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

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

Whiney it’s not a sad movie. It wrecked me because it was so moving and life affirming, like I said. You can be like me and see Eighth Grade and Blindspotting. It’s almost like my op was a preemptive response to exactly what you said.

Yeah, moving and life-affirming is a great way to encapsulate it. We know in the end it has a happy ending, or at least something approximating it, cuz most of us have been to 8th grade, and most of us made it through the other side. But at the time things can seem pretty uncertain and ugly and scary and confusing.

Btw, yet another way this movie subverted expectations, or at least my expectation, is that the high school kid she meets doesn't blow her off and genuinely seems to enjoy her company. I was waiting for the humiliation or heartbreak that never came.

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

Leave No Trace left no trace in my BRANE. LNT is a more measured, more mature, less auteurish movie, probably with a superior young female lead. But, eh, it just felt like the 116th movie I've now seen about how the war fucked a guy up.

yeah that's pretty much how I felt. LNT is great, probably the best Iraq PTSD movie or one of the best, but damn, dour much?

yeah Josh that the high school girl was very nice was so great - as clemenza said, it was as if she were shadowing her future self.

Had Jason Reitman written or directed this, he would have turned the high school girl into a hypocrite.

David Edelstein's the only film critic I periodically check in with anymore--his very positive review:

http://www.vulture.com/2018/07/bo-burnham-eighth-grade-movie-review.html

He reminded of a couple of other things I liked...and a couple more I didn't.

I understand the movie not resonating with some people. Lady Bird, e.g., did not particularly resonate with me. But resonant or not, both are smart and sensitive movies that prioritize the POVs of their young, awkward protagonists in a way I respect.

Saw this with my 13-y-o son, I think he liked it but I liked it more than he did? A bit hard for me to watch as Kayla is surely meant to be the viewpoint character but very hard for me NOT to occupy the viewpoint of the dad.

Because I was watching it with my son I sort of wished there were one sort-of-OK boy in it. (I don't really think Gabe was a sort-of-OK boy.)

The way I knew this movie was good was that the parts of it that were objectively kind of on-the-nose (ending with the video to the high school self, the dad's speech) I totally bought.

My son and I both agreed it was very nicely handled that you could see somehow that the Spongebob was important but not why at first.

Gabe rules, he's blithely living all the self-confident talk-to-people true-to-yourself aphorisms from Kayla's youtubes

Gabe is a dork and not super great at listening/communicating but he's nice and wants to be friends and it seems like he'll turn out okay. Of course, he reminded me of me at that age so I might be biased.

xpost When she first took Spongebob out of the box and stared at it I thought it was because she recognized that she looked a little like Spongbob! Big blue eyes, sort of crooked teeth, spots, "yellow" hair/skin ... When they revealed what it was later it was another "aha!" moment for me.

That's an excellent read on Spongebob, Josh.

However I think it's nuts to describe this movie as "not a comedy'!

I didn't realize the shitty comedy songs I'd seen of Bo Burnham were from when he was 18, that makes it make monumentally more sense he could make this movie, I have to admit I too was like "seriously? THAT guy??"

I kinda feel like a party pooper, but I found this pretty mediocre. It was hard for me to watch it without thinking of similar recent movies that I liked a lot better--Lady Bird, obviously, but also the possibly-even-better The Edge of Seventeen--but even on its own it felt kind of thin. One quibble that will probably seem pedantic, but which I kept coming back to (and which is especially surprising considering the filmmaker's social media past): her YouTube videos look *nothing* like the way any of the videos I've seen produced by young people. Granted, my only experiences with this genre(?) are BookTube things, but these tend to be really energetically paced and quickly edited, not at all like the generally lo-fi and staid videos that Kayla produces. It could be argued that her videos reflect her personality, but I suspect that someone who makes these videos would be more tuned into/trying to mimic the (for the lack of a better term) YouTube aesthetic.

I did like her Diane Franklin-ish high school friend, and the final scene with Gabe ("I like all the sauces equally"). The movie could have used more of his character, especially.

That's fascinating because The Edge of Seventeen felt too Hollywood broad.

I guess its broad in that its aiming for certain comic and emotional points, but I thought it hit most of them. It wasn't as popular among critics as Lady Bird or Eighth Grade, both of which are more low-key in a way that I'm assuming strikes a lot of critics and viewers as more "authentic."

I've seen a lot of videos on YT that looked a lot like Kayla's.

But it's the "Gucci!" That got me! She seems way too aware for that. I think there was something that hinted that she was getting a little embarrassed by it as time passes but I'm not sure

*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.