Teen Time: BOTTOMS and YOU ARE SO NOT INVITED TO MY BAT MITZVAH

The crude, snarky R-rated teen comedy Bottoms has ideas gesturing toward the concept of funny without ever really getting there. It’s the sophomore effort for writer-director Emma Seligman, whose anxiously amusing Shiva Baby was one of the better debuts in recent memory. That movie, a nerve-pinching stress-laugh comedy of manners, was a fine star turn for young comedian Rachel Sennott and a cast of character actors stuck in the most awkward funeral reception imaginable—or at least since Neil LaBute remade Death at a Funeral. Seligman is a talented writer of filthy sharp-tongued barbs and a capable director of cringing exchanges. Her latest does well to continue developing her reputation as a filmmaker with a distinctive voice. But there’s small delight to find Bottoms is the kind of unsuccessful movie only a talented filmmaker could cobble together. It’s an excessive, exaggerated goof on the usual oversexed heteronormative teen comedy. The leads, played by Sennott and The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri, are the typical awkwardly virginal dork protagonists this sort of picture often brings, but this time they’re lesbians. That gives a slightly fresh—albeit hardly original—spin to the expect flop-sweat antics as they try to get the hot popular girls’ attention. The duo is funny enough in their slack, improvisational dirtiness and all-elbows casual-insult friendship to carry a lot of silliness. Their school, though, is a bloodthirsty hyper-masculine football cult—complete with a phallic mascot and double entendres on every flyer. The team prowls around school like a wolf pack, intimidating and blustering with bullying thin-skinned toxicity. And so it makes perfect sense in that permissive environment that the leads’ irresponsible teacher (Marshawn Lynch) would allow them to start a school-sanctioned all-girls Fight Club. Sure, that might get some of the hot cliques’ attention. But if you wonder if that’d lead to a Project Mayhem-style conclusion—well, an exploding van would let you know the answer well before a climactic bloodbath on the football field. The characters all stand perpendicularly to reality in a place that’s parallel to ours—an amped-up nonsense world of sex and profanity and violence that sails beyond the usual excesses of the genre into a nowhere land. It’s not exactly a satire of its form; nor does it have any clear thematic concerns beyond goofing around with how far it can push and pull different tropes into its bloody aims. I’m sure one could make a sharp point juxtaposing casually normalized sexualized youth with crowds willing to shrug off bloody teenagers—the movie dances around topical concerns before settling on vague nothings—but Bottoms is more interested in coarse insults, cynically casual outrages, and the sort of half-baked world-building that leaves something real and interesting—and funny!—stranded in an unconvincing simulacrum of a teen comedy.

Much more to my teen comedy liking is You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. It’s cute and clever, as its broadness and obviousness and good humor are hammered home in comforting style like a pleasing pop song over a sitcom montage. But the emotions in it are deep and true and resonate, too. The movie is a totally charming work of comic empathy with high emotional stakes and small family dramedy. It’s also, maybe first and foremost, a love letter from Adam Sandler to his daughters, who here play his character’s daughters. There’s something genuinely moving about how much this picture plays off of Sandler’s love for his family. He takes a supporting role, while his younger daughter, Sunny, plays an awkward middle-schooler navigating the world of quarreling besties, dreamy boys, and mortifying menstruation. All this and a looming Bat Mitzvah, too? What’s a girl to do? The movie comes on like a modern-day Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret updated for the Snapchat and TikTok generation. It’s not nearly as annoying as that might sound. There’s some earnest tangling with ideas of young womanhood and religious awareness, as well as the requisite dramas of junior high social strife. The movie is juvenile enough to bubble over with the giddy, all-consuming importance of these milestones and mishaps alike, but wise enough to step back with a sense of perspective and proportion. That’s the fine double act of having both the adorable, high-energy commitment of the 14-year-old Sandler playing the adolescent drama, yearning, and confusion at full tilt, while the elder statesman Sandler (having aged into the most lovably paternal form of his screen persona) does his most shaggily charming wise-acre father act cutting the tension and wryly dropping in punchlines with ease. The movie’s colorful high-gloss look and generous ensemble of funny familiar faces adds to the comforting sitcom style, while its widescreen sheen and pounding pop music soundtrack gives it enough silver screen oomph to make every outsized emotion fill the space. It swoons and spurns and embraces and learns right along with its lead, and smiles knowingly at how these emotions are so big only because they’re all new to her. All this it accomplishes with a fine teen comedy flair, with the best Sandler mix of knowing irreverence tied to deep sentimental commitment. This is easily one of his most appealing films, and one of the most delightful teen comedies to come along in a long time.

Promising Young Women: SHIVA BABYand THE CRAFT: LEGACY

Shiva Baby is so drenched in social anxiety — not to mention family obligations, professional frustrations, and sexual tension — that one could practically wring it out. The whole endeavor has a palpable feeling of discomfort, the camerawork close and ever-so-slightly trembling, the score spare stabbing strings, the dialogue surface pleasant, subtextually jabbing small talk of needling relatives gossiping and hesitant strangers networking. It takes place almost entirely at a shiva for a distant relative (someone’s second wife’s sister—that sort of thing) of our protagonist, a college senior (Rachel Sennott) whose various worlds are about to uncomfortably collide. Her future looks uncertain, graduating without good prospects, to the dismay of her mother (Polly Draper) who tells her to let the other mourners think she has interviews lined up. Her father (Fred Melamed) still pays her bills since her babysitting job is so erratically scheduled. And neither know that her alleged babysitting job is a cover story for her real meager source of income: meeting men on a sugar daddy app and getting some easy money for a good time. We start the movie at the end of her latest hookup with an older man (Danny Deferrari), the better to recognize him when he enters the house. Small world. His wife (Dianna Agron) and baby are meeting him there, too. The walls are closing in.

There’s a constant sense of teetering on the edge of potential embarrassment, and Sennott capably plays the squirm, blundering forward though her insecurities and realizing only too late each escalating cringe. The tension rises as she’s bolstered by craft that keeps her tightly framed and blocking that presses her into corners or into uncomfortable exposure. In this small gathering the rooms were already full of elderly family friends (like Jackie Hoffman) prying nicely or passive aggressively into her personal life, and her childhood best friend and first romantic partner (Molly Gordon) makes eyes at her, too. Now it's only more complicated. Writer-director Emma Seligman, in a striking debut feature, has the confidence to sustain this small, well-tuned picture — a mere 70-some minutes and just a wisp of plotting to carry it — by signaling the largely interior stakes through small gestures and flushes of discomfort. The movie’s all about eye lines and furtive glances, the cold sweat of conversational awkwardness and the tension between polite fictions and outright deceptions. All the while, the whole thing plays out like a prelude to a panic attack, emotionally edging right up to the brink of a psychological catastrophe that never quite erupts. It feels like an achingly real emotional state.

You never know where you’ll find that. For instance, I just caught up with writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' The Craft: Legacy. Who’d have thought the couple decades belated sequel/remake of the cult teen coven classic would have some emotional truth in it? I didn’t. But there it is anyway. There’s a scene in the middle, a sort of Breakfast Club misfit confession circle, in which the star teen girls who dabble in witchcraft as a form of self-empowerment — but dangers lurk, because of course they do — talk with a former bullying boy from their school. He tearfully admits his closeted bisexuality and earnestly confesses to feeling stifled by gender norms. It’s a real bolt of interesting emotional valences that changes the temperature of the scene and resonates throughout the rest of the picture. The whole thing is an amiable teen flick, with lockers and house parties and cute montages and, befitting its horror roots, a bit of dark sinister intentions lingering underneath. There are a few good creepy moments, and fine parallel plots about our new-in-town lead girl (Cailee Spaeny) getting to know her new friends and her latent powers, and her single mother (Michelle Monaghan) finding a new beau, a masculinist self-help guru and maybe-cult-leader (David Duchovny). (Some shades of The Lost Boys, there, perhaps.)

So there’s decent contrast drawn between the girl-power witches and dark forces of misogyny, and there’s the usual stuff about crushes and classes and learning to grow into oneself inherent in the teen movie of any genre. It’s a consistent through line of inquiry connecting the boy’s troubles and the girls’, a frank admission that societal expectations can hurt everyone, even those who are theoretically built up by them. Even if the movie never quite leans all the way into horror — though there’s a bit with a figure in a mirror in a darkened bedroom that’s quite spooky — and there are fleeting moments where it feels like one of those featherlight Netflix Original buzzword Mad Libs pictures, the whole project has a consistent and pleasant earnestness about its characters that makes for a modestly enjoyable effort as it coasts to its routine conclusion.