 know it's actually been like two weeks since the the finale dropped but this this this over here this is the hot take couch and I think it is important that I do this from the hot take couch and you know that I'm doing this with with minimum required effort because assassination nation is literally my favorite movie and this this is this is just disappointing oh shit Mike the worst thing about aging for me is not the fact that it is incredibly difficult as an adult to make friends or that my body is rapidly breaking down but the fact that with each passing year it becomes weirder that I love coming-of-age stories about high school girls although I am a shining beacon of masculinity and testosterone in this painfully low tea environment tiktok scenes positive that I am a bisexual lady and who am I to argue with the almighty algorithm like my top four on letterbox are not necessarily my top four movies but they make a clear statement this man really likes ultra stylized movies about teenage girls overcoming the odds that are also directed by men and sure I love more low-key movies like the edge of 17 Mustang and even American honey but the only woman directed movie that I can think of that has a vibe like those four is raw and my dislike of that movies and it kind of outweighs the fact that it includes some of the best scenes of the last decade sorry point is euphoria by its very nature ticks a lot of boxes for me I've never done drugs which puts me a bit more at odds with the series protagonist and some others but there are plenty of other characters for me to project on to so it's fine and in any case it comes at a much different time in my life when Joseph Kahn's detention took my number one slot from I think Requiem for a dream back in 2012 I was just two years out from my high school graduation and while serial killers and time-traveling body swaps may not have reflected my literal experience it was fresh enough that I could feel how well the underlying drama matched that emotional one which is why I rolled my eyes at the negative reviews written by people who graduated from high school before the advent of the personal computer what did they know about it and now I'm a little bit that guy I mean what do I know about high school in 2022 I've got some relatively recent secondhand info from my college age sister but frankly doesn't matter because euphoria clearly has no interest in capturing the high school experience and I have seen some people complain about how unrealistic it is but to them I ask do you really want this exact show to feel like it's taking place in an actual high school because I don't I saw a video recently about why it's a problem to sexualize high schoolers as a concept even when it is obvious that the performers themselves are well past that age and like yeah no one who isn't also in high school should be thinking about a high school student like that and this show sure does like making its audience think about the characters like that and that's a problem if you're really thinking of them as 17 and 18 year olds but credit worth do even if we the audience all know that these people are past college age at this point the relative in universe ages are treated appropriately like that video I mentioned highlighted how often there are plot lines about students and teachers hooking up and how scandalous but sexy it is and the one example of this in that show is the driving force between one of season two's major plot lines because it's a horrible fucking thing to do and in the show everyone understands that there's no attempt to make illegal things glamorous or sexy at least as they relate to that even if the actors are made to be such but if we're highlighting these early to mid 20s bodies you might ask why not just set the damn thing in college yes there would still be weekly think pieces about the social acceptability of what is now HBO's second highest rated show ever I guess but you wouldn't have that little feeling in the back of your mind like maybe they kind of have a point even when you know that they're fundamentally wrong but then we get back to talking about this show and not some hypothetical similar show that might have existed and this show wouldn't work in college it needs to be in high school for reasons that will force the forthcoming third season which the rushed vibe of the second season makes me think actually came as a surprise to be a rather different experience while private schools throw a slight wrinkle into what I'm about to say high school is really the last time that people from all walks of life are forced to genuinely interact with each other in the real world the end of high school represents one of the most significant transitions in a person's life some people will continue their education and stay in the bubble for at least a little bit longer while others will jump straight into what millennials have called adulting there is a spectrum in that obviously but the key point as it relates to euphoria is that these girls will never be together again you know that some of them will go to college and others won't and those who do they won't all be going to the same place all of these characters lives are pulling them in vastly different directions but for now they're together and that is what high school is in euphoria a pretext for interaction a forcibly shared space in which everyone can be their most dramatic selves because what other choice is there making it feel like high school by adding school drama and administrators wouldn't actually add anything of substance and would in fact take away from the interpersonal stuff that they're really focused on yeah sure an episode where Ru had a big test coming up but she was so strung out and needed to figure out a way to cheat or something could be kind of fun in a self-contained way but those are also some hella low stakes in a season where there's a threat of Ru being sold into sexual slavery then again that kind of goes nowhere at first it seems like it will but then in the back of your head you're like then they wouldn't allow that in her contract so it's it's gonna work out in the end and yeah yeah sure her escape from captivity is a very harrowing sequence but it's ultimately kind of meaningless it just gets dropped because the show has other things it wants to focus on instead and that is euphoria season two's fundamental issue it is too short for the stories that it's trying to tell and there are two ways that could have been resolved one more episodes where they could give all of these disparate plot threads the time that they needed to breathe and you know fill in some of the gaps about other characters who we thought were gonna be important and just kind of weren't or to cut out the wheel spinning bullshit and focus on the right things an easiest way to do that would have been to change the protagonist this is still fundamentally Ru's show she is the one who gets the voiceover to introduce and clarify characters but she has long since stopped being the most interesting character hell of the main set she is definitely the least there's a lot of work done to make lexie more of a central character this season but even when the show seems like it's lexie's or should at least should be it's still ruse and that's frustrating but i do understand like ru is the character who sam levenson really wants to tell us about because she's basically his self-insert levenson spent those years of his life in rehab at the age of 16 he accepted that drugs would probably kill him much in the same way that ru seems to believe that addiction is everything and tbh ru is the face of addiction but also everyone's sort of an addict everyone gets caught in some sort of toxic cycle of something that just can't quit though for them it's often more nebulous ideas like love or whatever passes for that when you're still a child in cat's case our self-love icon reverting back to her insecurities she decided that stability is bad actually in yada yada i understand why barbie frera was unhappy with the way that her character arcs this season sure it was part of the whole make it really fucking dark thing but i i didn't like it yes usually people are sad but sometimes they're happy cat should have been happy anyways levenson was the subject of hundreds of think pieces over the past few months and it is no surprise i read the assassination nation script after shooting my uh incredibly glowing video and much like reading the spring breaker script it's really interesting look at how things got a lot less weird in a bad way and a little more weird in a good way levenson's got this sort of maximalist style of writing where he just goes full-on bananas and then lets it get cut back as he goes because he's clearly not super precious about things every article i have ever seen including the ones that are trying to call levenson out as a creep end up noting how much he prioritizes the comfort of his actors and gladly cuts things that they don't feel are in character or whatever yeah cassie was supposed to be more naked in the show as were a lot of other people and they said no and he said i and wrote it out now i understand that sometimes people don't feel comfortable speaking up for themselves but i'm also quite confident that if that had happened on a sam levenson set it would have been all over the dang place so i'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here also as i noted in my review of assassination nation i think boobs are pretty cool and i'm not going to complain if i see them more than is strictly necessary for my continued existence and quite frankly if you hear me complain about seeing them i am almost definitely virtue signaling and you should unsubscribe from the channel immediately i do respect that levenson's response to critiques of the male gaze in season one were not to cut back on the boobs though but to amp up the dicks one of my colleagues came up to me the morning after one particularly penis-centric episode and said i think he went overboard with that one why so many dicks and i said would you have felt the same way if it was a bunch of naked ladies and he said no probably not and i said then it sounds like a you problem and he said maybe but there still should have been less of them and i don't know what to tell them like at least they were beautifully lit right assassination nation has a tiktok type of intensity and euphoria has pushed that style even further this season goes to some truly wild places and it is all lovingly captured on honest-to-goodness 35 millimeter film which is as that hbo money right there because like are any other tv shows being shot on film the walking dead was apparently shot on 16 millimeter for a while but the pandemic shot stuff was done digitally in any way 16 millimeters a lot less expensive than 35 it is a wild thing to do and i love it and it really heightens the whole thing that film grain giving yet another texture to wrap your mind around while it throws all kinds of bonkers shit at you it's a lot and i'm really into it it's it's hyperpop the tv show and to that point when lexie wrote her bike to the sound of my most listened to song of 2021 she became my clear favorite of the main cast and then like she turned her life into a hilariously high production value theatrical experience which is oh my god goals i loved that whole thing unequivocally obviously to be sure the season's highs were really really high but there was so much that i found frustrating especially like the final minutes where everything just kind of gets wrapped up in a weird little bow yeah plenty of threads are unresolved but it happens in a way that still feels weirdly final it reminded me a bit of Hannibal season three which was clearly made by people who knew that they were getting canceled and so they put two seasons worth of material into one but that show did it so much more successfully because it didn't have the wheel spinning stuff it breeze through scenes that i would have liked to linger on but there wasn't any filler that i would have cut to extend them they only showed us what was strictly necessary so when the actual ending came and wrapped it up pretty dang quick it was okay but with euphoria i was genuinely surprised to learn when episode eight came and that it was the last one because there was so much more to say and i didn't think there was enough time to say it and i was right and that sucks and it does make me kind of excited about season three because a lot of these fundamentals aren't going to apply anymore because they will have graduated i have no idea where it's even going to start let alone where it's going to go but for the love of god dude don't redeem cal 7.3 out of 10 thank you so much for watching thank you particularly to my patrons my mom my cat cat saracada benjamin schiff anthony cole elliott fowler greg lucina cojo philbeats willow i am the sword maddie zimmerman claire bare taylor lindy's andrew medicine design and the folks who'd rather be read than said if you like this video cool if not oh well if you want to see more subscribe all little pappets sometimes i don't know whatever we're working on it