A lot of great art has been made about random but life-changing interactions between total strangers. Richard Linklater\u2019s \u201990s indie romance <\/span>Before Sunrise<\/span><\/i> is just one example of what can happen when you set two attractive young people on a collision course and follow them as they spent a full day walking and talking. (Does anyone else love a good bottle episode?) The thing about this type of setup, however, is that it seems to work best when the stakes are low and things are made to feel more like cosmic coincidence rather than F-A-T-E. Get too ambitious and heavy-handed with your storytelling and you end up with something decidedly less than stellar. Like <\/span>Crash<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Ry Russo-Young\u2019s new YA romance <\/span>The Sun Is Also a Star<\/i><\/strong> aims high but falls toward the middle of the spectrum, weighed down by an overcooked script that insists on telling rather than showing. From the moment we meet the two teenage leads, their personality types are underlined in bold: Natasha (Yara Shahidi) is the pragmatic, logical one who <\/span>doesn\u2019t believe in love<\/span><\/i> (and wears a jacket that reads \u201cdeus ex machina\u201d) and wants to be a scientist; Daniel (Charles Melton), on the other hand, is the romantic, earnest one who believes everything happens for a reason (and wants to be a poet, despite his parents\u2019 plans for him to become a doctor). They meet by chance on a pivotal day for both \u2014 Daniel\u2019s got his big Dartmouth interview, and Natasha\u2019s trying to stop her family from being deported back to Jamaica.<\/span><\/p>\n Things don\u2019t exactly go as planned for either high schooler, and they thus find themselves with a free afternoon and a bet to settle: Is it possible to fall in love with a stranger? The resulting trip around New York City could have been a charming and moving two-hander (especially given the timely political subject matter, which I hope we\u2019ll see tackled in a better film), but the script by Tracy Oliver (<\/span>Girls Trip<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Little<\/span><\/i><\/a>) doesn\u2019t allow us to really get to know either character. We get intricate backstories on Daniel, Natasha, and their respective families via illustrated voiceovers, but clunky, repetitive dialogue \u2014 here\u2019s looking at you, Daniel \u2014 keep the whole thing from really coming to life. Because of this, while Melton and Shahidi are capable actors, we never feel much of a spark between them.<\/span><\/p>\n Which isn\u2019t to say there aren\u2019t things to admire about <\/span>A Sun Is Also a Star<\/span><\/i>. It\u2019s refreshing to see a studio make a big film that casts two non-white characters as the romantic leads rather than relegating them to supporting status (even though it\u2019s frustrating as hell that this is still rare in 2019). I also really appreciated the attention to detail in regard to the immigrant experience \u2014 even small things like Daniel\u2019s mother speaking with him in Korean when they\u2019re at home, or Daniel\u2019s brother expressing the frustrations that can come with being caught between two cultures when you\u2019re first-generation. That\u2019s really a testament to author Nicola Yoon, who drew from her own family experiences (she was born in Jamaica and raised in NYC) when writing the source material. <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s also lovely to see New York captured by a native New Yorker who <\/span>gets<\/span><\/i> exactly what it is that makes the city so magical and why it\u2019s become home to so many people from so many backgrounds. There really is something fateful about meeting <\/span>anyone<\/span><\/i> in a city so densely packed, and Russo-Young and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw emphasize this by juxtaposing sweeping shots of the city skyline and bustling shots of real city streets with tighter crops of their teenage leads basking in the glow of a quiet afternoon spent getting to know one another. Unfortunately these more down-to-earth moments all feel like a glimpse into another (better) film.<\/span><\/p>\n A lot of great art has been made about random but life-changing interactions between total strangers. Richard Linklater\u2019s \u201990s indie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":11886,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: C-<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 40 min.; rated PG-13 for some suggestive content and language<\/em><\/h5>\n
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