'BEFORE I FALL'......DIE ANOTHER DAY IN THE WORLD OF YA......

Before I Fall (2017)   BQ might have successfully avoided this movie, yet another cheaply produced heart-tugger taken from a Young Adult novel......but Beloved Daughter, lover of all things YA, made it her choice for our movie night together......and so we took the cinematic plunge into the horrors of high school.......bullies, nerds, hotties, all the usual suspects,  blah, blah, blah.......

             Yep, we get it......"Groundhog Day" steeped in teen angst, with our fundamentally deep down nice teen heroine waking up to the same day over and over again after perishing in a car crash with her three BFFs.....who function like an amateur community theater version of Rachel McAdams and her "Mean Girls" crew........

              Since it's not a comedy and we're forced to watch this girl repeatedly struggle to course-correct her behavior as she lives through the same events, an inescapable amount of tedium sets in. She starts becoming smart enough to realize her designated boyfriend is an ass and her three besties are shallow bullies...... but after the third or fourth reboot of her last day earth, you can guess her new and improved interactions ahead of time......

               While the film's busy dutifully instructing us on how to treat others with respect, empathy and compassion, all the expected teen caricatures parade by......but none more grating and obvious than the Outcast Artistic Girl, target of all the bullying and sporting twenty or more pounds of bohemian hair extensions.......as the story drags on, she emerges as a key plot device, right up to the film's bewildering and unsatisfying final moment....

              Following our standard policy, we refuse to waste any space listing the actors involved here, since none of them work above the level of barely competent......nothing you couldn't see for free on any teen-oriented TV show from the Freeform or CW networks....

             And seeing this movie was another dreary chore.......like the "Twilight" films, the film plays out in the perpetual overcast drizzle of the Pacific Northwest, made worse by the cinematography which never moves a notch above dark, cold metallic gloom.

             If you take away the artsy camerawork and the portentous live-your-life-over-again trope, the film's not much more than long dramatization of those "Do be" and "Don't be" cartoons you read in the dentist office magazines. Don't be a bully.....do be nice to Outcast Artistic Girl.....we only needed to live through one of the lead girl's tedious flashbacks to figure that out.  So we'll only re-live 1& 1/2 stars...(* 1/2) for "Before I Fall"........before we fall asleep remembering it.