I was really looking forward to this movie after seeing trailers for it, and after seeing a high 90s ratings score on the often unreliable Rotten Tomatoes. I thought it would be like the Awkwafina film The Farewell (2019) where Awkwafina plays an Americanized, hip character dealing with older family members that don’t know English well, or at all, and believe in old traditions.
Instead, this movie reminded me a lot of the Bo Burnham film “Eight Grade” (2018). That movie got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and my wife and I both disliked it.
This deals with an 8th grader, in the summer before Chris (Izaac Wang), who is a Taiwanese-American, starts high school.
The movie begins well enough. We like his group of friends, who are a bit crude, but kind of funny and sweet with each other. They have a great friendship. Chris videos them doing pranks, and he’s pining for a cute classmate. Yet it never seems to make sense as to why he’s so rude to his mom and sister. Sometimes the fights are cute, but oftentimes they’re just nasty. This isn’t garden variety rebelliousness, but an anger that isn’t justified towards his family (although he’s always sweet with his grandmother).
The story which takes place in 2008 is drawn from writer/director Sean Wang’s life. Wang had previously been nominated for an Oscar for a short; this is his first feature.
We get lots of scenes watching Chris post things online, and learning lessons along the way (most don’t seem to reach him until the end of this two month period of his life we’re watching). Some of these scenes are interesting, but hardly original for a coming-of-age story. So often it’s disjointed, not sure of what picture it wants to be.
When his crush says “You’re kind of cute; for an Asian,” and he later then claims to be “half Asian” – you get why a kid would do that. But we never really see any fallout or confrontations from that. I thought surely we’d get a lecture from the mom (who is played wonderfully by Joan Chen).
At the end of the day, there just wasn’t enough here. While I was entertained watching it, I wanted to like it more.
Oh, and since 84% of movies have a puke scene, yes, you get one here.
2 ½ stars out of 5.