The PR of Snapchat and the film and television company cooperated, so we were able to watch the movie in advance at Arclight in Santa Monica before it was released. In a word, the shot is really good. Some people say that it is like the young version of "Miss Bird", I think it is even better, more real, more cowardly, and more warm.
The content of the film is very simple. It revolves around the last life of a little girl in the eighth grade (equivalent to the third grade of junior high school in our country). The little girl Kayla is introverted and unremarkable. She is at the bottom of the American campus where she looks at her face and looks at "social". However, her maiden heart is no less than anyone else. She hopes to get out of her introverted personality and make friends with more people. She has an idiotic heart for the handsome guys in the class. However, there is always a distance between reality and fantasy: Banhua has her own circle, and she basically rolls her eyes while watching her mobile phone. I don’t care about her existence; the handsome guy just wants her to give him oral sex; after finally making new friends in senior grades, what is waiting for her is even bigger...
The clue of the whole film is the video recorded and uploaded by the little girl Kayla on YouTube. The number of people watching each video is in single digits, and the subject of each video is something she can't do well but is teaching others how to do it. "How to make friends", "How to find myself"... This director who made youtube videos gave full play to his own specialties and made the audience laugh. But smiling, I think this is too real: she is telling herself how to do it, and she is also telling me how to do it. The little third-year student who was hiding in my heart slowly jumped out. Those topics that bothered me back then-how to interact with people, how to endure Banhua's white eyes, how to fight with the Banlila gang Zhou Xuan, how to become more extroverted...These are the things that I have always been aiming for.
And decades later, I found out that things have not improved. When you grow up, you have learned to cover up, and you have learned to focus on other things, such as work, such as firewood, rice, oil and salt; but the problems that bothered you back then, such as how can you figure out the psychology of others, how can you cheekily talk to strangers, how? Only then can I know when to make an inch and when to show weakness and beg for mercy...I didn't know this before, but I still won't. We hide our shyness with indifference. If you see me having a cold face at the banquet, it’s just because I don’t know what to talk about; we use mediocrity to cover up unskilledness, and we do the same step by step day after day. It’s just because we don’t want to get out of our comfort zone... We have told ourselves countless times that life is like this, the eighth-grade girl in my heart sighed.
Therefore, I still admire Kayla. She is willing to try-although not necessarily a successful attempt-but she also wrote an emotional letter to her future self and placed it in a time capsule, full of confidence in the future. This confidence is not "I will definitely be better", but "It doesn't matter if it's not good", and a large part of this confidence comes from the super touching conversation with her father at the end. Kayla asked her father: Are you sad when I grow up like this? Dad said awkwardly and softly: How can you be sad? I swear in the name of God, I am happier than happiness! You are so easy for people to fall in love, from childhood to adulthood... I thought I wanted to teach you kindness, teach you to share, and teach you this and that, but I found that you didn't need to teach, and you learned these things by yourself. This single-parent father worked hard to bring up his daughter little by little. Every day's growth is a miracle for him.
Yes, we are weak, introverted, and unsightly, but we are all miracles.
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