"EIGHTH GRADE".......THE FINE ART OF AWKWARD......

Eighth Grade (2018)    We've got a group of longtime friends who started up a nostalgic Facebook page for all of us who grew up in the same neighborhood.......

                One of them once posted a photo of our old Junior High School....(which is what we called Middle Schools in the Jurassic Age......)

                 The BQ immediately weighed in with a comment on this photo.......something along the lines of ....."there's nothing wrong with this building that a Tomahawk missile couldn't cure...."

                  ........which touched off the rest of our friends chiming in with all their pent up bad memories of their middle school days.......vicious bullies, callous teachers.......and the general misery of early adolescence.......

                   In other words, Junior High becomes every kid's own personal Marine Boot Camp.....humiliating to body and soul and in retrospect, barely survivable......

                   Which brings us to 'Eighth Grade', a little movie that won enormous praise by replicating, with unerring accuracy, the sheer, cringe-worthy horror of a 13 year old girl navigating her way through the minefield of middle school.

                   Stubbornly resisting any attempt to be a coherent, linear film, "Eighth Grade" presents a collection of documentary-like sequences in which we wince at the ever-increasing angst of Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) a painfully shy 8th grader whose main form of desperate self-expression comes from her own Youtube  self-help Vlog........which virtually none of her peer visit.

                    The vlog entries, in which Kayla stutters and stumbles through her own insecurities under the guise of offering advice to her fellow teens, forms the film's foundation.......and offers young actress Fisher a tour-de-force worthy of Meryl Streep........(that is, if Streep were 13 years old and spent every waking moment on her cellphone and IPad...)

                    There's nothing to discuss here in terms of story.......as we mentioned, the movie's not interested in telling one.......this is strictly a film of behavioral observation. And what observations they are........Kayla's walk of shame through a Mean Girl's pool party, an attempted 'Truth Or Dare' sexual victimization of her by a high school boy and an achingly poignant, loving moment with her single father (Josh Hamilton), whose as unsure and awkward in his parenting as his daughter is in her first, rocky transitions out of childhood.

                      As shapeless as "Eighth Grade" might be, we'll take this movie any day over a thousand of those rotten, mumblecore Sundance escapees about unemployed 30-somethings revisiting their home towns......

                      4 stars (****).........(and if anyone does lob a Tomahawk missile at our old Junior High, we swear we weren't anywhere near the place. Honest. )