Eighth Grade Review

Eight grade was a strange period of my life. A time that I didn't necessarily hate, but at the same time it was a year of school that just kind of happened. I liked my school. I liked my classes. I had great teachers. I had enough friends. I wasn't the popular kid by any means, but nor was I the awkward kid sitting in the corner with no friends and no one to talk to. I also feel I had a great relationship with my parents and siblings, so home life was pretty good. Millcreek Jr. High School in Bountiful, Utah was a fantastic place with lots of nostalgic memories. At the same time, though, eighth grade was that weird period of time in the middle of everything. That's why most places call it Middle School. In Utah we go with Junior High School instead and we put seventh through ninth grade in one building. But yeah, Elementary School was when everyone was still perfectly innocent while High School most kids had idea of who they wanted to be. Junior High or Middle School was that time of discovery. Lest you think growing up in Mormonville, Utah would mean all the young kids were all beautiful angels, you try being in school with hundreds of early teenagers, many of whom aren't yet sure if they want to do this whole religious thing. So yeah, I heard and saw unpleasant things, too.

All that said, I'm not here to review my personal eighth grade experience, though it's fun to reminisce. Eighth grade was actually the year I got hit by a car walking home from school, so that was definitely a year that I learned a lot of people cared for me. There's a lot of potential stories on that front. But no, I'm here to talk about a movie titled "Eighth Grade," which is one of those films that you may have no idea even existed if you're a more casual movie fan, but these are the types of movies that I live for. Yeah, I can have plenty fun with all the big blockbusters and this year has been a great year for them with the likes of "Avengers: Infinity War," "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" and "Incredibles 2," but the smaller, independent films are the ones that have earned a special place in my heart because it feels like real, genuine filmmaking that cinema was invented for. If I lived in a city where more independent films came to and I had enough time and money for them, that's all I'd be doing with my life. Thus when one like this gets enough attention that it expands to my current city, I'm all over it. Something like "Christopher Robin" can wait. I need to see my buzzy independent films. And man, when it comes to buzz, "Eighth Grade" has been on fire, so I was rather excited for it.

Even with my high level of excitement, I didn't have much of an idea of what this film was about. I knew it was a movie that premiered at Sundance this year and was purchased by A24. Generally speaking, an A24 film from Sundance is all I need in order to be excited, so I didn't need to do more research. I was in. The near unanimous praise was also exciting as the movie currently stands at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with 156 reviews counted. Only three Grinches decided that they didn't like this movie. The other 153 gave it at least a pass. Yet the 156 reviews combined for an 8.8/10 average, because that number exists, too, on Rotten Tomatoes in case you didn't know. And an 8.8 is really high from Rotten Tomatoes critics. What I also knew about this movie was that it was written and directed by a guy named Bo Burnham, who got his start as a YouTuber before gaining traction as a popular comedian. And now he's directed his first feature-length film that is doing really well at the box office. I think this is a rather fascinating story, especially since he was born in August 1990, meaning he's a year and a half younger than me. Crazy to think about that. If all of that doesn't get you excited to see this movie, I don't know what will.

Oh yeah, you probably want plot. This is the one element that I didn't know much about when I saw this. I vaguely remember the trailer and I figured it had something to do with eighth grade, because, you know, the title. And yeah, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out, but that's exactly what this is. It's your typical coming of age story that you've seen a thousand times, but instead of this being your upteenth high school drama that's made, this is a movie about a girl trying to make it through her last little bit of Middle School. That really awkward time of life that I spoke of. That fact that this is a Middle School drama instead of a High School drama does make it unique and it also takes on unique challenges not explored too often in film. This girl is an only child who is raised by her single dad, because her mom left the picture when she was super young. She does her best to try to fit in, but she doesn't have very many social skills, she's super quiet, her teachers don't seem to be too helpful, she doesn't have any friends, and not many of the bratty teenagers in the school seem to even acknowledge her existence. But by goodness she's not going to let any of that hold her back. She's going to live life to the fullest, which makes her extremely likable.

Yet what this all equated to when everything was said and done was a whole lot of awkwardness. This is not a movie that attempts to sugar-coat anything, but rather is out to fully display the awkwardness of eighth grade and it squeezes out every last drop to the point where I felt super uncomfortable for nearly the whole film. Now when I say awkward, I don't mean on the level of the peach scene from "Call Me by Your Name" sort of awkward. In fact, content-wise this is fairly mild for its rating. Take out the occasional teenage cursing and I'm confident that this would be PG-13. Perhaps a bit of a heavy PG-13 thematically, like "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," as I don't know if taking your eighth grader with you to see this is the best idea, but PG-13 nonetheless. So when I say awkward, I don't mean gross. I mean the type of awkward that we've all felt when you go to an activity, party or an event of some sort and you know no one there, so you immediately feel uncomfortable and your brain starts yelling at you to leave. Yeah, that's the type of awkward that happens to me all the time, so this felt so real to me. I was rooting for this girl to succeed, but every situation she put herself in turned into an awkward situation that made me uncomfortable.

I don't mean this as a negative. In fact, I think this is exactly what the movie was going for. The point was to display the awkwardness of eighth grade and it excelled at that. The girl gets invited to a party by the mother of the most popular girl in the school and she eventually goes. And when she makes that decision, I was super happy for her because she was overcoming a major obstacle and thus it was a great moment for her. But then she gets to the party and I'm suddenly reminded of the brutal honest of the movie because it goes down about like almost every party that I've been to where I didn't actually have strong relationships with people there. It's times like those where I desperately search for someone I do know and when I don't find someone, my mind is on how in the frack do I exit this party without making a scene. In her case, there really isn't an exit because her dad dropped her off. Thus the result was me personally cowering in my theater chair like a wimp unable to watch an intense movie moment. Like someone watching a horror film despite not liking horror films. That's what I felt like, not just during this specific scene, but for the whole movie as scene after scene was this girl trying her hardest to fit in and accomplish her goals, but awkwardly stumbling through the whole time.

Movies like that are brutally honest about life are interesting cinematic experiences. If done well, they can be rather challenging to get through, but super rewarding when you do. Thus is the case with "Eighth Grade." It challenged me in ways I wasn't expecting and if there were people in the theater watching it with me, said people may have thought I hated the experience. But I didn't. I was cringing the whole time, but it was a good cringe. And when I got through, I was left with an overall message that was rather beautiful. Without diving too deep, the basic message I pulled from this is that you're better human being than you often give yourself credit. That could sound cliche on paper, but with how honest this movie was from beginning to end, the final message ended up being quite genuine and touching, with a speech in the final act that reminded me of the final speech from "Call Me by Your Name" in terms of the emotional weight it left. I think the only negatives that I have are that everything bad that could've happened to this girl did happen, thus making it feel it little more heavy-handed than it needed to. Certainly no one's eighth grade experience was quite that exaggerated. And if your's was, I hope you made it through OK.

Yet on the flip side of things with that most recent argument, every time I try to really hone in on this element of the movie and attack it for this, my mind comes with about a hundred arguments as to why I'm over-thinking it or being too picky. Maybe a lot of people did feel this alienated in eighth grade. Maybe I just had things really good in comparison and am thus not able to fully relate. And even if I'm right in my criticism, it could also mean that everyone who watches this will be able to relate to at least part of this story. I certainly was able to, even though I consider myself lucky when it comes to my upbringing. And hey, better this way than to give some sort of half-hearted, cliche coming of age film, right? So when I argue it out in my head, I don't know if I really have many negatives about the movie, outside maybe the fact that it won't be my favorite movie of this year, like "Lady Bird" and "Boyhood" were in their respective years, those movies being similar coming of age movies. But that's an unfair bar to judge things by considering both of those movies were practically perfect. Not every movie needs to be the best movie of the year in order for me to be impressed, right? No need for this black or white nonsense. On that note, I'm going to comfortably give "Eighth Grade" a 9/10.