Eighth Grade Reviews

Since I kept hearing some pretty good things about this flick, I thought I might as well check it out. A couple of weeks ago, I had already been impressed by ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ which felt pretty accurate but this movie went even further though. Seriously, the damned thing was just painfully realistic. However, to be honest, this realistic and pretty much pitch-black approach made this movie quite fascinating but also difficult to watch. Indeed, my youngest daughter is about the same age of the main character and, just like her, she spends most of her free time on her smartphone using some similar apps so, as a father, the damned thing was rather hard to watch. Fortunately, my daughter is a bright and very social kid with many friends. The father was also a tricky character but also really well handled in the way he struggled to communicate with his kid. Furthermore, when he said such things like ‘Cool!’ to his daughter, it was exactly the same way I sometimes talk to my daughter which was pretty disturbing. Still, the guy seemed to be pretty much out of his depth and completely out of touch with her but I’m afraid that's the case for many parents. Concerning the main character, it was refreshing that Elsie Fisher was the right age and not a few years older which is often the case with this genre and she gave here a really strong performance. However, the main character was just so uncharismatic, so average, in fact, she barely had any redeeming features, as a result, it was rather difficult to really care about what she was going through. Anyway, to conclude, even if it was maybe not a masterpiece, I really enjoyed the hyper realism displayed in this flick and I think it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.