J Henry

A nice charmer around a surprising bonding experience that develops between two high school girls in a love triangle with a common boyfriend – Nick - where ultimately their love and kinship for each other wins out. They both bring hilarity to most of their life events and the challenges of their new relationship - offering dining etiquette advice to movie house patrons, maintaining their clandestine but ‘rule based’ friendship, and mixing in and out of other usual high school social scenes. Other characters that include April’s meddling, precocious little sister with an advanced vocabulary, her grounded mother, zany party pal friends and the sympathetic but wary guy pal all add to the humor set to some nice sun-drenched CA backdrops. The moves and paths of high school to college are pretty familiar, lost jobs, driving tests finally passed, acceptance to distance separated colleges but lovable characters, their relationships and witty dialogue always makes each journey especially unique and entertaining. The shared relationship eventually comes to a strained reckoning but the reconciliation is overcoming and the resulting love/friendship heart warming resolution even better. Just another in a series of superbly written, witty and entertaining teen dramedies that should give ‘Booksmart’ a run for its money this year.

This is a really nice debut by a young director that shows a capable handling of mature issues like suicide, substances abuse, family relationships, sex etc well beyond her years. Her character Lucy has been living in another ‘drunken dimension’ of binge drinking, casual sex with strangers and late night stagger homes after a visit to the chip shop. All this a result of losing her closest friend, Alistair, who committed suicide despite all her efforts at prevention. At times you see the pleasantness around her: the scenic city of Inverness, her watching the neighbors' nice family moments through their window at night contrasting her family situation where each member seems isolated. But other characters eventually to begin to ground her back into a more normal lifestyle. She has a small relationship with a traveler also dealing with family misfortune who she comforts at the same site where she lost her first friend. The same site she will later visit contemplating her own plight. Through the film she also has been helped by a therapeutic relationship with an elderly man calling her home mistaking it for the crisis hotline. The caller further restores her sense of humanity and tells her it is time to ‘wake up ‘ from this alternate dimension she is living in. A very clever reveal of the caller’s actual identity occurs soon after. She ultimately brings closure to her grief and delights to see her parents talking to each other again through the window as she arrives home one night and goes in and joins them resembling again the happiness of earlier captured in their large family picture. A pretty good resolution story told overall and some outrageous moments, mainly involving Lucy, also add an amusing element of humor.