Almost Adults (2016)

For our March indie spotlight, I found this on Tubi and thought I'd give it a look. It felt like it could be a modern take on the 90s off-beat comedies I used to catch at the local indie theater. That was a fun time for movies, and there's a sense that through crowd sourcing and other independent means, we're getting a level of that back, which I hope is the case and could be really exciting.

Almost Adults is about two childhood friends in their last year of college in Ontario, Mackenzie (Elise Bauman) and Cassie (Natasha Negovanlis). Cassie has just broken up with her boyfriend, while Mackenzie has finally come out to her parents and is trying to find the right time to come out to Cassie too. Instead, Cassie finds out when a coworker shows her Mackenzie's Tumblr, which causes friction between them that only gets worse when Mackenzie starts dating her first girlfriend. As they're growing apart, Cassie is offered a dream job in New York City. Will these two friends reconcile before Cassie moves thousands of miles away?

 

This ultimately did what I wanted coming in, it gave me that old 90s indie feel. It had its flaws, but I liked the dynamic between the friends, and I also liked how writer Adrianna DiLonardo and director Sarah Rotella kept us from liking either of the two too much at the expense of the other. I also liked how they mitigated the issue of texting from a cinematic standpoint, as it wouldn't have made sense if the characters weren't texting one another, and I don't think it's easy to incorporate that in a way that's not obtrusive, but I think they pulled it off. There were some areas that felt like they could've been a bit trite, like Levi, the gay male best friend to the girls (Justin Gerhard) who seemed to really only exist as the conduit for the girls to bounce things off of; but the film doesn't let us get too comfortable in that trope, as Levi will excuse himself from whichever girl he's playing shoulder to cry on to go out and live his own life, which I appreciated. Overall, we had a great, dynamic story, about two friends at a crossroads that I found pretty relatable, but yet with elements that made it more than that and gave it more depth.

One of those elements was how it wasn't just Mackenzie's sexuality that created the tension between her and Cassie. Cassie was used to leaning on Mackenzie, and Mackenzie was used to being available for her. In the opening scene, we see Cassie in bed with Mackenzie, because Cassie is still not over splitting from her boyfriend (Mark Matechuk), and she needs someone to cuddle with. Later, when Cassie needs some retail therapy, she press-gangs Mackenzie into coming along, and then when her ex shows up with a new woman, she makes Mackenzie come into the fitting room with her while she's changing. It's not even that she takes for granted that she thinks Mackenzie's straight, it's almost like she thinks Mackenzie's asexual, and that's what she takes for granted. The first thing Cassie feels when she finds out she was the last to be told that Mackenzie is a lesbian is, "why was I last?" which translates to "how could I be last? What is this life Mackenzie has outside of me?"

But then this is where the movie takes a smart turn, and prevents us from being too much Team Mackenzie. As she starts to date Elliot (Winny Clarke), a member of the school soccer team, she becomes the one taking Cassie for granted. She drops Cassie mid-sentence to take a call from Elliot; or tells Cassie she's not hungry when Cassie suggests getting a pizza, only to tell Elliot she'd love to grab a bite to eat when Elliot calls two seconds later. I thought this worked really well, because Mackenzie is almost a quirky sitcom character in the way she's constructed, and without this turn to make her a little less sympathetic, she's essentially the character we're coming back to the Almost Adults TV show for each week. I love too how her lack of understanding of how Tumblr works is what gets her dumped by Elliot. That's when the film brings us back to her and makes her sympathetic again, just in time to wrap things up; but at the same time, Cassie has now become sympathetic too, she's no longer the person who takes her friend for granted.

I've brought up the Bechdel Test in previous posts, mostly because we rarely have movies here on the DTVC that actually pass it. What this movie does though is flips the Hollywood traditions that the Bechdel Test is meant to expose in a couple ways that I really liked. In one scene, we have Mackenzie talking to Levi about when she should tell Cassie she's a lesbian. Instead of needing two women talking about someone other than a guy, we have the standard Rom Com trope of two female characters talking about a male love interest subverted with a lesbian woman talking to her gay male friend about her platonic straight female friend. Later, near the end, we have Mackenzie and Cassie reconciling, two women talking about their friendship, and then as a going away memento, Mackenzie gives Cassie her Beach Time Ken doll, completely naked. I loved the idea of that, Hollywood films often have two women talking about a man in a scene, well here he is. We always talk about Marvel movies or other big productions showing us what's possible with filmmaking, but I think a film like this does that even more, as these norms of needing to have however much of the film centered around straight male characters is limiting the art much more than the technology needed to show Spider-Man flying through the city was, and a movie like this does a great job showing us what's possible.

Finally, I was trying to figure out what to do with this last paragraph. One, it's the second film to feature Tumblr, the other being another indie spotlight, Captain Slick Pants, which we covered back in 2013. I met my wife Jen on Tumblr, so it holds a special place in my heart, as you can imagine, despite the fact that I barely use it anymore. Another thing is the ex boyfriend's name was Matthew. Not Matt, but Matthew. I always joked that I only ever heard Matthew in two situations: when my mom was calling my name, and if there was a hurricane named Matthew. Now though, post pandemic with all the online ordering, when I create accounts I often let Google auto-fill everything, and it usually auto-fills Matthew, so when I go to places like Starbucks to pick up my order, that's the name that's called, and now Matthew has grown on me a bit, at least so it's as good as Matt. Finally, there was a joke about Cassie needing to sign every email at her internship with "Kindest Regards." I always end my emails with "All the best," but if the sentence before that was wishing someone "the best of luck going forward," I can't have two bests that close, so I will utilize "Kind regards"--I also find "Kind regards" works in a condolence situation. All of this is a roundabout way of saying, I get the whole issue around properly signing your emails, and maybe I think about it much too.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of my writing this, you can stream this for free on Tubi here in the States. I think that's a great deal. This is a fun, engaging film that's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686862

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!