Eighth Grade – Movie Review

Eighth Grade Movie Review

“Eighth Grade,” starring the amazing Elsie Fisher, made audiences both erupt with laughter and sit in weepy silence at Sundance when it appeared there in January. And if you can get too-cool movie critics and industry veterans to actually show human emotion, you’ve either just announced one of the nearby mountains is an active volcano spewing hot lava on the town “right this very second!,” or you are Bo Burnham, the inventive comedian and YouTube star, who created this great movie.

Remember how much fun eighth grade was? It was great! Yayy!

OK, maybe for two people. For the rest us, eighth grade was a daily torture chamber of embarrassment, rejection and disappointment. And that was just the school lunch.

Elsie plays Kayla, a girl who meets the challenges of 8th grade by being almost completely silent at school, while recording YouTube videos that nobody watches about how to be confident and cool. Wait, that’s what I do in real life.

Her dad tries to help. And he’s a really good dad, but in the end, dads don’t know what to do. They are all just guessing. I remember one time my dad, who rarely dispensed fatherly advice, told my brothers and I that we should “hang around good people.” OK, then.

Here’s my one big problem with this movie: I kept waiting for superheroes, big machines that transform into cars and vice versa, alien spaceships, warlords from a distant planet and a comeback appearance from Shia LeBeouf in the passenger seat of a vintage Dodge Charger driven by Tom Cruise. None of these things happened.

Other than that, go see “Eighth Grade.”

Four out of five stars.