You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah review – Sandler family delivers sweet YA

Adam Sandler and daughters score a surprising win for Netflix: a sweet-natured adaptation of Fiona Rosenbloom’s teen novel

I’m as keen as the next person to roll my eyes at so-called nepo babies, but You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, a new Netflix teen comedy starring Adam Sandler and his two teenage daughters, makes the case for some upsides to maintaining the family business. Sadie Sandler as Ronnie, the sardonic older sister who can drive, and Sunny Sandler as Stacy Friedman, a 13-year-old struggling with her first crush, first BFF fight and one and only batmitzvah, are clearly actors in training. But the Sandlers’ affectionate rapport and palpable family chemistry lends the film, based on the book by Fiona Rosenbloom, a rare, sweet charm.

Credit as well to the director Sammi Cohen, working with a screenplay from Alison Peck, for an evocative enough rendering of middle school, that very tricky window between the innocence of childhood and the full thicket of teenage angst. Stacy’s fantasy for her perfect batmitzvah is at once distinctly seventh grade, specific to a certain slice of Brooklyn Jewishness and broadly comic: hot pink and sparkly, very extra, a fete of social adulation featuring a cheesy DJ and punctuated by her longtime best friend Lydia (Samantha Lorraine, the standout of the youth cast) and her floppy-haired crush Andy (Dylan Hoffman). Stacy’s world of Hebrew school coming-of-age ceremonies is serious and silly, a parade of Torah recitations and Twizzler stations, and thus her delusions of batmitzvah grandeur (hired pop stars) are rendered both heartfelt and comic. “You’re always saying how my batmitzvah determines the rest of my life,” Stacy tells her parents (Sandler and his Uncut Gems co-star Idina Menzel), “and I think Dua Lipa will make my life perfect.”

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/qCyPNpG

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two years after Buffalo mass shooting, an art exhibit focuses on the victims

A few months after 14 May 2022, a curator sought out three local artists. The resulting exhibition, Before and After Again, is thought to be the first of its kind Two years ago, a white supremacist drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, and opened fire in a grocery store in the city’s predominantly Black East Side neighborhood, killing 10 people and injuring three. Though the Tops Friendly Markets where the racist mass shooting took place has been remodeled, and most of the country has forgotten about the violence that occurred on 14 May 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is forever changed. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mqu1LFv
Read more

£1 Thursdays review – nightclubbing, sex talk and big decisions

Finborough theatre, London A mix of sweet observations about female friendship and cheeky brazenness about sex, Kat Rose-Martin’s play finds two young women at a crossroads in their lives In the cold air outside a sticky nightclub in Bradford, 17-year-olds Stacey and Jen are at a crossroads. In one direction lies the world they know: the family stress, the looming exams, the pumping pop beats at the club where they’ll reliably pull boys from school. In the other direction lies an uncertain path, and questions of who they are apart from one another, whether they could be the first in their families to go to university, and how to afford it if they do. Constantly on their minds, while they’re drunkenly dancing the nights away, is where they’ll end up, and what to do if they are the ones left behind. Thoughtful if not revelatory, £1 Thursdays covers an uneasy period of big decisions in these characters’ lives, as the gap between them widens. Monique Ashe-Palmer (Six) is ebullient as St
Read more