“Lady Bird” - Let it go.

(It's award consideration season and I'm playing catch-up. As I tear through them, I thought I'd try mini-reviews. Enjoy!)

For about eight minutes, some hay was made about Lady Bird breaking a record for the most positive consecutive reviews without a negative review on Rotten Tomatoes.  Then, a single film critic gave it a negative score out of a combination of spite and thinking the film was merely okay and the Internet pooped its collective Pampers.  There is a lot to unpack with this situation, but I’ll save that for another time (*cough* year-end-review *cough*).  After watching Lady Bird myself, I can definitively state that I am not a teenaged girl.  I checked.  Lady Bird is a coming-of-age tale about a high school senior, Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan).  That’s it; that’s the whole movie.  Lady Bird is your stereotypical (or typical) female teenager - she hates her mom (Laurie Metcalf), wants to go to college on the opposite side of the country from her mom, falls in love with different boys, has a falling out with her best friend over stupid teenager shit, and sucks at math.  Since I am not a teenaged girl (I checked again) and am good at math, I can only relate passively with Lady Bird on most of her issues, though I can sympathize because I knew some of those girls.  It reminded me a lot of Napoleon Dynamite, but without the quirkiness of Napoleon Dynamite.  For all those reasons, I couldn’t generate more than mild interest in what was happening on screen (just like with Napoleon Dynamite).  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t mostly bored by this film because it was about a teenaged girl.  I was mostly bored because that teenaged girl was barely interesting.  I’m not saying the movie isn’t good, just that I’m not the intended audience.  But also, what is that smell?

Rating: At the risk of causing another stink (haha), unless you are a teenaged girl, ask for three dollars back.