There’s a really particular type of Netflix movie that keeps getting produced and thrown in our faces. You’ve probably breezed past the autoplay advertisement. Or maybe you watched that one that everyone was talking about. Regardless, they’ve seeped their way into the zeitgeist and into our lives. They’ve made Noah Centineo a Tiger Beat-worthy heartthrob and they’ve given Riverdale cast members something to do during their breaks between seasons. However, most importantly, they’ve revitalized that late 90s / early 2000s rom-com genre we all know, love, and miss.
Unfortunately, for fans of the genre, most of these Netflix-produced movies are bad. Not all of them, obviously. There are a few true gems that are worth a genuine watch, but, for the most part, these movies are cheesy, predictable, cringe-worthy, stuck in a more misogynistic time, or aggressively feel like they’re written by a room of 54-year-old men.
But first some ground rules, so I don’t hear any complaints about why rom-coms like Someone Great and Set It Up aren’t included in this. Here are the three basic parameters these movies had to fall under:
1. They had to be romantic comedies first. No straight comedies, no suspenseful romantic dramas. Someone’s gotta fall in love.
2. The characters had to be currently in high school or literally just graduated high school (The Last Summer barely making the cut).
3. And they had to be Netflix-produced (no SPF 18, no Adventures in Public School).
These movies range from the completely ludicrous and insane (The Kissing Booth) to the genuinely hilarious (The Package). The good news is, I’ve watched all of them so you don’t have to. Every other week, I’ll release two new reviews and drinking games for you to play along. First up, we are taking a look at The Perfect Date and The Kissing Booth.
The Perfect Date
This movie is centered around Billy McFarlane lookalike Brooks Rattigan, played by Netflix-engineered heartthrob Noah Centineo. It’s about an unappreciative white kid who spends his days wishing he was rich, objectifying women by narrowing them down to colleges, and complaining about his life while his best friend Murph does all the actual work at their sandwich shop job. He has a one-track mind to get into Yale and that gives his permission to be an absolute asshole to his down-in-the-dumps father (who by the way has assured him a FREE spot into the college where he works!!).
Brooks gets this weird and dumb idea that the only way he can make enough money to go to Yale is to force Murph to create a low-key illegal app that allows him to take girls on dates for money where they get to choose his personality. (Yes, obviously this is where the message and the moral will come from. “I’ve been so many people, but I forgot how to be me… blah, blah, blah.”) Obviously, the plan won’t work out. He hopes to get a date with the Queen Bee, Shelby, but ends up liking the manic pixie dream girl he went on the first fake date with.
The Perfect Date (Netflix)
This movie is weird, dude! There are about a thousand school dances or school-related events which is honestly the only reason his app is able to be so successful. Brooks is not a sympathetic character. He’s a shitty friend, he’s an ungrateful son, and when things don’t work out with one girl, he goes IMMEDIATELY to the next available girl. One of the most redeeming parts of this movie is Murph, who at many points plays the role of the “magical negro.” (Don’t worry, there’s also a second magical negro character because this white boy is SO dumb he needs more than one black person to tell him how to act.) After he realizes he has no real plan besides “go to Yale,” he slowly starts to see how short term and status-driven his thinking was and finally realizes everyone, especially his dad, was right from the start. Nobody knows who they are; they’re just figuring it out as they go along. But dear God, I wish Brooks had learned that sooner instead of being such an ungrateful, selfish asshole for so long.
The Perfect Date Drinking Game Rules:
There is voice-over
Brooks insults his dad
Murph gay panics
Brooks complains about being poor
Hipster boyfriend is a 2011 hipster
School dance
Dead parent
Magical negro (finish your drink)
Anyone says the title (finish your drink)
The Kissing Booth
The Kissing Booth is a heartwarming tale set in at least 2002 about a girl Elle, who has a set of unbreakable rules between her and her best guy friend, Lee, whose parents must be drug lords due to the size of their house. One of those rules, for whatever reason, involves promising to not date siblings, which is clearly only directed at Lee’s older brother, Flynn, since she’s an only child. For some reason, the best friends, who are both on student council together, decide the only way to raise money for the school (??) is to set up an aggressively heterosexual kissing booth where people are blindfolded while kissing their classmates for money. Through a twist of fate, Elle gets to kiss her crush, Flynn, and the kiss is so good that they start a secret romantic relationship. But how long can they keep up the ruse and how long can Elle break so many of her clearly defined friendship rules? You’ll have to sit through the agonizing 110 minutes to find out.
For a movie set in “LA” (filming actually took place in Cape Town), this feels like it was written by someone who had only seen Los Angeles through the movies. They get caught in a Florida-level rainstorm, people fuck at the Hollywood sign, and they go on casual school-night dates to clear 21-and-over clubs like it’s normal.
The Kissing Booth (Netflix)
The sexuality in this movie feels very tone-deaf. Throughout the movie, the main character gets sexually assaulted, gets in trouble for wearing something too provocative (read: distracting to the boys), she jokingly thinks she was raped by her best friend’s brother/crush, does a drunken striptease at a party, and does another unnecessary striptease in the boy’s locker room that goes on for an uncomfortable amount of time.
This movie feels like it was written in 2002 and then never updated for a 2018 audience. The mean girls are called “The OMG Girls” for Christ’s sake! It’s one thing to watch a dumb movie; it’s another thing to have that movie make you actually feel dumber when you come out of it. Re-watching even the trailer of this movie made me feel like I lost IQ points.
Because this movie made me feel so dumb, at first I was convinced it was only made because it was this man’s passion project or he owed a lot of favors to the parents of a lot of teen actors. When I looked back into the writer/director, Vince Marcello’s, previous credits, it all made sense. Marcello is the writer/director of notable Disney Channel original movies like Teen Beach Movie and Teen Beach Movie 2 (which features future Netflix rom-com The Last Summer star Maia Mitchell). But most notably, Marcello is the director of no fewer than FOUR American Girl Doll-based movies. That’s when it clicked. This movie is unfamiliar territory for ole Vince. He’s so used to making high stakes movies about 10-year-old girls trying to achieve their impossibly huge dreams. So much so that he tried to translate that feeling onto what should have just been a sexy high school, will-they-won’t-they rom-com. But instead, he fumbled and made an awkward, cringe-worthy, tone-deaf movie. I’m not saying he’s a bad director; I’m just saying maybe after doing so many specific types of movies for so long, he needed to take a smaller transitional step forward.
Also, if you have to have a written and memorized set of rules for your friendship, it’s not a friendship. Just sayin’.
The Kissing Booth Drinking Game:
Voice-over
DDR
There’s a party
Drink when they drink
Sexual assault?
Striptease
Big Flynn fights
Motorcycle rid
They mention one of their friendship “rules”
That’s it for this week’s edition of the Netflix Rom-Com Survival Kit. Did you survive the drinking games? Hit us up on Twitter and let us know what you thought! We’ll see you next time as we walk you through The Last Summer/The Candy Jar.
The Perfect Date and The Kissing Booth are available now to stream on Netflix.
