Long time, no see! I have apparently been out of sight and mind since… June? Which seems pretty extreme? Busy few months, so I’m going to try to dive through the backlog and then keep a better rhythm on things going forward. The Wrong Girls is sort of an unavoidable movie for anyone who’s a Kristen Stewart completionist. She talked glowingly about the making of this movie during its brief press tour and it fits neatly with the stoner comedy that birthed a thousand retweets and one meme from a trailer screencap, Pizza Movie! It also shares some aesthetic similarities with Touch Me, but only insofar as I thought that Stewart’s double was Olivia Taylor Dudley until it wasn’t? This movie has an incredibly stacked cast for such low production value and I think I was especially set up to fail, because it was apparently filmed in Vancouver which became so distracting as someone familiar with the city that it really became a game of identifying locations and then trying to figure out if the script had organically called for specific sets or if specific sets were selected based on what was available and interesting in Vancouver, which tells you just about as much as you need to know about the movie’s plot continuity and the just general cohesiveness of setting. There’s more than one scene in the movie in which a character walks into a big building or a big room which has written in large block letters UNITED STATES OF AMERICA so large that the character has to comment on it, even though it is clearly CGI’d onto the building. It’s also a little disorienting to have filmmakers use Vancouver as a stand in–not for some sleepy PNW town, but for presumably California? It’s not quite Aloha levels of disorientation but it isn’t not that. On production values, there are a couple of things that make this movie feel like someone’s senior thesis, Stewart and Shawkat acting their hearts out in someone’s fancy Point Grey home made to look like a pigsty: one is the fact that most of the music is just piano synths played as sort of foley for the girls as they run around town and two is represented best by this scene where one of the absolute GOATs Lakeith Stanfield who cameos in this movie is fighting off some people behind a closed door, but they haven’t put a mic on him, so we’re just sort of watching him mime choreographed fighting from behind a window with no sound. Also, for some inexplicable reason Kristen Stewart is playing a straight woman? Like, she has two or three different romantic crushes on people with whom she has no chemistry. Which is saying something, because she and Shawkat have incredible chemistry together–they have clearly done a lot of work to choreograph every step of their codependent relationship together which makes the sloppiness of other parts of the production all the more visible. There aren’t that many other movies that do telepathy humor, so I’m going to keep a Post-It here for later and just encourage you thoroughly to watch this when the vibes are harshed.
