Review of Lady Bird (2017) by Huraxdax — 07 Jan 2018

Lady Bird works great as the coming-of-age-movie is it supposed to be - but only as that. It's a sweet movie with (to some people) relatable moments and characters. The characters feel a bit stereotypical at times, so nothing we haven't seen before. On the other hand, though, the chlichee-characters aren't too exaggerated and I didn't feel like the movie cared about being so different.

The story got a little confusing for me at times, as I didn't always feel like I knew what side each character was on. Especially Lady Bird herself was kind of hard to understand sometimes. I guess that's also part of the characteristics with people in her age, though. Maybe a little more context for the characters would have helped instead of just showing a very linear story, where there's a definite start and end with nothing beyond these lines.

The most impressive part of the film by far is the acting. If I had to only judge the acting, Lady Bird would be an easy 10/10. Everybody, from the main roles down to supporting characters with less than 20 minutes of screen-time, everybody is almost perfect. I do expect noumerous award-season nominations and wins.

As for the script, the dialogues are very real, very relatable and seldomly boring. It's not artistic or anytihng, it's just very real and fun, and the impressive acting only adds to that.

Production-wise, Lasy Bird isn't really worth mentioning. Normal camera, normal sound, normal music, everything is very average quality, which works good though. An exccentric production wouldn't make it better.

So to summarise it:

I loved the acting (10), I liked how real the setting, the characters and the story felt (8).

I didn't like the way the story was delivered, leaving me somewhat lost at times, despite the fairly simple plot (4). Unfortunately, instead of making me want to understand the story, it rather got me bored every other scene.