Trundled off to a cool-kid party - a pool party, true hell for an awkward eighth grader- Kayla vacillates between a full-bodied anxiety attack and pushing herself to sing karaoke in front of her slack-jawed peers (behavior that hits on yet another universal truth: Teens are impulsive and dumb and self-sabotaging and strangely free).Īt every turn, Fisher is honest and open, relatable to the point that you feel as if you’re actually watching her own life play out (Fisher actually spent her own post-eighth grade summer filming the project). But Kayla, for all her fake self-help mumbo-jumbo, is also smart enough to recognize the key to moving past all that: basically, just totally faking it. She knows it, we know it, even her doting dad (a wholly lovely Josh Hamilton) knows it. Kayla’s happiest times are spent in the endless scroll of Instagram and Twitter and whatever else it is that teens are into these days, and she loses herself in the curated lives that everyone else seems to be living just a screen away.īut Kayla is curating her own lives - and lies - just like anyone, thanks to her arrestingly open YouTube page, which is dedicated to happy videos that see Kayla doling out advice on topics she knows nothing about. It’s not that she’s actively bullied, it’s that she’s just not noticed, thanks to a combination of her quiet personality and the deep self-absorption of the rest of her peers. Kayla has just one week in eighth grade, and it’s evident that this shy, sensitive, creative kid hasn’t caught too many breaks in middle school. Burnham was initially moved to write about how social media impacts our lives, before abandoning the idea for something a little lighter, and perhaps even more true. It’s remarkable that Burnham - yes, a man - has delivered a film like “Eighth Grade,” which is so deeply rooted in the feminine adolescent experience that it often feels as if he must have cracked open a whole mess of girls’ diaries to pen it.

Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘Passages’ to ‘TMNT: Mutant Mayhem’

A24 datamoshing trippy video bo burnham