To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020)
Directed by Michael Fimognari
Lara Jean and Peter have just taken their romance from pretend to officially real when another recipient of one of her love letters enters the picture.
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What critics say influenced To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
Despite Condor’s determination to make Lara Jean feel like a real girl — albeit with distracting false eyelashes — she’s stuck being a clone, opening the film crooning “And Then He Kissed Me” to her bedroom mirror just as Elisabeth Shue did in “Adventures in Babysitting.”
It’s only fitting that a franchise that so pulls so liberally from its ’80s-era predecessors — no other teen movie has made such a meal out of heart-eyed teens throwing their hands in the paramour’s back pockets since, of course, “16 Candles” — kicks off with a bopping tribute to “Adventures in Babysitting,” as Lara Jean dances around to “And Then He Kissed Me,” a la Elizabeth Shue.
I Still Love You tries to further subvert the genre while still paying homage to the classics right from the jump: The opening scene finds Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) mimicking the iconic opening of Adventures in Babysitting.
Lara Jean swoons over one-off classics like “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles” (even as she concedes Long Duk Dong is “extremely racist”).
The end of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” was downright John Hughes-ian, including a big kiss between Lara Jean Song-Covey and Peter Kavinsky on a football field meant to echo Judd Nelson ’s pumped fist at the end of “ The Breakfast Club .”
For example, Pretty in Pink , Some Kind of Wonderful , She's All That and countless others in the genre pinpoint class as a significant social barrier for our potential couples.
John Corbett returns as the girls' devoted father, getting a lovely side narrative, and Holland Taylor is a real treat as the older, wiser Stormy, who dispenses sound advice to our heroine; the latter nicely paying tribute to Iona and Andie's dynamic in Pretty in Pink , when the teenage girl has to choose between two boys.
Peter is neither turned on by Lara Jean’s virgin status nor interested in protecting her virtue à la Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in the Twilight saga.
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Whereas the first movie felt modern (Lara Jean might have sent those letters via snail mail, but she still had to cope with the 21st-century challenge of being slut-shamed around school when a hot tub make-out video went viral), this squeaky-clean follow-up would have felt awfully square had it come out anytime in the last half-century: It makes everything from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to “Thirteen” look like Larry Clark’s “Kids” by comparison.
It even made a point of showing Peter watching Sixteen Candles with Lara Jean and her younger sister Kitty (Anna Cathcart), and having the girls affirm that the dreamboat qualities of the Jake Ryan character make the “extremely racist” Long Duk Dong one worth enduring.
Lara Jean swoons over one-off classics like “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles” (even as she concedes Long Duk Dong is “extremely racist”).
Fimognari, promoted from the job of cinematographer on the first installment, occasionally cribs a shot from a more ambitious movie: a floating kiss; a pair of snow angels; an argument on a class trip to the aquarium filmed before a tank of bioluminescent jellyfish, recalling a James Bond brawl in “Skyfall.”
…stylish, with a beautiful pastel colour palette and a fashionable electro-pop soundtrack (featuring some modern remakes of '80s classics like "Age of Consent" and "Girls Just Want to Have Fun").
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But “The Philadelphia Story” this ain’t, even if audiences are sure to be torn between #TeamPeter and #TeamJohn (Fisher certainly gives the goofy Centineo a run for his money in the charm department).
Whereas the first movie felt modern (Lara Jean might have sent those letters via snail mail, but she still had to cope with the 21st-century challenge of being slut-shamed around school when a hot tub make-out video went viral), this squeaky-clean follow-up would have felt awfully square had it come out anytime in the last half-century: It makes everything from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to “Thirteen” look like Larry Clark’s “Kids” by comparison.