Two new movies put women at the centre.
Booksmart
If you loved Lady Bird, but it wasn’t lesbian enough for you’ll love Booksmart. Best friends and academic overachievers Amy (Kaitlyn Dever—one of Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have taken their final year in high school super-seriously, positioning themselves for Ivy League colleges, and feeling superior to their party-hard peers.
But on the eve of their graduation, these BFFs and type A wallflowers fear they’ve missed out on all the fun and make a pact to catch up—all in one night. ….
Late Night
After almost 30 years at the top of late night TV, trailblazing female talk-show host Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) discovers she will be re-placed if she doesn’t make her show more relevant.
What’s intriguing about screenwriter-actor Mindy Kaling’s debut feature Late Night, is that such a woman does not exist in real life. “
Sadly, there hasn’t been a female late-night talk show host on any big network since Joan Rivers’ show in the 1980s,” admits Kaling, “which lasted less than a year.”
Nevertheless, Kaling mines this “what if” scenario for all it’s worth, mostly to examine the lack of diversity in mainstream storytelling and the persistence of a ‘white savior’ mentality when it comes to transforming modes of entertainment from within…..