Booksmart (2019)

This coming-of-age teen comedy romp may be implausible and full of holes but it's still a pretty good time and often funny. It's the night before high school graduation—the whole night, actually, so in a way director Olivia Wilde and the four screenwriters are courting American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused. But it's quite a bit more loopy and surprising than either of those movies. Molly (Beanie Feldstein) realizes that she and her best friend Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) have spent all their time at high school with their noses to the grindstone to make the grade to get into good schools. They never had fun like the rest of the kids, on whom they generally look with bemused disdain. But, in turn, they know they are only regarded by them as good-girl drudges and they feel they deserve better. The night follows, with the general aim of finding a party at Nick's aunt's place, wherever that is. Feldstein and Dever have a lot of chemistry and they are going to make this movie work no matter what it takes or what the script tells them they have to do. Molly and Amy have elaborate, weird, and hilarious affirmation rituals they go through when they meet or just before challenges. They are smart, sensitive, geeky, charming, and funny when their inhibitions drop, but high school social pressures being what they are they only rarely drop. There are wonderful characters here. A poor little rich boy, Jared (Skyler Gisondo), who kept reminding me of Jackie Chan. His mysterious sister, or cousin (or something), Gigi (Billie Lourd), who is literally everywhere Molly and Amy go, before they get there, even though they leave her behind in worse condition every time. An encouraging teacher, Mrs. Fine (Jessica Williams), who is. A high school principal (Jason Sudeikis) who drives for Lyft in his spare time. Amy's parents (Lisa Kudrow and Will Forte) are cloyingly adorable liberal (I think) Christians who accept that their daughter is a lesbian, and even support it, thinking she is involved with Molly. She isn't. There's also a serial killer who tries to talk sense to them. Early in the evening, on Jared's yacht, when Gigi doses them with some exotic drug they become Barbie dolls for a sequence and undergo other strange changes before regrouping and moving on to the next stop on the way to the party. Of course there are tender moments—it's a milestone of life, after all, high school graduation. But this movie is mostly a lot of laughs with the soundtrack turned up loud. Good stuff all around.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Oscar Wilde is of course one of the great epigrammatists so found myself scrambling to save some as they swam by: "One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing ... Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner ... It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion." There are many more. It surprises me a little that this is the only novel he produced—it's so good, above and beyond his language, which was witty no matter what he wrote about. One could quibble that Dorian Gray is more of a fantastic tale, inflated to the size of a novel. Perhaps. I actually wish there were more about the bad behavior of our hero and object lesson Dorian Gray—the specifics. Obviously he had an illustrious depraved career. We might have been shown, for example, whatever it is Gray had on the chemist Alan Campbell that enabled him to blackmail Campbell into doing something so abhorrent and contrary to Campbell's character. More on the women Gray ruins too. It's still a fine first novel. The arc of Wilde's career seemed to be toward the theater—his plays are still produced today—but it's always tempting to speculate what might have been, particularly as he died at 46. I like the fantastic element to this story, and I like the way it remains unexplained. It proceeds in many ways like an unusually chattering Henry James, but the macabre and dark forces go well beyond anything James imagined in The Turn of the Screw or elsewhere. This is closer to Poe—to "The Cask of Amontillado," where everything is all convivial and easygoing good fun ... until someone has to go too far. In Dorian Gray that is largely Dorian Gray, and when Wilde pulls back the curtain even a little on the evil in which Gray traffics—as how forcefully he makes Campbell cooperate—it can be a little alarming. My gnawing question: What did he do? Yes, I know, there's a whole school of argument that the details of such things are best left to the imagination. Fair enough. I've imagined plenty now. One more nice point: a good nervy scene that takes place here in an opium den somewhere in London near the river. Mostly this is just a blast to read.

In case it's not at the library.