Review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) by Greatmartin — 20 Aug 2015

The past few weeks I have seen a couple of entertaining movies like “The Gift” and “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation”, a few okay films like “Phoenix”{ and “Ricki and the Flash” but I knew, from experience, it would all come to a screeching halt and it did today with one of the worst movies I have seen this year called “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”. It is one of those movies I got suckered into seeing by word of mouth from movie reviewers of which there seem to be 3-4 every year, not some much from the actual reviews as I very seldom read reviews before I go to see a movie. There was the fact that it played at Sundance and magazines like Entertainment Weekly picked it as a winner and Hollywood Reporter stated ‘a strikingly intimate look---in an outstanding debut film” so off to the movies I went.

It could be that I have forgotten what a teenager is like or the fact that I was never a female teenager and/or that a male teenager losing his virginity isn’t that big a deal but except for a few startlingly incidents like the boyfriend, at 35, of the girl’s, at 15, mother is the one that loses her virginity, that she is shown in full frontal nudity (though in real life she, Minnie, played by Bel Powley, was 21 when it was filmed) along with many sexual scenes from lesbian shots, to teenage girls performing oral sex on teenage boys, the movie is pretty boring and I think it only appeal to teenage girls, maybe some women and voyeurs!

Reading a half of dozen reviews after seeing the movie it seems many give Alexander Skarsgard a pass on having sex with a minor and seem to ignore the fact that all the females, except Minnie’s younger sister, are pretty loose with the sex and drugs including her mother played by Kristen Wiig, her best friend Kimmie, Madeleine Watres, a young lady, Margarita Levieva, into gay sex and drugs in all forms.

Surprisingly the only off key acting is by Christopher Meloni who plays Minnie’s father, who lives in New York. I found Wiig and her female friend to be annoying while Bel Powley playing the teenager experiencing her sexual coming out is convincing and off kilter at the same time.

Directed by Marielle Heller, who also wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, seems to add some of the “Birdman” fantasy plus more, shows San Francisco in a good light, also the good and bad of 1979, with many illustrations to add a comic book angle including many a Disney touch and a drawn Aline Komisky-Crumb who ’helps’ Minnie.

This is a movie I came very close to walking out on but stayed hoping it would redeem itself but, for me, it didn’t.