Binge-r #179: I Am Not Okay With This + The Last Thing He Wanted
Class Dismissed: Wyatt Oleff (Stan) and Sophia Lillis (Sydney) in I Am Not Okay With This
I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All seven episodes new streaming
“Dear diary, go f*** yourself.” That’s the scene-setting first line in this offbeat and enjoyable Netflix series, which despite lacing Carrie through Pretty in Pink manages to somehow apply a sweet hopefulness to teenage disorder. The recalcitrant diarist is 17-year-old Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis), who is dealing with a deceased father and a less than consolatory mother, Maggie (Kathleen Rose Perkins), with her main support being best (and only) friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant). “She keeps me laughing,” notes Sydney, whose internal monologue freely alternates between acceptance and anger. The show pulls off a similar double act, with teenage angst made explicit by Sydney’s burgeoning telekinetic powers. “It almost always comes out when I’m angry. Or embarrassed. Or scared,” she explains, and whatever ‘it’ is that’s just the reality of adolescence writ large.
I Am Not Okay With This was adapted by Christy Hall and director Jonathan Entwistle from a graphic novel by Charles Forsman, whose The End of the F***ing World was previously picked up by Netflix [full review here]. That show had a nihilistic bent with an undertow of calm, but the balance is flipped here: Sydney just wants to get by, make sense of her many doubts, and discover where she belongs – suddenly giving a nosebleed to Dina’s annoying jock boyfriend, Brad (Richard Ellis) or cracking a wall with frustration is not part of her plan. That back and forth unfolds with bittersweet realisations and barbed exchanges, particularly in the dialogue between daughter and mother, which manages to encapsulate years of discord in mere minutes.
That heightened flow, retaining a naturalistic feel, is the best thing about the series. The early episodes with Sydney and her goofball neighbour Stan (Wyatt Oleff), which can clock in as briefly as 20 minutes in length, feel like vignettes that hold a rhythm from first shot to last. I Am Not Okay With This loses a little bit as it adds more plot, with the emerging complexities of what Sydney might do if she’s out of control sometimes overwhelming the way she has to find clarity on her sexuality. But it ties together in a watchable, if sometimes familiar way; there’s a detention episode that is a homage to The Breakfast Club. Holding it together is the performance of Sophia Lillis, who has previously portrayed the adolescent version of adult characters played by Jessica Chastain (It) and Amy Adams (Sharp Objects). Impudent optimism, grief’s undertow, and volcanic anger nestle in her performance, and the way she effortlessly folds them together will keep the episodes coming until the climactic finale.
Spook Country: Anne Hathaway (Elena) in The Last Thing He Wanted
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
THE LAST THING HE WANTED (Netflix, 2020, 115 minutes): If Netflix suggests this new film starring Anne Hathaway and Ben Affleck, it’s sadly best to say no. Co-writer and director Dee Rees previously made one of the streaming service’s best original movies, the hardscrabble 1940s segregation drama Mudbound (which you should definitely watch), but this oblique Reagan-era thriller about a crusading newspaper reporter who falls into the arms trade is inert and jumbled. Set during the 1984 U.S. election, Joan Didion’s 1996 novel is a study in distance – it’s written from the perspective of a magazine journalist trying to retrospectively understand the reporter’s downfall. The film makes the reporter, Elena McMahon (Hathaway), the narrator, and she receives some of Didion’s glinting, emotionally entangled prose: “weightlessness seemed, at the time, the safer mode,” she observes. But Elena’s many contradiction never cohere, as ambition and filial love lead her to an arms shipment to Central America wrangled by her ailing father (Willem Dafoe). Everything is on a “need to know” basis, but neither Hathaway’s impassioned dialogues nor Affleck’s intermittent appearances as a government fixer offer emotional or logical clarity. The movie is a handsome mess.
New on SBS on Demand: An intimate, compelling portrait of life at Versailles in the weeks prior to the French Revolution, Farewell My Queen (2012, 100 minutes) remakes the period drama with Diane Kruger as Marie Antoinette and Lea Seydoux as a servant in her imperial grip; Bone Tomahawk (2015, 102 minutes) is a bloody and bone dry western starring Kurt Russell and Patrick Wilson that posits the frontier as a series of looming horrors.
New on Stan: Thoughtfully adapted from Timothy Conigrave’s posthumous 1995 memoir, Holding the Man (2015, 128 minutes) is a gay love story and social history of Australia in the years before and during the AIDS crisis; Anton Corbijn’s Life (2015, 107 minutes) is not one of his best films, but in telling the story of an iconic 1950s magazine shoot by James Dean (Dane DeHaan) it has a fascinating role for Robert Pattinson as photographer Dennis Stock.
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