Thanks for the heads up, PMM, that was excellent! Much feels. I love how specific it is.

Much feels. I love how specific it is.

I wind up with a different set of feels each time. Last time, I totally thought I had escaped with my mascara intact, only to start welling up at Aubrey Plaza's expression when Old Elliott realizes Chad can see her. (Then I ended up just painfully, achingly nostalgic for the place in Canada where Gram and Malcolm were living when I was 15 and stayed with them for part of a summer. It's a water and boat thing?) It's such a tiny, intimate movie with a real sense of place, which I love about it. It's also hilarious, despite having multiple cry points for me. It's also a rare movie in that it does a good job of showing someone falling for someone (I enjoyed Anyone But You on the plane, but it failed to do that) despite not actually being a romance, even though it features one. God, and I love Max, the middle brother. "Old upset is different than new upset." is a line that sticks with me. Hell, I love her whole family. Young Elliott and her friends are so realistically teens, I say, my house usually overflowing with (often queer) teens who are all so like that. And Old Elliott...I just want to wrap her in a blanket.

Yes! Such good characters, especially both the Elliots but the friends and brothers are also really well drawn and particular. When Elliot introduces Chad to her friends and Ro says something like "oh I see how this works" while they are bantering, that got to me in a big way. Everything so precise and exactly right.

I also just cracked up at Elliott and Ro's faces when Ruthie asks what happens if one of them says something weird that alters the dynamic of their friendship forever. And an appalled Elliott telling her older self that she's not going to FaceTime her mom while high. And the whole defensive "I let her talk to me about a hummingbird for forty-five minutes!" which just was SO (actually) very young adult daughter.

Seeing it with my own daughter was a trip in some respects. I had a few concerns about that because Elliott goes from thinking she's only into girls to falling hard as hell for a dude, but the movie made it very clear that she's still also way into girls (her older self has a girlfriend) and L thought it was pretty realistic as far as realizations that your sexuality might not be exactly what you think. (I mean, she had sort of the opposite thing where she took a while to really realize, no, she's only into women.)

I kind of feel like I'm underselling the part where it's honestly really funny when I talk about it because of how overwhelming the feels have been for me at parts of it, but truly, it's a delightfully crafted hour and a half.

It is! There were very few other people in the theater with me so I was, like, aware of that every time I laughed out loud but I still did it

Reminded me of Everything Everywhere All At Once in some ways that I have not been able to really pin down and articulate.

I can actually see that? Not that I can articulate it, either, but I can see it. It hits complementary emotional notes. Different, but complementary.

(EEAAO broke my child's ability to speak for about half an hour, though. The eternal fraughtness of mother/child relationships as adulthood happens and all. Plus the "this is kind of movie about untreated/undertreated ADHD, too" aspects.)