This Honor roll Rose has thorns
THIS rare misfire from Apple TV+ starts promisingly with an introduction to orphan Sam Greenfield (Eva Noblezada), the world’s unluckiest teenager.
There’s a great wordless sequence that begins with a mop falling against a door knob and ends with the girl’s breakfast slowly sliding down a wall. With great comic timing, a slice of toast plops on to the floor. Jam side down.
Sam’s luck changes dramatically when she offers a black cat a piece of a sandwich. When the mysterious feline scarpers, she finds a shiny coin and, after picking it up, is suddenly blessed with good fortune.
But after losing it, Sam seeks out the cat, whom she discovers can talk and has a ropey Scottish accent.
Sadly, the grumpy feline (Simon Pegg) is in no mood to offer her a replacement.
When she follows the cat through a magical portal, the charm quickly evaporates. On the other side is the Land of Luck, a magical realm that operates under a wildly over-thought system of rules. A good portion of the rest of the film is devoted to explaining them.
Apparently, lucky ideas are hatched by pigs, turned into ‘lucky dust’, stamped onto leaves, turned into crystals, and sent to a machine called the Randomizer. There is also some business involving ‘ancient luck stones’, an R&D department, the Polishing Room, rabbits with joysticks, ‘The Inbetween’ and the Land of Bad Luck where gravity operates in reverse.
Jane Fonda voices a dragon CEO, Whoopi Goldberg is some sort of supervisor, Cliff from Cheers is a root vegetable barman.
Thankfully, Luck is available for home streaming where you can rewind it to your brain’s content. I also recommend a pen and paper. A spare wall, drawing pins and a variety of coloured string would be even better.
To follow this, you will need the tenacity of a TV cold case detective.
IT’S often claimed that school is “the best time of your life”, but for many teenagers, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
No-one knows this better than Honor Rose, an over-achieving high school senior and protagonist of Awesomeness Films’ latest production, Honor Society.
From the studio behind hit Netflix teen rom-com To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before comes a high school comedy starring Spider-Man’s Angourie Rice as Honor, who is trying her hardest to graduate, get out of her home town and fly away to the educational paradise of Harvard University.
But to get there not only does she have to ace her classes and maintain a multitude of extracurricular activities, but she also has to convince the lacklustre guidance counsellor — played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse — to give her a recommendation to the prestigious Ivy League college by bringing down her academic nemesis, Michael Dipnicky, played by Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo.
“I was very similar to Honor in high school,” confesses 21-yearold Australian actress Angourie Rice.
“Very driven, very intent on putting pressure on myself to do well, in all aspects. But what I loved about Honor is that she’s so ruthless, and unapologetic about it.
“I was a bit more reserved and anxious, whereas she’s like ‘This is what I want, and I’m gonna get it, and here’s how’. I loved her confidence.”
Underneath her tenacious, charming, confident and witty persona, audiences soon learn that Honor is a flawed, uncertain teenager who makes a lot of mistakes along her path to success.
Director Oran Zegman, who is making her feature debut after writing and directing several award-winning short films, breaks the fourth wall throughout the film by having Honor address the camera directly, with the camera often playing the role of the voice of reason — or judgment — in contentious situations.
Being directly addressed by Honor, audiences will find it hard to resist her undeniable charm.
Honor Society is on Paramount+ now.