However, with the rise of streaming platforms slowly but surely taking over the film & TV industry, a film going straight to streaming doesn’t always mean a bad thing anymore.
well, you can imagine where it goes from there, with the requisite twists and misunderstandings to serve as obstacles along the way.By: Joyce Chang Made for streaming: The best movies exclusive to Netflix, Hulu, and moreīack in the good ol’ days, if a movie did not get a theatrical release and went straight to DVD or digital, it meant that the film wasn’t very good. But doing so also allows her to hang out with AJ and. Paige fakes her way onto the track team, although hasn’t the slightest shred of athleticism, to search for clues and spend time with Gabriella.
(It’s a little complicated and not nearly as interesting as the main story.) But she also drags a couple of childhood friends into her quest: queen bee Gabriella ( Isabella Ferreira), whom she’s loved from afar since the fifth grade, and Gabriella's tomboy twin sister, AJ (Cravalho). Paige gets help from her best friends ( Tyler Alvarez and Teala Dunn), who happen to be passionately in love AND running against each other for student body president. ( Michelle Buteau brings a hilariously deadpan delivery to her handful of scenes as the school principal.) The point is the finger-pointing and running around that Blanchard’s Paige must do to prove she’s not King Pun-even though she’s the prime suspect as a talented artist herself-and avoid suspension.
You’ll be able to figure it out pretty easily. At its core, this is a mystery similar to uncovering who’s truly the scandal-sheet scribe Lady Whistledown on “Bridgerton.” At least it is to the student body of Miller High School, who regularly arrive for class and find the lockers, walls and bathroom stalls tagged with the whimsical, colorful work of an artist who favors wordplay and goes by the name King Pun.
The former Disney performers assert themselves confidently with more mature material while still bringing all that well-honed comic timing Blanchard made her name on the TV series “Girl Meets World,” and Cravalho became a global phenomenon at 16 as the star of “ Moana.” The two have an easy, sparky chemistry that’s obvious to everyone but their characters, and watching them steadily acknowledge their feelings for each other is, of course, the film’s joy.īut the road to that realization is paved with snappy dialogue and playful, well-paced situations. It just isn’t that big of a deal to this generation-or at least, it shouldn’t be, “Crush” is saying.Īnd that kind of authenticity springs from the fact that so many of the people involved both in front of and behind the camera identify as queer themselves, including the director, writers, and stars Rowan Blanchard and Auli’i Cravalho. The matter-of-fact way they discuss romance in the script from Kirsten King and Casey Rackham is reflective of evolving mores and identities. These teens are here, they’re queer, get used to it, to borrow a decades-old rallying cry. This is a movie about gay characters in which there is no hiding in the closet, no anxiety over coming out, no fear of condemnation from parents or ignorant classmates. The quirky outsider pines secretly for the most popular kid, the students have a zippy way with words that suggests a wisdom beyond their years, and everyone-regardless of their status on the social hierarchy-gets wasted at the kind of mansion rager that probably never occurred in your own youth.īut despite the familiar settings and tropes in director Sammi Cohen’s debut feature film, “Crush” feels refreshingly contemporary. The high school rom-com “ Crush” plays like a queer version of a John Hughes movie.