EIGHTH GRADE (2018, written & directed by Bo Burnham, starring Elsie Fisher)

sorry elmo! one speech isn't most of the film though

This was excellent. And let me just say, as the father of a 13-year old girl that just finished middle school and is about to enter high school, a lot of this shit was downright uncanny. Off the top of my head I honestly can't think of any remotely similar movie that gets so much right (at least from my perspective).

otm

Didn't like this as much as what's above, but it is ambitious--it wants to be the definitive film on the subject, and to get a film like that into theatres, into wide release even, is admirable. Three things I did like: the wording of the forced invitation to the pool party, "Orinoco Flow" (a song I have not heard nor thought about even once, literally, since it was out in the world; thought of it as an interesting curiosity at the time, like "Royals" or something), and Elsie getting her future self as her high-school shadow.

Kayla, not Elsie--got the character and the actress mixed up.

Did you know that Enya, despite selling millions of records, has never toured?

No--I guess that explains in part why she vanished from my radar. I did like how the film used that song (recognized it immediately but took a few seconds--till the vocal--to put a name to it).

One question (which has nothing to do with my overall feelings--just curious): do schools in the States ever run simulations of school shootings that graphic? I can't imagine anything like that up here, but then the problem isn't as prevalent up here (we've had them, obviously). I would think a readiness drill like the one in the film would be traumatic in and of itself.

My instinct is to say no, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is yes. Certainly my kids (one about to start high school, one about to start middle school) know the drill, so to speak.

man the high school kids were SO good, almost more believably written and naturally acted than the eighth-graders.

The shadowing reminded me of Dazed and Confused, although in Linklater's film, the high school students weren't one-on-one shadows, and most of them wanted to make your life miserable. But a couple of them did take the younger kids under their wing, invited them to tag along, etc.

and Elsie getting her future self as her high-school shadow.

man the high school kids were SO good, almost more believably written and naturally acted than the eighth-graders.

― This is a total Jeff Porcaro. (Doctor Casino), Friday, August 3, 2018 5:20 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm, would watch a movie about them finishing senior year. but then again, that movie has been made many times before.

I tried to resist this (critical nature, slight aversion to Bo Burnham) but eventually fell completely under its spell. What a treat. Amazing that this was showing at the megaplez just down the road and not at the art houses exclusively.

I though the first 15 minutes were weak and was tempted to walk out (after the lady in the film said "lit" and then the teacher dabbed upon entering the classroom) but then immediately followed the most extraordinary stretch of film in recent memory with the dinner scene and the enya scene.

I am too far removed from 8th grade to even trust my sense that some things were overwrought but it did feel that way.

No one got up when the credits started rolling, good sign.

My oldest kid is literally starting 8th grade on Wednesday, so I couldn't resist the synchronicity of taking him to this today. He was sort of intrigued -- by the R rating and because he knew Burnham had started as a YouTuber -- and sort of resistant, because of the potential cringe factor. But we both ended up really liking it. Elsie Fisher is great, and it all felt grounded and, even to an actual 13-year-old, totally convincing.

And yes, his school has active shooter drills. Not with a guy actually dressed as a shooter, but it wouldn't surprise me if some places are doing that.

loved it overall. certainly surpassed this to become bo burnham's greatest film.

I’ve long hated Burnham’s musical comedy steeze and I’m not sure I can ever watch this and appreciate it as its own thing.

I'll see it, but not in the theater. He seems to have matured/grown up vs. whatever he was doing a few years back, though. Good for him.

I’ve long hated Burnham’s musical comedy steeze and I’m not sure I can ever watch this and appreciate it as its own thing.

― circa1916, Sunday, August 5, 2018 1:41 AM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

missing out! this isn't like his comedy at all

Will def check it out when it’s streaming somewhere. Heard an interview with him recently that kinda punctured my image of what he was about. Just hard to shake vivid memories of a real corny roommate of a friend who would put on one of BB’s DVDs repeatedly and how it made me want to throw the TV out of a window.

Haven't seen it yet but really enjoyed this interview with Burnham where he talks about growing up with social media: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/566579/?__twitter_impression=true

xpost This has nothing to do with this dude's comedy. It's earnest, it's empathetic, it's lovely and loving. And it's almost documentary like in its restraint and approach, so much so that I would not come close to branding it a comedy. It's got some awkward laughs in it (like life), but there's almost nothing in it that does not ring true or seem like it does not come from the honest perspective of an eighth grade girl (which is something, coming from a 28 year old first time director with a background in dumb comedy). While I can see waiting for it to come to TV, I do recommend seeing it in a theatre with other people, likely of other generations, just to see how they react and what gets reactions. The giggles of recognition from the high school girls behind us were different from the solo 60 year old dude in front of us. My older daughter is at summer camp right now, but when she comes back I think my wife is going to take her, to hear her side. I'll report back.

Interesting Bo Burnham stuff: he plays a well meaning but crap comedian in "The Big Sick," and (as I learned from the New Yorker profile), he directed Chris Rock's most recent special, at Rock's request.

I hate being the guy who's less than enthusiastic about something everybody else on the thread loves, but, while I did like some things about this film (see above), some of it didn't ring true to me--from unimportant nit-picky stuff (I can't imagine any middle school giving recognition at a school assembly for something based on physical appearance--informally in a yearbook, yes, not an officially sanctioned award/certificate) to maybe the most central fact of the film, the father-daughter relationship. I'm not a father--if anyone wants to bat away this objection with "If you were a father, you'd understand," feel free. But when the father gives his big speech about how much of a joy his daughter is, I wish the director had actually given us some reason to believe this. I mean, I know these characters have entire lifetimes behind that assertion that we don't see, and of course any father would feel that way, but all we've seen is 90 minutes of his daughter pretty much treating him like dirt, and him smiling and bumbling and making self-deprecating jokes in response. In Six Feet Under, by way of contrast, we see the daughter treat the mom the same way (or in Roseanne, when Darlene goes through her season-in-black phase), but before they have a similarly emotional rapprochement, we get the expected exasperation/anger/silence/confrontation from the mom (and also from dad on Roseanne). So when they finally do come out the other side, the bond there feels very real to me. Here, when the father speaks of the wonder of his daughter, I just thought "Really?" I found the father a real cipher in Eighteen.

As a dad I kind of agree with some of that and mentioned it to my wife on the way home, that he was a little too idealized (because kids are fucking hard). It did capture the vibe of unconditional love, though, the way you can look at your kid and see nothing wrong, even when they are internally tormented by all sorts of drama. But as my wife pointed out, the girl in this is *not* some mere wallflower or shut-in. She, begrudgingly or not, actually follows her dad's advice. She goes to parties she does not want to go to, she follows his phone restrictions (clearly more limited during the week), she stands up for herself and confronts people when she feels she is wronged, she builds up her courage and does karaoke in front of people that don't like her. And she's not afraid to contact dad for help or rides and stuff, and he is very accommodating. This is an instance of something being a little between the lines but totally clear: she listens to him because she loves and trusts him. They have a great relationship, and that is something else I loved about this movie. They did not mine their relationship for conflict. Her problems have nothing to do with her supportive dad, and she knows that, which is a lovely twist on these things (and yet something else that sets it apart from Ladybird, which is specifically about mother/daughter conflict and a reason I thought it felt a little more TV-y to me.)

You're right that conflict is the default setting in these films. There's a third way, too, but you don't see it very often: the Ridgemont High thing where the parents are virtually absent. (The most extreme example I can think of--pretty sure you don't see or hear a single parent in Heckerling's film). The kids work out everything themselves.

I really hate to keep harping on this but everything about this sounds absolutely unappealing to me

• It's the auteur statement from a stand-up
• That stand-up is ironic rap YouTube funnyman Bo Burnham
• It's called 'Eighth Grade'
• It's about social media
• People in this very thread are saying thinks like "It just wrecked me"

This could very well be an excellent, smart, awesome movie, but that is ... a lot of hurdles for me to jump

yeah

though honestly I really was not a fan of Donald Glover's comedy or music and Atlanta is fast becoming one of my favorite shows of all time

xpost people in this very thread are also telling you they were suspicious of burnham, didn't like his comedy etc., and yet found the movie very good. maybe instead of telling us that our being moved by it makes you not want to see it (because, i guess, we are all dummies whose opinions are always wrong), you should just see it, and post to the thread afterwards.

well it's also like, OK, even if this movie is NOTHING LIKE his shitty, quasi-racist chive-y videos, he wouldn't have even had the chance to make this auteur indie-cinema without years of building his brand from -- and these quotes are straight from Wikipedia --

Burnham wrote and released songs about white supremacy, Helen Keller's disabilities, homosexuality, and more.[1]

When speaking with The Detroit News about his rapping, he expressed his intent to honor and respect the perspective and culture of hip-hop music.[3]

Comedy Central Records released Burnham's first EP, the six-song Bo Fo Sho, as an online release-only album on June 17, 2008.[13]

It feels when people are wowed by Vice News doing some interesting reporting when their entire infrastructure was built on ironic racism and rape jokes. Again, if this guy turned over a smart/funny leaf somewhere, it's news to me.

maybe instead of telling us that our being moved by it makes you not want to see it (because, i guess, we are all dummies whose opinions are always wrong), you should just see it, and post to the thread afterwards.

It's meant less to call people dummies and more like "I don't like going to see movies that make me sad"

Again, the movie could be totally fine, we'll see how bored I get. I'd rather go see Blindspotting and Blackkklansman if given the choice tho

ah okay. well that's more understandable, sorry.

I've been avoiding the acclaimed Mr. Rogers doc too because the innocence of kids sometimes depresses me on a deep level

fwiw burnham is 27, and the alamo pre-show reel, whatever its faults, gave me the sense that he is a 27-year-old who can look at the shit that made him internet-semi-famous when he was 18 and cringe. it doesn't seem like he's proud of it or wants it to define his work, and the film is so far from that sensibility that it includes a loudmouth high schooler trying to be funny with "edgy" humor and argument-baiting, and this guy is clearly portrayed as inconsiderate and obnoxious at best.

but i have not actually watched any of his comedy and for all i know he still has noxious stuff in his act! and obv there are longer debates on how much you can wipe out your 18-year-old edgy asshattery with later good intentions. the beastie boys might be an interesting comparison.

This movie is not a comedy, but ...it is not partucularly sad, either!

There are so many sad or tragic ways it could have gone, some even maybe foreshadowed. That it does not go those routes is another astounding achievement, imo.

Without going into spoilers, no one is hurt, no one is even bullied in this, as far as I remember. That's what sort of makes it so special. Middle School is challenging even when nothing happens to you!

the most intense scene of conflict in this is between her and a kid in a car, and honestly listening to the reaction of the high school girls sitting behind me was every bit as intense as watching the scene play out.

did Whiney leave to watch the film?

It is interesting to me how much the reactions I have read about the movie focus on social media. I know one person who said she and her whole family reconsidered their social media use after seeing the movie. That is weird to me, because I don’t feel like social media is presented as a particularly negative thing. It is just the water they all swim in. In another era, you could have the exact same story with different technological trappings. I don’t really think the movie is about social media at all.

I would imagine it's the easiest thing for a old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds reviewer would notice.

burnham has played it up in his statements on the film fwiw - not in a "kids these days" way but recognizing that it is something different. he said something about how the pressure of social media makes even quiet kids feel like they need to be this big presence or whatever. not like IT CHANGES EVERYTHING (he parodies that with the high schoolers claiming that someone who had snapchat in middle school is a "different generation" ) but it makes some things different, some things easier, some things harder.

if you want to see a burnham-free, social media-free version of this movie, leave no trace is still playing, I think.

sweet baby jesus thank you for no fb snapchat or twitter in the 90s

I found the father a real cipher in Eighteen.

we don't see any of his life outside of Kayla, because we're only seeing her life. but we see how the mother's absence has deeply shaped his approach to parenting, his remaining single, his balancing empathy and discipline and fear of overstepping. it's a fantastically drawn (part of a) character and performance.

Ambivalence noted, I would recommend that everyone see this and put aside whatever you already know about the director. On that count, I’m lucky. I knew nothing about the director going in--had never even heard of him (in no rush now to familiarize myself with his earlier work).

Less helpful was re-watching 20th Century Women a few days before seeing Eighth Grade, a strong contender right now as my favourite film of the decade. I took that into the theatre with me--I’m rarely able to see films without comparing them to other films, especially one fresh in my mind. The mother-son relationship in 20th Century Women starts from the same basic place as the father-daughter relationship in Eighth Grade: the son wants to communicate to the mother that she needs to leave him alone, he’s doing just fine. (He’s a couple of years older than Kayla.) For me, their relationship was infinitely more shaded, though, in terms of what we actually see on the screen, as opposed to taking the complexity on faith, as a given. There’s an incredible scene in 20th Century Women where the son, seemingly in an effort to let his mom know that he understands how she’s feeling, reads aloud to her a passage from Zoe Moss’s “It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete” (which I’m really anxious to read, but nothing online, and I’m not quite ready to pay a small fortune for Sisterhood Is Powerful on Amazon). He’s trying to be sympathetic, but the words he reads seem to cut dangerously close: Annette Bening dismisses them with a curt “And that’s how you see me?” There are so many levels to that scene, and it’s difficult for me to watch (difficult in the good sense: too real)--in the immediate shadow of that, the Eighth Grade version felt hollow. I realize that mother-son isn’t father-daughter, 15 isn’t 13, and 1979 isn’t 2018.

And again, isn't that a movie about their relationship? At the least, I think it probably *is* more complex, more novelistic, more ... written. Eighth Grade is not about the relationship between Kayla and her dad. It's pretty much just about Kayla and her coping with her immediate, in the moment surroundings.

Not as central, probably, but it did feel to me like the dad, even when he wasn't there, was kind of guiding Kayla's decisions (as you point out above, he was the impetus for her "putting herself out there," going to the party, etc.). And there's lots else going in 20th Century Women, too (which is at least as much about Bening as the son, so in that sense, no, it's not a fair comparison).

"going on in"

you want to see a burnham-free, social media-free version of this movie, leave no trace is still playing, I think.

Leave No Trace is definitely at least 9x better than this

All Eyes on Me, the new version without the skit, stands alone as a great song. Laurie Anderson vibes, and the lyrics, suggestive of digital anomie, are actually better without the surrounding movie, which overdoes the idea.

Burnham should just make an album of real songs, not joke songs.

“We’re going to go where everybody knows everybody” is a great start to the chorus. It feels like ILX to me.

“Hands down, pray for me”

Everyone itt made this sound shit and then the lyric that got posted in the we didn’t start the fire thread was far shitter than everyone made it sound, I was gobsmacked

Like if the Patricia Lockwood novel got bonked in the head by 30 falling coconuts in a row and then wrote a song

if you take this song, on its own, like T.S. Eliot would, just looking at how it hangs together internally, i think you will find that is good.

or perhaps not.

but this is my take, weeks later. much of the special is embarrassing but i like this one.

watched some pieces of this and dunno if I want to go for the whole thing. his sense of humor is very much like a bunch of Twitter accounts I eventually unfollowed, except it's presented as him singing it to you while nothing funny happens in the background. dude is definitely talented and interesting but I feel like this stuff is supposed to make me laugh at some point? like the "Welcome to the Internet" song, that sort of thing has been done a thousand times but it's so much funnier in the hands of someone like say Neil Cicierega.

re. "welcome to the internet," i think the line "a little bit of everything all of the time" is a good and pithy description of the internet. it captures the way it repels absorption -- you just end up skimming the surface.

there are flashes of poetic intelligence like that in each of these songs.

like, in "white woman's instagram" where he is just clowning on #basic ladies until, all of the sudden, he switches to a verse about how the curator of this instagram page misses her dead mom and wishes she could see she is doing Ok. it's good human moment -- like a lot of social media is just people aggressively trying to reassure themselves and their community, maybe their parents too, that they are OK. we just want to be OK.

i am very torn because i see the cringe too.

I'll probably never watch Inside but I kind of like this album! It's like a melancholy Weird Al?

If you like the album you should definitely watch the movie

i heard the special was good so i checked it out. "i made you some content" was funny but then a few minutes later i was like "wait, does he sing throughout this entire thing? i'm out"

treeship, we are having such similar journeys with this special and explaining it to our partners lol

if a special this successful has a sock giving marxist analysis i'm for it and don't care how cringey it is. also the "get your hands up" song is weirdly effective/sad and i agree that it's a good song and he needs to stop with the musical theatre vibe but also that's who he is, so whatever. he's not doing this for me. also more men should talk about their vulnerabilities around mental health in mainstream media

the only moment i actually laughed was when he said "is the guy big or is the room small" when he was being a twitch streamer playing his own life

Only made it partway through when it first came out. Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into the first.

The Phoebe Bridgers cover of "That Funny Feeling" was a good entry point, taking the song without the Burnham persona.

In some specific ways (voice, vulnerability, specificity), parts feel like a mix of Johns Darnielle and Mayer (the Mayer of interviews more than his songs).

Anyway, works well, especially when we're still in that Inside zone for almost two years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEUl4DThSwE

*Went back to it tonight, in the middle of Omcrion, and got pulled into it.

i just realized the guy who did that thing i don't want to see made this. huh.

ignore that. the movie is much better than anything he's directly made as a standup, totally different vibe

Oh I liked it! I just don’t want to see the other thing

yeah... probably better off not seeing Inside. or any of his netflix specials. I don't know why, I watched those trying to convince myself that there was something good there, and... probably not?

Gave my friend's grade 8 daughter a DVD of this for Christmas. She's very much into her Darlene-in-Rosanne incommunicado phase--hope she watches it.

the movie is much better than anything he's directly made as a standup

The movie Eighth Grade is a perfectly fine, very watchable movie about what it feels like to be an eighth grader in a US middle school in the twenty-first century, which rather naturally encompasses the main character feeling not exactly fine throughout the movie, but struggling not to feel much, much worse than fine.

I just watched Inside on Friday and greatly enjoyed it while thinking to myself “I bet most of ILX is falling over themselves to hate this” and then I thought “that’s not particularly charitable, I should look up what the reaction actually was before assuming” and welp

learning (as I did via letterboxd) that BB apparently lived with his partner of several years through all this really did add an extra layer of "fuck off buddy" to my reaction

Just wait 'til you hear about Thoreau and Walden.

so uh this is pretty good especially given the current situation

Wow. Didn’t know Bo Burnham was a real one. Couldn’t be more relevant pic.twitter.com/DOBEcUEVJQ

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 2, 2022

He's right that the market demands growth and companies that sell your attention must increase their reach into your attention in order to grow. We can only hope that social media will poison their own well so completely by cranking that handle so hard it breaks, and people reject it to give their attention elsewhere.

dang that twitter post took down twitter hardcore

"and yet you participate in society"

"Drink a Haitian guy's blood"

https://genius.com/4355796?

That's a good clip--very much in keeping with what I thought was Eighth Grade's greatest sequence, the girl lost on the internet as "Orinoco Flow" played.