The premise alone is enough to make you appreciate the movie for the throwback relic that it is: A 25-year-old copy editor played by Drew Barrymore goes undercover as a high school student in order to write a story about contemporary youths, but really she’s there to crush on her fully adult English teacher (Michael Vartan!) in super uncomfortable ways and get a second crack at teenage popularity. Fortunately, even the half-decent ’90s rom-coms have become iconic in their own way, and that’s especially true of a film like Raja Gosnell’s “Never Been Kissed,” which has very much become a cultural touchstone in spite of its quality (and because of its extreme “of its time”-ness). Streaming services aren’t exactly bending over backwards to provide down-the-middle Valentine’s Day programming this year, so even a half-decent ’90s rom-com feels like a gift from the gods of love. Image Credit: 20th Century Fox Licensing/Merchandising / Everett Collection A spotlight on Melvin Van Peebles complements his recent Criterion box set (“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” only gets better with age), while those in search of less familiar landmarks can get acquainted with video artist Ulysses Jenkins, whose experimental short film work is collected here in a digital riot of lo-res high-art on subjects ranging from mythmaking in the African Diaspora to modern media portrayals of Black men. The Harry Belafonte series alone is worth the price of a subscription, as it finds him picking up where Paul Robeson left off with his first film appearance in 1953’s “Bright Road” (co-starring Dorothy Dandridge as a teacher with a troubled student in rural Alabama), and runs the gamut all the way through Robert Altman’s “Kansas City” some 40 years later. The Criterion Channel reliably highlights classic and contemporary Black cinema all year round, but the service’s programming during Black History Month - a rich and diverse celebration of Black film artists that runs the gamut from Abderrahmane Sissako and Gordon Parks to documentarians Stanley Nelson and Rosine Mbakam - offers a perfect illustration of how the depth of the service’s library and the insight of its curation elevates it above the rest of its competition. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (dir.But in the hands of “Madeline’s Madeline” director Josephine Decker, a filmmaker uniquely suited to depicting personal expression on the big screen, the film version of “The Sky Is Everywhere” makes for a satisfying and special take on a particular sub-genre of YA story. A cinematic version? It could be maudlin or silly, leaning too much into the pain or way too much into the more cutesy elements of the story (its leading lady, musical prodigy Lennie, is prone to penning her thoughts on leaves and napkins and closet walls, a creative if potentially too zany way to show how she processes her pain). Grief is a fertile, if uncomfortable topic, and Jandy Nelson’s YA novel “The Sky Is Everywhere” - the story of a teenage girl sifting through the messy aftermath of her older sister’s death - approached it with the kind of open-hearted honesty it deserved, wrapped up in a careful package that made it accessible enough for the audience it was meant to serve.
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