Bonus Review: Didi

For Anyone Who's Ever Been A Teenager

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INTRODUCTION

This is a quick review of the newly released film Didi. Keep in mind this is but one of the many movies I watch every year, and that whatever initial grade I come up for this film could change for better or worse with time. To better keep up to date with both my thoughts on other movies and if my feelings on this film changed, follow me on Letterboxd.

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THE PLOT

Via Letterboxd: In 2008, during the last month of summer before high school begins, an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him - how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love your mom.

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QUICK REVIEW

Over the last few years It’s become a popular habit of some directors to direct fictional semi-autobiographical films that end up being big awards season players - or duds that become also rans. We had Roma in 2018, Minari in 2020, Belfast in 2021, Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans in 2022, and now we have Didi in 2023.

Coming off an Oscar nominated short film, Sean Wang gives us a coming-of-age tale in which a young boy has to navigate a life-impacting summer between his final Middle School year and his first High School year. And its set in 2008, bringing us back to the days of MySpace at its peak, instant messenger chats being social kings, and Facebook just coming into its own. And the movie uses these things to make this a very web-based story in how we watch our protagonist, Chris (Played by Izaac Wang), interact with the social scene around him.

As someone who had all but one of the aforementioned films mentioned in the first paragraph as among my favorites from their particular years, a good coming-of-age movie can really hit the spot with me; so you can imagine how excited I was to see this Sundance Film Festival hit for myself. On paper this should have really been up my alley, and a contender to be one of my A-tier films of the year. The reality ended up a little more complicated than I had hoped.