Movie review ‘IF’: Everything We Know About the John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds Film

 Went to see this fantastic film 2 weeks ago Friday. The day it came out in cinemas! Here’s what you guys need to know about the movie. The Sixth Sense' meets Pixar in this family comedy about Imaginary Friends. Since appearing in the successful nine-season run of The Office, John Krasinskihas worked hard to diversify his portfolio with strong lead roles in projects like Michael Bay's gritty war film 13 Hoursand his titular role in Prime Video's hit Jack Ryan series, but his most impressive feat has been his pivot into a directing career. Krasinki had previously directed the comedy-drama film The Hollars and adapted David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for the big screen, but it was 2018's breakout hit A Quiet Place that shot him straight into the upper echelon of directors working in Hollywood today. The unprecedented success of the sci-fi horror film, has already spawned a sequel, with multiple spin-offs in development, and led to a first-look deal for Krasinki with Paramount. IF, or Imaginary Friends as it was first titled, will see John Krasinski team up with Ryan Reynolds as they both star and produce the film, with Krasinski once again writing and directing.

The family fantasy comedy has conjured up an ensemble cast completely filled to the brim and along with its intriguing original concept, has turned into a sought-after package that ultimately landed at Paramount, who will no doubt be seeking to repeat their success with Krasinski after the Quiet Place films. Here is everything we know so far about IF. 

IF is currently slated to open on Friday, May 17, 2024. The movie will be opening up against the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, the horror reboot The Strangers: Chapter 1, and the indie R-rated comedy Babes. 

IF was originally set to release on November 17, 2023, and was later delayed to May 17th, 2024, before finally being bumped up a week to its current release date.

With a stellar ensemble cast and big-name talent in front and behind the camera, IF is a rare high-profile original studio comedy in the current movie-going landscape that is set to have a wide theatrical release. Both A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II were huge successes for Paramount, the latter being one of the first movies to bring people back to the theaters after the global pandemic. While the movie's theatrical window is currently unknown, the film is eventually expected to be available to stream on Paramount+ at some point in 2024.

Is There a Trailer for 'IF'?

And there is the trailer for it:

The first look at IF was released online on December 14, 2023. The teaser trailer is quite a lengthy look at the film, coming with a shocking two minutes of footage. The final trailer for IF was released by Paramount Pictures on April 11, 2024, a little over a month before the film's release date.

What Is 'IF' About? 

The film follows Bea, a young girl played by Cailey Fleming, who goes through some traumatic experiences and develops a unique power that allows her to see other people's imaginary friends who have been left behind after their real-world friends grew up and moved on. Ryan Reynolds Bea's neighbor Cal, who shares the same ability as her, and mentors her. Reynolds has described the movie as a "live-action Pixar film" that he and John Krasinski have been working on for years, and here's what the director had to say about the film at CinemaCon:

“Imaginary friends are not just these adorable creations, they are time capsules for our hopes, dreams, ambitions. I wanted people to leave this movie believing in something bigger and believing in something beautiful. It’s very real, and it’s very possible."

“Imaginary friends are not just these adorable creations, they are time capsules for our hopes, dreams, ambitions. I wanted people to leave this movie believing in something bigger and believing in something beautiful. It’s very real, and it’s very possible."

Who's In the Cast of 'IF'? 

The casting directors of IF have pulled off an epic line-up featuring some of the most exciting names working today, which even John Krasinski has acknowledged,

This cast is insane. I know for a fact that I will never get a better cast." 

Cailey Fleming (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool) will lead the live-action cast of IF as Bea and Cal, two humans with the ability to see imaginary friends. The rest of the movie's live-action cast includes director John Krasinski as Bea's Dad, Fiona Shaw(Andor) as Bea's grandmother, Alan Kim(Minari) as Benjamin, and Bobby Moynihan (Saturday Night Live) as an adult who has abandoned his imaginary friend. Liza Colón-Zayas (The Bear) also stars in the movie in an undisclosed role.

Leading the movie's voice cast is Academy Award nominee Steve Carrell as the big, purple-furred imaginary friend Blue, who previously starred alongside Krasinski on The Office. The film's expansive voice-cast also includes Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) as Blossom, the late Academy Award winner Louis Gossett Jr. (An Officer and a Gentleman) as Lewis, Academy Award winner Matt Damon (Air) as Sunny, Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) as Robot, Krasinski's wife and Academy Award nominee Emily Blunt (Oppenheimer) as Unicorn, Maya Rudolph (Loot) as Ally, Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Superhero Dog, Sebastian Maniscalco (About My Father) as Magician Mouse, Academy Award nominee Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water) as Art Teacher, Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: Organized Crime) as Cosmo, Awkwafina (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) as Bubble, Reynolds' wife Blake Lively (A Simple Favor) as Octocat, Academy Award winner George Clooney (Gravity) as Spaceman, Matthew Rhys (The Americans) as Ghost, Academy Award nominee Bradley Cooper (Maestro) as Ice, and Amy Schumer (Trainwreck) as Gummy Bear,

Who's Making IF?

John Krasinski will be directing the film from a script he wrote, and he will also be producing the film through his production company, Sunday Night Productions. Ryan Reynolds will also be producing the film through his company Maximum Effort and their overall deal with Paramount. Alison Seeger and Andrew Form also serve as producers on the film, along with George Dewey, Alexa ZinzGinsberg, and John J. Kelly as executive producers. Do you guys want to know who I loved in the film? Her name is blossom! She was my favourite character in the movie! Now some pictures of the movie! Enjoy! As it’s my last post of the day! 

Mean Girls Back to school: why we keep returning to Mean Girls: the ultimate movie review

 Went to see the movie yesterday at the cinema! Was brilliant! 🤩 The new hit take on the beloved Tina Fey high school comedy shows a lasting appeal, but can the original ever be topped? 

Because time is a construct, it’s the year 2024, and the biggest film at the box office is … Mean Girls. That would be the new movie adaptation of the hit Broadway musical based on the beloved 2004 film, which feels like a distinctly modern case of IP ouroboros. (Think High School Musical: the Musical: the Series, but more lucrative.) Despite harsh-to-middling reviews and several trailers noticeably avoiding any of the film’s musical numbers, the new Mean Girls topped the MLK holiday weekend box office with $33m, out-earning the original in absolute terms (adjusted for inflation, the first Mean Girls would have made around $40m on opening weekend). And, true to the spirit of the original, the Mean Girls musical movie has generated its own stream of memes – for not knowing it was a musical, for example, or for star Reneé Rapp Regina George-ing a tour bus company owner during a press junket.

For skeptics, interest in the new Mean Girls rides heavily on some differentiation from the modern classic. “It’s not just a remake of the original,” I heard one woman say as recommendation after a pilates class. “There are new songs and jokes.” Which is true, to an extent – original writer (and Ms Norbury) Tina Fey has updated the script for the times, tucking in jokes about slut-shaming and TikTok. Costume designer Tom Broecker somewhat controversially took just as much inspiration from “on Wednesdays, we were pink” as the vibrantly hued teens of Euphoria. There are several musical numbers by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). Still, the new version struggles to justify its existence, frequently feeling like a glossier yet overrehearsed karaoke performance of an unmatchable original.

But if the success, or even the existence of, the new Mean Girls proves anything, it’s that love for that original runs deep, enough to make any riff on the concept baseline enjoyable. For a movie that hit the zeitgeist fully two decades ago, with all the dated references that entails, Mean Girls maintains a remarkably solid grip on the culture. Interest in the new one only demonstrates a point made by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong in her new book, So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It – that arguably no 2000s movie has had as much impact on pop culture as Mean Girls. After 20 years and countless “you can’t sit with us” references, we just can’t quit Mean Girls.

The film has stayed relevant due, in part, to its relatability. The byzantine rules and codes of the Plastics – the clique of Regina George (Rachel McAdams/Reneé Rapp), Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert/Bebe Wood) and Karen Shetty (Amanda Seyfried/Avantika Vandanapu) – were always heightened, and the methods and means of cliques have wildly changed. But the concept of a dizzying maze of hyper-local social specifics – one that would baffle a theoretical alien to teenage girl world like Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan/Angourie Rice) – remains. “Bullying and social power dynamics have not abated in the least, and may have gotten starker because of factors like social media and, in a broader sense, polarization in America,” said Armstrong via email. “We all relate to this on some level, no matter our age or gender identification.” 

It helps that the film is just very, very quotable. There are so many Mean Girls lines floating through the ether of pop culture, in memes, gifs and TikToks – “it’s October 3rd,” “there’s a 30% chance that it’s already raining” and “get in loser, we’re going shopping” to name just a few. If you were in a school environment, a girl’s locker room, or the mall at any point between the years 2004 and 2014, you certainly heard them. There’s also the title, which serves as a shorthand for a certain type of behavior that has aged well into the 2020s obsession with girlhood. “You’ll hear people refer to ‘Mean Girls’ behavior and immediately understand what they mean, whether you’re referring to teen girls, a boardroom, a reality show, or national politics,” said Armstrong.

The stickiness of Mean Girls benefited from timing; it was released at the advent of MySpace and Facebook, imprinting on millennial brains just before they began posting on social media and, later, producing and running era-defining media sites like BuzzFeed. Mean Girls was “foundational for Web 2.0”, said Armstrong, an easily dissected text for the nascent genre of memes. The film also tied into the aughts tabloid culture through Lindsay Lohan, who hit peak fame with Mean Girls and, shortly thereafter, became a headline-grabbing paparazzi target and a cautionary tale via the era’s freewheeling, often vicious blogosphere – the mean girls of the internet at the time, if you will.

All of that doesn’t necessarily translate into the current digital, video-heavy landscape or appeal to gen Z or gen Alpha, the oldest of which are (terrifyingly) in their freshman year of high school. The new film tries to appeal to such media fluency via front-facing cameras, a gesture at TikTok, and a plot point that briefly turns into viral Instagram content mocked by a chorus of North Shore high school students. But Armstrong found, in research for her book, that younger audiences – those now in junior high and high school, for whom Mean Girls was ostensibly set – still connect with the original film. Even if they haven’t seen it, the quotes live on in memes and TikTok. The Y2K outfits are an on-trend aesthetic, the pre-cellphones school life distantly chic.

It’s always so hard to know how long pop cultural artifacts are going to last, but it has held up for 20 years, and the ideas at its core seem to be universal and unchanging,” said Armstrong. It’s definitely possible Mean Girls will remain a coming-of-age classic, like a John Hughes movie, Clueless or Rebel Without a Cause. The same might not be said for the new movie musical. “We do have the new version,” Armstrong noted, “but my guess is that we’ll always want to go back to the original.” 

Now for the latest updates of the movie and more! 💗