive parents — Josh Duhamel and Jennifer Garner, as Jack and Emily — and a doting younger sister (Talitha Bateman, as Nora) to who he is equally devoted. The comfortably secure family lives in a gorgeous home, complete with dog.

Simon has his own car, with which he collects his posse each school morning, stopping en route for a coffee fix shared with longtime BFF Leah (Katherine Langford), best guy friend Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.) and comparative newcomer Abby (Alexandra Shipp). We don’t see much in the way of routine class work, but everybody is involved with the drama group production of Cabaret.

This musical’s haphazardly talented cast — drama teacher Ms. Albright (Natasha Rothwell) having been instructed to accept all students, regardless of thespic or singing ability — includes Martin (Logan Miller), the socially inept class clown who always says and does the wrong thing at the worst possible moment. Somebody to be pitied, but also somebody to be avoided.

Life couldn’t be better, right?

Well ... no, not really.

Before I Fall: A thoughtful little fantasy

Before I Fall (2017) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, dramatic intensity and considerable bad behavior by teens
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.3.17

This could be subtitled Mean Girls Meets Groundhog Day.

The party is going well, which means that Lindsay (Halston Sage, far left) and her posse —
from left, Sam (Zoey Deutch), Ally (Cynthy Wu) and Elody (Medalion Rahimi) — already
have humiliated a fair number of peers. Sadly, the worst is yet to come.

But while there’s considerable truth to that mash-up designation, Maria Maggenti’s adaptation of Lauren Oliver’s young adult novel is reasonably inventive in its own right; the narrative doesn’t succumb to potential pitfalls, and a third-act twist is a clever surprise. Director Ry Russo-Young draws credible performances from her young cast, and the result is a solid improvement over her earlier efforts (the little-seen Nobody Walks and You Won’t Miss Me).

But Russo-Young and Maggenti partially sabotage their efforts with superfluous voice-over narration and a wholly unnecessary flash-forward framing device, both of which imply that we dumb viewers aren’t savvy enough to follow the story on its own merits. While this likely is an effort to replicate the inner thoughts of the central character in Oliver’s book, film is a different medium. Contemplative narration that works on the page falls flat on the screen, feeling too much like a New Age sermon. (“Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow...”)

All concerned should have more faith: The core gimmick isn’t that hard to follow, and Zoey Deutch’s heartfelt performance easily anchors the action.

She stars as Samantha (Sam) Kingston, who wakens on what she assumes will be an average day ... which is to say, another opportunity to behave like the other condescending, insufferably spoiled bee-yatches in her posse: Ally (Cynthy Wu), Elody (Medalion Rahimi) and most particularly the hateful Lindsay (Halson Sage). All four wear upper-class entitlement on their designer sleeves. (Indeed, everybody in this community seems to have more money than God.)

This particular day is marked at the local high school with a pre-Valentine’s Day celebration dubbed Cupid Day, when single roses are sent by secret admirers. Alas, this is just another cruel exercise in marginalization: The most popular kids compete to see who can amass the biggest armload of roses, while those left out feel even more unloved.

Which, in turn, gives Lindsay another opportunity to taunt those she despises: notably “weird girl” Juliet (Elena Kampouris) and punkish lesbian Anna (Liv Hewson). Sam, Ally and Elody go along with such spiteful behavior because, well, that’s what friends do.

Everything about this day is difficult to endure — for us, as viewers — because of the relentless, self-centered arrogance. It begins when Sam wakes up, and contemptuously dismisses a sweet gesture by little sister Izzy (Erica Tremblay), and is scheduled to conclude after an unsupervised, late-night party, when she loses her virginity to boyfriend Rob (Kian Lawley), a self-centered lout in his own right.