Life of the party
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“You’re my sexual Dumbledore,” he tells her, and she gently advises that no woman, ever in his life, will want to hear that. They later kiss in the library stacks, her messed-up hair the sign of the off-camera sex, and he delivers one of the pic’s few clever, offbeat lines. But this is a careful, family-friendly PG-13 movie, so there is not a hint of a sex scene, just Deanna creeping out of his room the next morning. From then on, the film is a benign fairy tale of a mother-daughter friendship from a mom’s point of view.ĭeanna sleeps with the college guy. Voila, Mom is now a woman in a black shirt who attracts and hooks up with a hot but sweet young guy. At one party - and there are way too many even for a pic with this title - Maddie takes her into the ladies’ room, and in that quick trip removes her mother’s glasses, smooths out her frumpy curls and tosses away her embroidered smock.
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Maddie’s sorority friends want to watch movies with Deanna and take her to their parties, unironically. She fits into college, and the film is overwhelmed by cliches. Sure enough, in no time Life of the Party becomes a gushy Deanna lovefest. In all of these you can feel McCarthy doing the heavy lifting, with a lame script that gets sappy about the heroine’s second chances. It can’t be a coincidence that those better films, including Spy, Bridesmaids and The Heat, were all directed by Paul Feig, and have an element of comic surprise that is missing here.īut Life of the Party, like The Boss and Tammy, was directed by Ben Falcone, McCarthy’s husband, and co-written by him and McCarthy. There is an edgy honesty in these scenes of her rough landing, a sharp tone reminiscent of some of McCarthy’s best movies.
#Life of the party movie
Helen, who was in a coma for eight years before returning to school, is the kind of quirky character the movie could have used more of.ĭeanna herself begins to see that she’s intruding on her daughter’s life. One of Deanna’s new friends, Helen (Gillian Jacobs), sneakily snips off some of a mean girl’s hair. Mean girls in class are sarcastic about Deanna’s wardrobe, mocking her to her face. Maddie (a very natural Molly Gordon), like any ordinary college girl, is quietly horrified at having her bubbly mother living in a nearby dorm and dropping by her sorority with snacks. She is clueless.īut for this first short stretch, the film does have a clue. She turns up on campus excited and fully decked out in school paraphernalia, from sweatshirt to backpack, traipsing around like the ghost of college past. Abandoned, Deanna decides to finish her degree.