A painfully awkward sexual encounter. slotxo ระบบออโต้An impromptu road trip. A tested friendship. No, the outlines of Natalie Morales' “Plan B” aren't revolutionary. This is the tried and true framework of the high-school comedy. But teen comedies, almost as a rule, are made by their leads. And with Kuhoo Verma and Victoria Moroles, “Plan B” is overwhelmingly a winner.
Morales' film seems destined to be compared to Olivia Wilde's “Booksmart,” which arrived in theaters almost exactly two years ago. Both are helmed with a veteran filmmaker's sense of timing by actors-turned-first-time-directors. (Morales has been a familiar face in film and TV for the past 15 years.) Both feature a pair of breakthrough performances. And both bring a funny, feminist spin to a traditionally boyish and often boorish movie genre.
But it surprised me watching “Plan B” just how much it's its own thing. It has a comic rhythm and perspective of its own. And while most teen comedies have gone for packed movie theaters, “Plan B” - more scruffily indie, more all-the-way R-rated - is only streaming. (It debuts Friday on Hulu.) So it's fitting that the characters of “Plan B” offer us a new phrase in the streaming lexicon that can sit alongside “Netflix and chill”: “Disney-plus and thrust.”
Verma, who had a small role in “The Big Sick,” stars as Sunny, the high-achieving, low-self-esteem daughter of demanding Indian American parents. Her best friend Lupe (Moroles, from MTV's “Teen Wolf” and the Disney Channel's “Liv and Maddie”) is more self-possessed than most adults. But her brash style and two-tone hair are regularly ridiculed by her more conservative father. Both Sunny and Lupe are outsiders in small-town South Dakota, where their ethnicities are only foggily understood. Mostly, they shrug it off. When one boy, intending a compliment, tells “Verma” she's “got that whole Princess Jasmine thing, ”She sheepishly notes that it's the wrong ethnic group, but“ it's kind of the closest princess we've got so I'll take it. ”
The sharp-witted script, by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy, is best in the movie's first half, set largely around high school and, as the genre's laws decree, at a party thrown by Sunny when her parents are away. If you think you've seen enough Sex Ed scenes by now, you'll want to make an exception for one with Rachel Dratch as an in-over-her-head teacher, helpless when her students take a car metaphor for virginity and run. with it. The party scene, too, has its tropes (a poorly concocted punch) and its unique touches. Sunny, feeling spurned by her crush (played by Michael Provost), ends up in the bathroom instead with Kyle (Mason Cook), a sincere kid into both magic and Jesus - and to Sunny about the most regrettable person in South Dakota to lose her. virginity to.
