I honestly cannot tell you why I chose this movie to try out the (new to me) Tubi app on my Roku, but this is the movie I chose and man am I happy I did. Tubi itself is an ok service, but it has several of the problems that I associate with first generation streaming apps: weird movie choices, out of sync audio, ads that run at weird times (and 3 seconds of the previous scene being incorrectly chopped off, then plays after the ad), washed out images, and an UI that’s not terrible but not great. I look forward to what they end up with in the future though, they seem to be moving the right direction. One shockingly positive thing I noted was that they ran a commercial for a local mexican that I’ve been to many times, which was surprising on multiple levels, but it was great to see different ads every ad break and not the same one three times in a row.
As for the movie itself, boy howdy was it a humdinger of an experience. It’s the story of four freshmen in highschool being played by 18-20 year olds, which if you’ve ever met both a 14 year old and an 18 year old, there’s a world of difference, not that it matters in this case because they’re so excited to be a part of this new high school experience. It’s never addressed, but the school they’re going to has security in nearly every scene, so I can only assume it’s a cesspool of dangerous criminals, something that’s further re-enforced by the thinly veiled Barbi stand in bully, who’s father is the principal of the school. It’s later revealed that they live in a multistoried mansion on what I can only assume is an expansive piece of real estate, worth several million dollars. How he affords all this on a high school principal salary can be explained partially by the amount of armed security on the campus, I’m pretty sure he’s getting some sizable kickbacks from the contractors handling the detail. There’s some odd MTV participation, and while I see no indication they were actually involved in the creation of the movie itself, I guess it’s a buzzworthy name that’s easy to drop to highschoolers. Mixed in with all this is a weird child love story with a younger brother and a much much younger sister, all wrapped up with a song / music video that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie, either in tone or substance.
This was not a good movie to me, a 38 year old white guy typing out movie reviews from the safety of his couch.
