This week at Generic Concepts Theater is Graduation dates (now streaming on Hulu), the story of two high school best friends obsessed with making graduation night the best time of their young lives. You might wonder why they are so obsessed with prom? The only answer I have is, because otherwise there would be no movie. Of course, mindless movies can still be funny and therefore fun to watch, and this one features a pair of talented young actors in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star Julia Lester and ginny and georgia Antonia Gentry leads. But it may take more than hard work from a couple of up-and-comers to overcome the clichés of too many raunchy neosexual comedies.
PROM DATES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: We start with a literal blood pact: best friends Hannah (Lester) and Jess (Gentry) cut each other’s palms and promise to have the best prom ever, and then there’s a mishap that probably ends in the ER with a few stitches . being managed. Fast forward a few years and things are on the right track, but not quite: Jess is dating Luca (Jordan Buhat) just because it’s the fast track to prom king and reign; As expected, Luca is a vain general chodemeister who is quick to put down others, for example, Hannah. Meanwhile, Hannah receives an over-the-top musical theater proposal in front of the entire school from her boyfriend Greg (Kenny Ridwan), which mortifies her; The biggest problem is that she is secretly gay and hasn’t told anyone yet, not even her best friend. This is how the commitments we make to achieve our dreams go.
As these things inevitably go, I get tired of these things inevitably going the way they do, because those things are always, predictably, lousy. Jess catches Luca the Asshat cheating on her, and Hannah breaks Greg’s poor, fragile little heart, and with only two days left until prom, they have to despair so they don’t go to the dance alone like complete losers. So, in a shaky plot development that only makes sense considering the main characters are teenage idiots, they venture to the nearby Rutgers campus to attend parties and maybe get some new dates. They attend a party hosted by a perpetually slurring, perpetually swimsuit-clad entity known as Vodka Heather (Zion Moreno), and yes, there will be vomiting and hijinks (or wherever the two of them are) as they do hard drugs and break up. comically mingling with asshole jocks, frat rapists and strippers.
Some developments worth mentioning: Hannah is in love with the confident Angie (Terry Hu), but fears she’s wasted her only chance to charm her. Greg won’t go away easily either, as he desperately pursues Hannah. Jess may have something almost okay going on with a football player, even though she makes Ralph Wiggum look like Oppenheimer. Jess also harbors a potentially destructive secret: she once slept with Hannah’s brother Jacob (JT Neal), which, in the pantheon of teen movies, is a betrayal worthy of public execution. This is a potent powder keg for the plot, people, hello powerful. The question is: do you want to see it explode or would you rather see a less derivative film?
What movies will it remind you of?: Anyone with a pulse will see it. Graduation dates aims to be the ideal mix of Very badly and Smart reservation; she keeps dreaming, Graduation dateskeep dreaming.
Performance worth seeing: When Graduation dates Changing the tone from a gross blecch to a serious blecch, Ridwan gets a heartfelt scene that rings true, pure and honest, and which the film doesn’t deserve at all.
Memorable dialogue: A revealing interaction between Jess and a badly concussed football player:
Soccer Player: My coach says, one more concussion and I’ll have to learn to read again.
Jess: Oh, that’s horrible!
Soccer player: I know. It was very difficult the first time.
Sex and skin: Some horizontal kisses and off-screen hands-on work.
Our opinion: There is very little in Graduation dates that prompts us to not give a damn. The main characters’ motives are confusing at best and they are very hastily defined as human beings. Desperation is a common trait among the Movie Teens, but here it is the only tangible quality that defines Hannah and Jess; you’ll want to jump into the movie and grab them by the lapels and get some character details out of them. Lester, the most charismatic actor of the group, tries to find some agency in Hannah’s coming out dilemma, but the film isn’t interested in letting him be more than a simple plot point and an opportunity for some too. easy jokes At first, Jess exclaims that she didn’t get a Brazilian wax just to go to prom alone, and I tell her, Jess, darling, you should get a Brazilian wax to yourselfand anyone else.
Under the banner of Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Productions, the film goes out of its way to be crass, as if it takes a bunch of laxatives to artificially induce evil instead of letting nature take its usual disgusting course. We have blood, farts, and a lot of vomit, and although the characters are horny, horny, they never engage in any activities that are shocking enough to be funny. But the film isn’t content to be consistent in its would-be crudeness, as it veers left into blatant trash during the third act. Where once characters were treated like jokes, suddenly that’s not the case, and we get a series of heartfelt speeches (including a heartfelt one in front of the celebrating masses, sigh) that not only dilute the comedy, but feel more like screenwriter calculations than recognizable human behavior. Graduation dates I would desperately love to be seen as a scandalous, smut-fest with heart, but it’s too unambitious to engage in new smut. I honestly doubt he even knows what obscenity is.
Our call: Feel free to throw Graduation dates the day of the dance. He doesn’t deserve you. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
