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

I just saw this today and realized i love Hal Hartley movies but hate every movie that reminds me of a Hal Hartley movie. I am pretty sure I hated this. But the main actress was good.

this was... fine

the dorko kid was great, even moreso his deleted scene doing magic

Yeah, pretty sure this was really terrible, but props that Bo Burnham got people to love it.

I was really expecting to hate this but it was fucking surprisingly good. Little heavy handed at points, sure, but I was legit struck by the aesthetic decisions. “Bo Burnham ~film auteur~” seemed like a comically outlandish concept, but damn, maybe he’s got it.

Lot of shots and music choices in this that felt really sharp.

yeah

this really did seem to get how the new generation live, for all its universal teenage appeal

Got me real choked up tbh.

That pool party scene with the Anna Meredith song was absolutely brilliant.

Oh!! We remembered it as Holly Herndon. Whoops. Great song/scene anyway

I watched this today and noticed that Lori Loughlin's daughter is the makeup youtuber in the opening credits

Her mother submitted a screen test that got her the part.

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

excellent horror movie

anna meredith score was a delightful surprise

Watched this last night and otm it's a great horror movie, with some of the toughest scenes I can remember. We (stupidly?) watched it with our kids, 11 &13 and they both had to walk out at various points. For all its power though, I think it shat the bed a bit in the final 10 minutes or so: the various flails towards redemption (the YouTube sign off, the inexplicable far-sightedness of the flash-forward, the squawk at the 'bullies') and maybe even the dad cha, even if it did move me to tears. With the horror thing in mind, I do wonder if the shooter drill was a different kind of flash forward/wish fulfilment, but that might be a step too far.

Short version: I'd taught two year 9 classes that day (UK version of 8th grade) and have one in the house; ultimately, this made me feel closer to them and all the horrors they have to - and have left to - endure (and which they'll survive because, well, what else are you going to do?).

*dad chat, not dad cha, though with his character, him dancing round the fire would have worked just as well.

My kids were just comparing and contrasting their lockdown drills the other day.

We had a lockdown practise on Thursday. We sat under the desks in the dark for 10 minutes, then had to troop outside in the rain. The kids didn't take it remotely seriously.

I keep thinking about the dad character. I get that he was a cipher of sorts (pushed to the side of his own life, to paraphrase Larkin) and there to accentuate the totalising nature of adolescence, but did he need to be so empty? Which is to say, I think he'd have made an interesting character study. I suspect I'm pushing my own 'emptying out of middle age' anxieties onto Josh Hamilton/Bo Burnham but there we are.

Short version: I'd taught two year 9 classes that day (UK version of 8th grade) and have one in the house; ultimately, this made me feel closer to them and all the horrors they have to - and have left to - endure (and which they'll survive because, well, what else are you going to do?).

― Life is a meaningless nightmare of suffering...save string (Chinaski), Saturday, September 28, 2019 6:10 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

my cousin was a very depressed and very online eighth grader and although she was already aging out of it by the time i saw this it really hit me

I have friends trying to convince me that this Bo Burnham guy is great and that this Inside thing is good... What am I missing? Are my friends actually terrible and should I disown them?

eighth grade is a very good movie…. have almost negative interest in this special from what i’ve seen tho

I tried watching, gave up after like 10 mins. the hype/reception is absurd

Agreed. I liked Eighth Grade well enough, but the hype around this special is absolutely insane.

and considering it contains a solid minute of undiluted left agitprop it's really something that I was still totally unmoved (or worse)

I've had this film on my "to watch" queue for a year now, I may hate it but it has Anna Meredith's Nautilus in it, so probably won't.

I'm gonna be generous to the friend who recommended it and say that from the first 15 minutes "Inside" he's talented, if a bit limited in terms of scope.

He comes across a bit smug and self-effacing, like "Yes *wink wink* I know this is kind of shit but that's the joke harharhar".

Musical comedy's can be hard to pull off. When it's great, I love it. I love Flight of the Conchords and Lonely Island because they're parodying actual pop and rock music with absurdism and wordplay. Even Bill Bailey - charming, talented and affable as he is - has mined this "I'm going to put a techno beat over the Channel 4 News theme" thing to death.

But this dude feels like a relic, harking back to the days when Victoria Wood would sit and sing wry, suggestive songs on daytime TV in the 90s; if not going further back to the days of Vaudeville and music hall in the 1930s - and there's nothing wrong with that of course.
But for me this tireless trotting-out of drab observations ("Foot fetish porn and bomb recipes on the internet!", "I'm a privileged white entertainer!", "My mum had wet hair on her Zoom call yesterday") elides actual humour and winds-up as a list of banalities played on honky-tonk piano; a John Lanchester novel set to ironic yacht-rock instrumentation.

Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, or maybe it's just not for me. I was just waiting for it to get funny and after about 15 minutes of watching Inside, the gratingness gave way to a realisation it wouldn't do that.

that was exactly the issue with the one song i watched, the internet one

yes, he seems to care more about finding the appropriate level of self-deprecation/irony than being funny, and it lends the whole thing a level of self-satisfaction that's tough to shake. and yeah the songs feel like relics from another era despite the aggressively contemporary lyrics

i tried w this dude on his first(?) Netflix thing like 8 years ago and just wasn’t my thing. a friend of mine keeps telling me I should watch the new one even though “you’ll prob like some of it, some of it not so much”. not really selling it tbh.

never saw 8th Grade

i was so ready to hate 8th Grade but liked it a lot.

i always think this guys comedy stuff would be funny if they were like 'the funny song' in some actual musical, but presented as standalone comedy its pretty boring. the jokes about self-obsession and how hes coming across, while i guess understandable from a grownup 1st gen youtube star, feel many years out of date. "social media makes me feel weird", huh no shit?

that being said i honestly appreciated how a number of the songs got a hard cut after the first chorus (or even 1st verse a couple times, i think?) as soon as the joke landed, like "you get it, you get it, moving on"

Eighth Grade nails it in so many amazing ways. But the reason I've never checked out his other stuff is ... songs, tbh.

xp OTM. I was waiting for an actual story to take place, but when I realised it was just songs, or more-often observational comedy set to a tune, I lost interest.

I've now watched, like, five of the songs now including the Kanye one and the Zoom call one and the Internet one and a couple more I can't remember. But they all pull the same trick of just listing rote everyday stuff without any real conclusion or punchline, just "This is a thing that happens when you eat Pringles".
Like, yes, I too have had trouble getting the last Pringle out the tube - we all have and we all observed this at picnics in the nineties - but why, Bo, are you continuing to labour this humdrum observation for a full minute after you first pointed it out?
And don't think you can Get Out Of Jail Free me by quipping "I've overdone the Pringles thing, sorry!" at the end.

My own Netflix special is going to be SWEET AS btw

Eighth Grade nails it in so many amazing ways. But the reason I've never checked out his other stuff is ... songs, tbh.

― Josh in Chicago, Tuesday, 8 June 2021 15:55 (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

a bit better when he leaves the musical stuff to Anna Meredith eh

none of the songs I caught in this would pass muster on a subpar lonely island record

Everyone otm. Eighth Grade is a great but tough watch, the bits I've seen of his standup are exhausting and went right through me.

a John Lanchester novel set to ironic yacht-rock instrumentation.

cmon it's not amazing but it's not lanchester bad

this dude feels like a relic

based on my instagram search function, it seems like *everything* is musical comedy now

8th Grade is a great movie, and I liked Bo Burnham a lot in Promising Young Woman. This special is only just ok I don't know why people are falling all over themselves either loving or hating it. The white woman's instagram bit is good though. It's impressive he put the whole thing together on his own.

Father John Misty is somewhere microdosing and slapping himself for not coming up with that Insta song first.

the phrase "can i interest you in everything all of the time" is not a bad line at all but that song is, at best, listenable once

I liked the end when he brought all the themes of the songs together; but like I said, it took an awful long time to get there.

Eighth Grade is a great but tough watch

The most brilliant thing about Eighth Grade is the way none of the worst case scenarios it constantly alludes to actually come to pass. I love that just being a regular eighth grader (my younger finished 8th grade today!) and dealing with mundane teen shit is tough going enough.

I hope this movie doesn't end up being the exception that proves the rule that Bo Burnham fucking sucks

I thought this was... quite ok? Not amazing but definitely not a hate-watch. Some of the observational comedy is half-assed, but the half-assedness kind of fits with the weary, cramped vibe. He's barely out of his twenties! It's not bad considering.

Less politely, I guess I mean some of the comedy is fucking lazy, but in pandemic summer number two, so am I and I didn't mind.

Enjoyed it, but if you told me this guy was in Pamplemoose, I'd believe you.

Inside was one of the worst things i’ve ever seen in my life

you need to see more bad things

idk it was pretty bad

I started watching his 2016 special and it was very bad in a way that Inside wasn't

He's also cuter and in his underwear a lot this time

'inside' is p good! it's like darker weird al. dark al. it's too long, though.

major Tonetta vibes on that turning 30 song

Idk about this.