As all the world has come to know, except in areas controlled by the Taliban and ISIL, Amy Schumer has a buxom figure and a demolition-derby contestant’s attitude toward sexual propriety. Combined with the juvenile aspects of her face—the short, stubby nose, the kewpie-doll cheeks—these attributes can make it hard for you to decide whether her development is arrested or precocious. She has it both ways in Trainwreck, the Judd Apatow–directed vehicle she wrote for herself, playing a woman who learned early about men’s loose ways and has been following them enthusiastically ever since.
I am all for Trainwreck, if only because it’s one of a handful of films that popped up this summer in which a woman played the lead and talked about some of what she wants. But it wasn’t quite as funny as I’d hoped—Schumer never turned my laughter into a yelp of incredulity, as Chris Rock did in Top Five—and I felt disappointed that the ultimate dare for her character was to accept a man’s faithful love, even though he was a nice-looking, internationally renowned surgeon.
So where taboo-breaking is concerned, the sex-education movie to which I gave my heart was The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s adaptation of a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Starring the remarkable Bel Powley, a London-born actress in her early 20s who easily gets away with playing a 15-year-old San Francisco native, the movie is the story of young Minnie Goetze’s awakening to many aspects of life: first her sexual possibilities, and through them the frailty of her mother, the stupid spinelessness of her mother’s boyfriend, the unreliability of her contemporaries, and above all her vocation as an artist, which eventually puts the rest into place.
The year is 1976, which helps explain why the mother and boyfriend (Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgård) don’t seem quite grown up. Mom is still trading on her good looks while looking for a good time; the boyfriend has been taking instruction in irresponsibility through the EST seminar; and any substantial sum of money that comes into the old junk-shop-furnished house is likely to result in a party, with plenty of wine, weed, and coke. Minnie—short, blue-eyed, nubile, and impatient—is pretty much left to pursue whatever she likes. That might be cartooning—the drawings, created for the film by Sara Gunnarsdottir, spring to life throughout the movie—or it might be sex with Mom’s boyfriend.
Directed by Heller with a winningly light touch, The Diary of a Teenage Girl doesn’t aim to shock, but neither does it play for laughs. It’s a comedy in the deeper sense: a story about the unstoppable vitality of the young, and the way one particular girl, despite everything, discovers how to use all the energies she’s got.
Article Appeared @http://www.thenation.com/article/white-hands-and-black-skulls-from-the-panthers-to-straight-outta-compton/