Ok so I have begun an ambitious plot to chew through my Letterboxd watchlist alphabetically and this is the first one on my list. I fear that this may have been a mistake because this movie IS SO FUCKING GOOD and may have ruined the rest of all cinema ever. Despite my cynical and avoidant attitude towards romance when it comes to real life things (especially things involving me, because let's be honest here-- actually let's not) I really do love tropey romance movies like this. I love silly movies with pairings who start out not really liking each other and then actually end up liking each other a lot. Maybe there is some introspective soul-searching that could be done to explain why I eat this shit up but it's finals week and I don't feel like doing all that after nothing but chemistry for 10 hours today, OK?

This movie was not what I was expecting. I don't really know what I was expecting; I knew abstractly it was about high school and you know it's a romance movie from the poster, but I wasn't expecting to really genuinely like this movie. Like, I dunno, I figured at some point I would end up just scrolling through Instagram anyways, I might as well start my little watchlist project. Which yes, I was on my phone a little bit (I had texts to answer and my brain is small) but I was still very much interested in what was going on! The story. The acting. The music. The everything. I loved it; the stakes are so low and that's exactly what I needed today. Kat is who I wanted to be in middle school, with the feminist book collection and niche music taste and posters on the wall. Now I don't know if I want to be Patrick or be with Patrick so that's cool. (If we're being honest, I was only ever Kat's Shakespeare-reading friend. Nothing has changed; all my friends from both high school and college are the main characters in their own movies and I am still the sidekick with huge glasses, womp womp). I was wholly unprepared for the um. singing scene. but I dig it. If someone did that to me I would kill myself on the spot but for a movie it was very cute!

I judge a romance movie by the number of times I say "I'm going to kill myself," the amount of second-hand embarassment I get, and how often I make a horrible kettle-screech noise. I lost count of the first one, only got a little bit of the second one, and the last one happened at least three notable times. So. Overall very good, very fun, very rewatchable. And I finished it before midnight so that's very exciting; maybe after posting this review I can still get a reasonable amount of sleep!

also Heath Ledger is beautiful and I would (and have) definitely embarassed myself if a beautiful man like him was in my school or my general vicinity ever ^_^

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