Senior Year

A very good comedy and generally palatable to almost everyone.

I just finished watching this movie with a friend of mine, and we were both pleased with what we saw. The film is an excellent comedy that manages to reach two different audiences: today's youth and their parents, who were young twenty years ago, because it makes direct allusions to various cultural elements that were very familiar to them. Personally, I was still very young in 2002, I was about to enter adolescence, but I was also touched by some nostalgic aspects.

The script is reasonably simple, but it works well: it all starts with Stephanie, and the way she decides to become popular and accepted after being snubbed at school. Things go well, and she becomes the archetype of the perfect teenager: sexy, blonde, cheerleader, sexually expedite, with an enviable boyfriend and a promising future. The icing on the cake was going to be her election as High School Prom Queen, and a massive after-party, complete with loss of virginity. It didn't happen: in an elaborate dance choreography, and by the work of a rival, she falls and ends up hospitalized, in a coma, for twenty years. In 2022, at last, she wakes up to a horrible reality: her body has changed, life has passed, her boyfriend married her rival, she is not the same and has nothing of what she wanted. So, she decides to go back to the High School, finish what she started and be Prom Queen… but the School has abolished that!

The script seeks to include a series of cultural allusions to the 90s and 2000s, ranging from films and series (Sex and the City, Deep Impact, Aly McBeal, Clueless), songs and musical artists (Britney Spears, Madonna, Mandy Moore) and objects of fashion and mass culture (the Tamagotchi, for example). We, who saw ourselves as teenagers between 2000 and 2010, know these things well, they were our fads and fashions. The film also criticizes the way today's youth view social and environmental causes, virtual life an...