Still Tallin'
For those of you who missed my review of 2019’s Tall Girl last week, please note that it’s a movie that never should have ever received a sequel, and of course I watched said sequel the first second it was possible for me to do so. There’s nothing more intriguing to me than a movie that has no reason to exist, and Tall Girl 2 is so bereft of reasons that it might just be incontrovertible proof that we are living in a simulation.
Tall Girl 2 picks up 3 months after the events of the last film. Jodi Kreymer (Ava Michelle) is - as you may recall - tall. She is also now dating Dunkleman (Griffin Gluck), a fetid totem of patriarchy whose Milk Crate of Turgid Longing has been blissfully crushed in a hilarious incident between the events of the two films. Now that Jodi has made her peace with being tall and came out as tall at the Homecoming Dance, she is signing up for the Spring musical, which is Bye Bye Birdie. She gets the lead role of Kim (which the director hilariously describes as requiring "rawness and authenticity"), opposite the untenably attractive Tommy Torres (Jan Luis Castellanos) as Conrad.
When she and Dunkleman break up for reasons that are unbearably contrived even for a teen movie (the only thing that makes this situation feel naturalistic is the fact that Dunkleman continues to be the Incel King of New Orleans, so any bad choice he makes is consistent with his character), she is faced with a decision: Should she fight to win Dunkleman's love back? Or should she bump tonsils with a super cute boy? Despite the answer being obscenely obvious, this is a hard decision for her to make. Meanwhile, the other characters from the previous film mill about, and occasionally the camera picks them up in the corner of the frame. Oh, and the bully Kimmy (Clara Wilsey) is mad that she has to be an understudy and vows to get revenge on Jodi, which disappoints her crony Schnipper (Rico Paris), who encourages her to grow as a person.
Evidently Liz is a character we're meant to have noticed in the previous film, so Kimmy and Schnipper also have a long conversation about why Liz isn't around this time, to answer the question "What has become of our sweet Liz?!" that they expect us to have been screaming, rending the hair from our skulls and beating our breasts until we collapse on the ground from exhaustion.
I'm going to be straight with you: Tall Girl 2 is a miraculous improvement on the original film. My hypothesis is that this is thanks to new director Emily Ting, who seems to think of film as an aesthetic art that anybody would ever want to look at with their human eyes. She hasn't crafted the next Roma, but the enormous leap in quality here is palpable. When the camera started moving, I actually gasped. Ting uses the camera to juxtapose and link different ideas, crams the frame with delectable bright colors, dresses characters in colors that express something about their personalities, and even delivers a pair of musical sequences that use camera and editing to elevate the material. In a shocking turn for the Tall Girl universe, she seems to actually have a grasp on how to visually underline the thesis of the movie.
The thesis is still absolute bullshit, but we can't have everything.
If anything, the improved visual schema highlights how hollow the premise of Tall Girl 2 is, and how the script just sits there like a dead fish at an inland supermarket, gently sweating under a fluorescent bulb. To returning screenwriter Sam Wolfson's credit, there is a genuine attempt to address the many issues with the first film, especially as it pertains to race and privilege. Unfortunately, the scene where Jodi is forced to deliver an apologetics monologue about Tall is both inorganically shoehorned in and breaks the back of the character forcing her to undergo this introspection. Also, this movie falls into the To All the Boys I've Loved Before trap of having the secondary love interest be a person of color, even though that person's sole function in this type of story is to be cast aside in favor of the same horrible white man who's been here the whole time.
Also, I didn't know this was possible, but the tall jokes are even worse. Evidently "Taller Swift" was the absolute zenith of height-related comedy, so now we're stuck wanly making jokes about how Jodi sure isn't a small actor now, is she? At least this film is less obsessed with her height and gets to turn its attention from being wrong about how high school bullying functions to being wrong about how high school theater functions. Seriously, they throw huge parties both the evening before and the night of their play's opening. Also, Kimmy is an understudy to Jodi but has no other part to play onstage. Like... she's just an understudy and if Jodi isn't performing then Kimmy can go home. Not even Broadway does it like that!
At the end of the day, being better than Tall Girl still leaves a lot of room for improvement. It's still an outrageously empty teen movie that reeks of flop sweat. And honestly, the fact that it goes down easier makes it less interesting of an object to consider, because it's still not close enough to "good" to be worth watching.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Tall Girl 2 picks up 3 months after the events of the last film. Jodi Kreymer (Ava Michelle) is - as you may recall - tall. She is also now dating Dunkleman (Griffin Gluck), a fetid totem of patriarchy whose Milk Crate of Turgid Longing has been blissfully crushed in a hilarious incident between the events of the two films. Now that Jodi has made her peace with being tall and came out as tall at the Homecoming Dance, she is signing up for the Spring musical, which is Bye Bye Birdie. She gets the lead role of Kim (which the director hilariously describes as requiring "rawness and authenticity"), opposite the untenably attractive Tommy Torres (Jan Luis Castellanos) as Conrad.
When she and Dunkleman break up for reasons that are unbearably contrived even for a teen movie (the only thing that makes this situation feel naturalistic is the fact that Dunkleman continues to be the Incel King of New Orleans, so any bad choice he makes is consistent with his character), she is faced with a decision: Should she fight to win Dunkleman's love back? Or should she bump tonsils with a super cute boy? Despite the answer being obscenely obvious, this is a hard decision for her to make. Meanwhile, the other characters from the previous film mill about, and occasionally the camera picks them up in the corner of the frame. Oh, and the bully Kimmy (Clara Wilsey) is mad that she has to be an understudy and vows to get revenge on Jodi, which disappoints her crony Schnipper (Rico Paris), who encourages her to grow as a person.
Evidently Liz is a character we're meant to have noticed in the previous film, so Kimmy and Schnipper also have a long conversation about why Liz isn't around this time, to answer the question "What has become of our sweet Liz?!" that they expect us to have been screaming, rending the hair from our skulls and beating our breasts until we collapse on the ground from exhaustion.
I'm going to be straight with you: Tall Girl 2 is a miraculous improvement on the original film. My hypothesis is that this is thanks to new director Emily Ting, who seems to think of film as an aesthetic art that anybody would ever want to look at with their human eyes. She hasn't crafted the next Roma, but the enormous leap in quality here is palpable. When the camera started moving, I actually gasped. Ting uses the camera to juxtapose and link different ideas, crams the frame with delectable bright colors, dresses characters in colors that express something about their personalities, and even delivers a pair of musical sequences that use camera and editing to elevate the material. In a shocking turn for the Tall Girl universe, she seems to actually have a grasp on how to visually underline the thesis of the movie.
The thesis is still absolute bullshit, but we can't have everything.
If anything, the improved visual schema highlights how hollow the premise of Tall Girl 2 is, and how the script just sits there like a dead fish at an inland supermarket, gently sweating under a fluorescent bulb. To returning screenwriter Sam Wolfson's credit, there is a genuine attempt to address the many issues with the first film, especially as it pertains to race and privilege. Unfortunately, the scene where Jodi is forced to deliver an apologetics monologue about Tall is both inorganically shoehorned in and breaks the back of the character forcing her to undergo this introspection. Also, this movie falls into the To All the Boys I've Loved Before trap of having the secondary love interest be a person of color, even though that person's sole function in this type of story is to be cast aside in favor of the same horrible white man who's been here the whole time.
Also, I didn't know this was possible, but the tall jokes are even worse. Evidently "Taller Swift" was the absolute zenith of height-related comedy, so now we're stuck wanly making jokes about how Jodi sure isn't a small actor now, is she? At least this film is less obsessed with her height and gets to turn its attention from being wrong about how high school bullying functions to being wrong about how high school theater functions. Seriously, they throw huge parties both the evening before and the night of their play's opening. Also, Kimmy is an understudy to Jodi but has no other part to play onstage. Like... she's just an understudy and if Jodi isn't performing then Kimmy can go home. Not even Broadway does it like that!
At the end of the day, being better than Tall Girl still leaves a lot of room for improvement. It's still an outrageously empty teen movie that reeks of flop sweat. And honestly, the fact that it goes down easier makes it less interesting of an object to consider, because it's still not close enough to "good" to be worth watching.
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: netflix originals
