In Senior Year (Netflix, 5.13), Rebel Wilson‘s “Stephanie Conway” awakes from a 20-year coma at age 38 or thereabouts, and decides to return to high school in 2022 to finish her senior year.
You can tell by the lame-ass humor in the trailer (jokes about Madonna vs. Lady Gaga, the relentless Fast and Furious franchise) that the senior creatives were terrified of doing the obvious.
The obvious would have been to create a fish-out-of-water comedy about a woman from 2002 suddenly grappling with woke Stalinism.
Wilson and her colleagues were too scared, in other words, to focus on the horror of Twitter, totalitarian safe spaces, the revolutionary consciousness overhaul brought about by #MeToo, the prohibition of certain terms, the dismissal of nearly all over-40 white males, Variety apologizing to Carey Mulligan for a single sentence in Dennis Harvey‘s review of Promising Young Woman, CRT and equity in schools, trans activists calling the shots (and therefore the triumph of Lia Thomas and the grooming of three-year-olds so they’ll understand the particulars of all the various genders), all people of color regarded as hothouse flowers and given sainthood status, celebrating obesity in underwear ads, etc.
There was a 1989 Cheech and Chong comedy called Rude Awakening — late ’60s hippies hiding in Central America and suddenly returning to the U.S. in the late ’80s and confronted with yuppie culture. Similar.
HE salutes Wilson, by the way, for dropping 77 pounds between ’20 and ’21. She’s still “ample” but within reasonable proportions.
