Smart People

Smart People
a drama movie
IMDb | Netflix
Overall Rating: 4
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4

I did not particularly like Smart People. I liked it better than Netflix thought I would, since they said I would give it 1.5 stars at most. There were several things that made this underwhelming, mostly that none of the characters seemed really catchy. I can’t tell if that is because the acting was mediocre, the script was bad, or because the intended characters just suck.

We have the bitch-dad who cares about no one except how they can be demeaned and insulted. He’s a teacher who manages to not teach and to turn all his students off his subject while complaining that no one really wants to know English and its literature. We have the daughter who is fulfilling the wifely roles in all but affection, while trying to graduate high school and make a life for herself. We have the stoner brother/uncle. We have the son/brother who is in college where dad works. None of these people struck me as especially brainy or brilliant or insightful, so we have only the title to tell us they’re “smart people”.

In my experience really smart people do not need to study. They read the material, they listen to the lectures, they do the required assignments which exist for idiots who need to drum things in even though it’s just busywork, and then when they want to learn something they do outside work. So the daughter who was studying for her SATs struck me as rather dumb. Plus everyone knows the SATs have been watered down until the scores are meaningless.

There was not a lot of real plot in this movie. We have the daughter who hits on an older man. We have the son who is secretly a published poet. We have the father who thinks he wants to be head of the English department and whose book has been rejected. Then we have the father gets a girlfriend plot. That was the really repulsive aspect.

The girlfriend is a doctor. Their first date went so badly she walked out and he had to plead piteously to get a second chance because she really does not like him. They shag on the second date and although they use a condom she gets pregnant. It is my understanding that unmarried women who are sexually active and non-monogamous take contraceptive pills as a matter of course, even though everyone engaging in risky behavior should use barrier methods as well. Condoms break, fall off, or there are user errors. Having sex with a man who has been chaste for a decade (since his wife died) who freely admits he has not used a condom before– well, I think any woman who did that is taking a foolish risk. Any woman who gets pregnant with a man she does not like is criminally stupid. There really is no rational reason for how an educated woman could bring an unwanted child into the world.

I have no idea how I would have felt about the movie without the problems it had. If the writers had actually known smart people, not just assholes who were smarter than the writers, and if a supposedly intelligent woman who can write prescriptions could have done the right thing and gotten herself emergency contraception—- I think I might have enjoyed this thoroughly. But that’s a completely different movie.

And a note about the rating, I think most average people are turned off by movies about (supposedly) smart people, so I think they would inherently expect this to be a 2/10. So my -2 rating is actually down from my expected rating of at least 6/10. And I do really think it was a 4/10 for most people. Most people seem to think that an unwanted baby makes everything better so they would consider that to have been a happy ending which is worth about +2.

21

21
a docudrama movie
IMDb | Netflix | Amazon
Overall Rating: 5/10
Meets Expectations: +1
Apparent Rating: 6/10

Honestly, 21 is the kind of movie that I know I am going to love. It’s a movie about smart people who make good despite the way the world is slanted toward the extroverted morons. I believe that’s possibly fair in terms of “leveling the playing field” because anyone who needs to flap their mouth to air-cool their brain since it only runs in low gear probably needs for technical, loner-centric jobs to require 4+ hour marathon interviews lest they be stuck in reception their whole careers. But being one of those smart and introverted people who finds small talk pointless or even irritating, I find it difficult to get the right job through networking.

However, movies about smart people doing well in life tend to offend the masses who prefer homogeneity. I also like superhero movies and just about any kind of fish-out-of-water story. Most people think those are fairy tales for children.

That said, I thought 21 could have been a lot more interesting. I didn’t feel like the main character was someone who made the right life choices. Why does he want to be a doctor? Why if he wants to be a doctor does he need to go to Harvard Med? There are cheaper options. Why does he need a pretty blonde girlfriend? I’m sure there are a number of girls in Boston, probably even a number of girls at MIT— as far as I could tell, he was only interested in that girl because she was unobtainable. It seemed like he treated the people in his life badly through this endeavor— people who loved him and knew him and who would have been able to see the inherent problems before the drama hit.

There were a number of points in the movie where I wanted to throw things at the screen because as an actual adult, I know you don’t practice security-through-obscurity and expect it to work. If he could have talked to his mother instead of dodging her, she’d have told him to get a safety deposit box just like I would.

The movie is told via flashback and that was unnecessary and completely blows the element of surprise.

Without the epilogue, I’d have really hated this movie. With the epilogue, I liked it. I doubt regular people will like it at all.