The Perfect Date
Premise - A high school senior needing to raise money to attend Yale sets up an app that allows people to "rent" him as a stand-in for a date. He will dress and act however you would like, no questions asked, in order to get people off your back about being single. A paid date with one particularly unlikable girl, Celia, develops into a fake relationship during which they begin to fall for each other.
Review - Okay, I genuinely enjoyed this movie, and not just on a surface level? Despite some of its cheesiness and predictability, I actually believe it had some deep things to say about one's locus of control, self-esteem, ambitions, and dependence on societal validation. I know this was supposed to be some standard movie this actor did to ride the high from the success of To All the Boys I've Loved Before, but I actually enjoyed this film more. Noah Centineo is a teen heartthrob at the moment, and this was the first time I really got a sense of his charisma and talent. I mean, I suppose he's a charming love interest, but it's different holding his own as a protagonist of a film. I also thought his character was extraordinarily relevant today. He has an ambitious personality that I recognize in a lot of young men. His striking oblivion to how difficult, yet lifeless his ambitions are annoys me in its naivete, and yet we see him learn from that. So I wouldn't call it just a love story.
Brooks, our protagonist, wants to be the next Steve Jobs. He wants to build apps and be a businessman, but it's all the idea of this profession that fuels him. He doesn't actually have any ideas himself about how he wants to change the world. This "dating" app, developed by his tech friend, is the most innovative we've ever seen him be, and yet it's not something that he can brag about to college admissions because it's just short of male prostitution. He's annoyingly elitist. He doesn't come from a rich neighborhood himself, but loves his rich clientele. His life dream, more than anything, is to go to Yale. But he has absolutely no idea what he wants to do when he gets there. Again, it's just the idea of an Ivy League that appeals to him, nothing more. By the end of the story, he's realized that what attracted him to these aspirations was the external validation that comes from seeming like an impressive guy. It's the same way he fakes different personalities on these dates. It's just a means to an end. So he ends up going to the University of Connecticut. This is good, because my initial complaint of the film was how movies make it seem so easy for characters to accomplish all their dreams and get into Ivy Leagues. This guy did NOT have anything particularly special about him that was worth Yale, in my opinion, smart as he was. I know that good grades alone don't get you anywhere.
The love interest, Celia, is stereotypically rebellious. We see her kind of anti-social, sarcastic, black-boots-wearing character all the time in movies. But she was likeable nonetheless, and grows on you. She's supposed to serve as an antidote to all of Brooks' BS.
The weakest point of the film is that it has such a funny premise, yet doesn't pace itself well enough to really play with that. We know that Brooks is going on all these fake dates, yet we don't get to really see any of them. There is a very quick montage. But it's such a key part of the story, and would have made for some great comedy, that I wanted more! Instead of following a really straightforward narrative about the situational comedy of a guy and this app, it's really about the growth of the character as a whole, with the app just being kind of a piece of that growth. So structurally it could have been improved. (80/100)
Quote - IT'S SUCH A SHAME because there were DEFINITELY moments in this film where I was like, "Dang, I'm impressed. That's actually a great quote." But then I didn't write it down and don't have the time or energy to go searching for them at this moment. I can't even remember the context, so that's how much of an impression it must have made.
What to watch for - Again, this film actually made me appreciate Noah Centineo! I don't think he's phenomenal, but that opinion may have been wildly different if I was 10 years younger and he was the Zac Efron of my time. I understand his appeal.
If you liked this movie, I'd recommend Easy A!
Directed by Chris Nelson
Distributed by Netflix
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