Middle School: The Worst Adaption of My Life REDUX

well would you look at that isn't it such a weird coincidence that i'm making a video now about a bad adaptation when in just the last video i was talking about another one and isn't it even weirder still that this is an attempt to take the last video i did over a year ago and make it not terrible and in a way i'm adapting my points from before to be honest it's a stretch but stay with me here and for your information yes it is a coincidence i've actually been planning to try my hand at tackling this movie again ever since the second fairy tale video was completed unfortunately as a content creator you usually have multiple projects going on at one time so i read the book and watched the movie taking extensive notes along the way but then i saw butch hartman was in the news again and some people already know this channel was basically kickstarted by a butch hartman video so i pretty much had reason to jump back on the bandwagon there after that i got the idea to make a video on mr inter then demon slayer then mulan 2020 and i began another script i had thought of before but then i realized i still hadn't redone my old middle school video so now we're here talking about this movie almost no one remembers for anyone out of the loop here i made a video over a year ago talking about the film adaptation of this book called middle school the worst years of my life the book series is about a kid named rafe khachadorian a regular middle school student who gets into various escapades while trying to get through life in the most fun way he can think of it sounds kind of generic on the surface but the book is surprisingly realistic with a deeper theme that i didn't quite understand as much when i was reading it at 10. needless to say i was a huge fan of the book series even though i didn't get some of the deeper complexities so when i heard there was a movie adaptation i was quite excited to see it as it came and went i thought it was pretty good then a few years later i got it as a birthday present and rewatched it that's when i came to understand oh this film is it's not good is it some might even say kinda bad at that moment fifteen-year-old braxton fought with his super blue yeti mike in two months experience with sony vegas he'd create a brilliant deconstruction of the film since i uploaded it at a time when i had less than 500 subs in may of 2019 almost no one saw it and rightfully so if you're asking me then after my avgn vs nostalgia critic video got popular the middle school vid got kind of an uptick and people started watching it by the time i re-watched the video again and understood no one should have seen it it had already amassed over 100 000 views it had become one of my most popular videos at the time so i was a bit reluctant to unlisted for a while but after i did i knew there was still something that could be done i hadn't nearly gone as in-depth as i wanted to in the old video and i didn't even read the original book for clarity's sake back then and spoiler alert that's gonna play a huge role in why i now kind of hate this film for what it could have been with all that explained i'm now going to give you a comprehensive guide to every reason why i think this film is a bad representation for the entire franchise and yes this sounds very similar to the opening of my mulan video but you know what [ __ ] you i'm also simultaneously gonna review the book and tell everyone why i think it's great and stands out in comparison to other graphic novels like big nade or diary of wimpy kid let's start with the plot the first middle school book starts with an incredibly simple concept one so hard to mess up you'd actively have to be trying rafe is your average 6th grader who thinks his school life is going to be much more boring than he anticipated but after going to an assembly listing out all the school's rules he decides to make a game out of trying to survive middle school by breaking every single one of them by the end of the year he entitles it operation rules aren't for everyone and sets up a point system rules and so on an important thing to mention about this concept is that rafe decides to do this entirely because he wants to there isn't any major incentive for him to break the rules beyond wanting to have a fun experience and just not blending into the crowd to some this could come off as an unlikable trait but something we learn as the book goes on is that wraith isn't a perfect protagonist he has plenty of flaws when it comes to getting good grades interacting socially or expressing himself in normal ways something that needs to be understood is that this is the exact kind of thing a middle schooler would do i knew tons of kids that did crazy [ __ ] just for the fun of it and you probably did as well and as the book goes on it shows this isn't the best way for rafe to express himself on the surface wraith is breaking all of these rules in a goofy manner and we get to see exaggerated versions of situations through his perspective but when you look deeper it reveals there's a sad truth to all of this when we get scenes of rafe interacting with other characters besides his friend leo the silent we see how bad his family life kind of is his mom is constantly working two jobs and can't be there for him and his sister as much as they'd need it she has a manipulative boyfriend that lays on the couch all day and isn't emotionally there for her and the fact rafe only ever talks to leo most of the time is sad in itself spoiling the ending of the book and movie here leo is not real he was ray's twin brother when they were both really young but he died after a few years so rey thought up what leo would look like if he got to stay around longer leo was the only person wraith could confide in and over time he was never really able to make many other long lasting friendships rafe tried to cover up all this sadness in his life through comedic drawings and his big plan for operation rafe but even as that goes along it kind of crumbles around him his mom takes notice of the rule breaking until eventually on her birthday she hears about something he did and runs off to the bathroom after that rafe tries to shape up and get everything back on track but as he does it leo doesn't really like it it isn't because he's being good and all that it's because he's conforming to the regular way of thinking and becoming boring in leo's eyes the sad thing about this whole change is that rafe still can't escape his plan he accidentally lets his notebook get in the hands of miller the killer a bully at school and rafe needs to resume his plan to pay to get his notebook back page by page other events get him to end up in the principal's office and so on leading to him being put in lockdown by his parents at this point he's lost all of his lives and feels like he's completely failed to plan but leo encourages him to pull off the final act he'd been wanting to do for a long time because the plan never really mattered it was about wraith expressing himself and not being a boring person this leads to the cops arresting wraith and as he's driven home in a police car another altercation happens at his house bear the manipulative boyfriend accidentally pushes rafe's mom down the stairs after miller sends photocopies of ray's notebook to his house and the two squabble over if wraith is just a bad kid or not after that rafe ends up in the principal's office with his mom for fighting miller and the idea of expulsion is brought up but at the last moment the teacher that connected with rafe the most miss donatello has a different option she sees rafe's creative potential and pitches an art school to them wraith obviously won't go unpunished but in this case he'll be able to go to a school that really suits him trust me i've left out a lot of information for later on in the video but that's the best plot summary i can give based on my summary you can tell this book is a great subversion of the regular trope of i mean middle school and life sucks and everything around me sucks so i'm gonna do some wacky [ __ ] a great detail about the book is that every bad thing that happens to rafe and others around him is because of actions he decided to take there are antagonists in the book with some more or less justified than others but they usually just take situations wraith has put himself in and makes them worse as the reader you can sympathize with wraith as a character and some of the hardships he needs to face but you also understand he's only in the situation because he decided to do [ __ ] that would land him in there i'll get more into characters later but first we need to talk about how the film [ __ ] everything up hold on just give me a second to get into the right voice for this rave gadgadorian is a radical artist rule breaker who only has one school left in the country that'll take him and his tubular friend leo after the whack stuck out principal dwight destroys rey's notebook he decides to get back at him by breaking every rule in dwight's handbook before the blar a standardized test with just the help of his totally hip english teacher and classmates rafe has to then prove that dwight set them all up as the culprits to get better test scores along the way wraith has to deal with his mom's douchebag boyfriend a love interest a bully his smart little sister and even a dog ah damn that's gonna hurt in the morning and that's the plot of the movie for middle school it sounds like if you took the basic concept i mentioned at the beginning of the other plot summary and didn't look any further like it's almost as if the writer of this film didn't get the source material at all or maybe didn't even actually read it look even the original author makes a cameo just to be as passive aggressive as possible big guy you had enough sugar i mean who could blame him i'd be like that too if my book was butchered like this yep [ __ ] off you're gonna ruin my book and put me in to give a little seal of approval on your piece of dog [ __ ] i don't got to give a [ __ ] in recording somebody give me a goddamn drink jesus christ you gotta love how the film blatantly strays from the source material by framing it as though rafe is 100 justified in doing what he does because the authority figures tried to suppress him and his creativity rafe didn't need a major reason to do what he did there wasn't any cartoony oppressor that made his life so terrible he just had to retaliate he was a regular kid at a regular school that expressed himself in a destructive way there's nothing wrong with that on its own as a concept the fact the plot is so simplified also irks me because all the nuance from the book is lost a really clever move i noticed was that rafe draws his mom's boyfriend bear as an actual bear because he thinks it's funny but the one time he chooses to stray from this and draw bear as an actual person is when he pushes race mom down the stairs making grave lose any want to try and bring levity to the situation and just see it as it is in a way it's a wake up call of sorts for him to go back down to reality in the movie he's just a guy in a tracksuit that's kind of a dick and in some animated segments he's a bear that's all other than that the characters in general are majorly changed as well starting with our main man wraith as i've mentioned before he's no longer mr average looking regular student a defining character trait of rafe at the start of the book instead he's a troublemaker that probably thinks he's cool for listening to marilyn manson that's been kicked out of two other schools already in this same year because he was just so radical never really got an explanation why he was expelled from all those other schools but i guess with all he's able to accomplish in this film with little provocation he was just a ticking time bomb ready to blow up at any moment talking further on that notebook while rafe did shine more as an actual artist in the books after the first it was assumed for most of the first book that leo was drawing the pictures and conveying what he and ray felt slash saw through them when we learned rafe was the one drawing all this art and that leo was never real it all makes sense rafe when he wasn't trying to express himself through crazy rule breaking was drawing in this book all the events going on and bringing leo to life in his drawings near the end of the book he creates his magnum opus that gets him in trouble with the law a massive mural on the side of the school wall showing his creativity in a climax of rafe's character arc of accepting himself my point is as the book went it was clear art played a large role in how wraith coped with the world and saw things but it wasn't his entire personality if rafe's notebook was destroyed in the first book he'd have probably just gotten another notebook to this wraith it's so important to him that when he's destroyed he starts his whole mission to go against dwight assuming this is just a completely different character from the rafe we all know and loved he comes off as kind of petty it's not like he can't draw in another notebook what was this is only one artists have multiple notebooks full of drawings i know from experience the notebook itself wasn't that special either so rafe just comes off as a petty kid that goes off on a revenge plot at the drop of a hat he also got into this whole mess in the first place because he was just drawing in an assembly discreetly and some kids decide to just snatch it from him and all look at it like some hive mind kids don't act this way and the film makes it so it isn't even rae's fault he was caught it was just these kids not acting like normal kids who wouldn't stop shouting about how hashtag hilarious his drawing was rafe does still do things to get him in trouble and there are still some genuine moments because of what rave did with his sister and his mother but unlike in the book this film needs a straight-up villain to point the finger at and call the bad guy who caused drafe to do all this and therefore he's 100 right it isn't just rafe causing himself to get into bad situations like in the book or rafe overreacting to having a notebook destroyed here no this film can't have a protagonist who isn't 100 right so they have principal dwight in the role of the evil mustache twirling authority figure that's trying to keep the kids down with his super oppressiveness to be real here andrew daly playing principal dwight is actually entertaining to watch and he's clearly giving his all for the film however him being a villain at all is in itself a problem in the books wraith had his antagonists and people that terrorized him but there was no evil force trying to mess with him in his everyday life there wasn't any super oppressive figure stifling him he was just a kid at a regular middle school that wanted to switch things up now in the film the school is presented as this totalitarian dictatorship with dwight as glorious later while fun in his own right dwight is just an exaggerated character of teachers and 90s science the hedgehog ads he's portrayed as running his school with an iron fist he's got an excessive amount of rules he's overly strict overly serious and cares only about standardized testing and keeping his number one spot the film tries to justify all that rafe does by making dwight look like the bad guy for destroying his book but even if that's the case rafe did end up doing stuff that would warrant being expelled he broke into the school on at least five different times he tampered with the pa system to make it spout fart noises okay that isn't that serious but he somehow in a single night was able to cover the entire school and post-it notes with detailed faces and figures on him he put graffiti all over the school like it was nothing when it was a major event in the book he steals his mom's boyfriend's credit card buys a live eel from somewhere i'm assuming the dark web or some [ __ ] cause no way he got that legitimately and fills a trophy case with it in other animals he also randomly fills a room with balls i guess assuming dwight or another teacher would go in it what rule does this even break i don't know i'm pretty sure he breaks the law more times than he actually just breaks the school rule book let's see here multiple accounts of vandalism endangerment of animals damaging private property tampering with safety systems multiple accounts of breaking and entering and you still want me to think he's in the right for doing all this cause dwight gave him kind of a hard time on his first day the film is so desperate to make dwight the bad guy like after all this [ __ ] goes down he decides to add more rules that are seen as oppressive and sure that sucks but did wraith honestly believe nothing would happen after he did all that [ __ ] it's like poking a beehive with a stick and being shocked when you get stung having basically nothing else on dwight to make him seem worthy of the villain moniker they give him a subplot about wanting good test scores and race class is bringing them down though he fabricates evidence and makes it seem like the whole class is at fault to get them suspended rafe has this whole scene of trying to confess to dwight but he doesn't want to accept it and keep it secret so rafe sets off the fire alarm making it shoot out color instead of water and dwight expels them are we supposed to feel bad for rafe here i mean yeah it's bad that dwight framed people and fired a teacher to try and improve his test scores obviously he should get his job taken for that but rafe took safety equipment and tampered with it to shoot paint instead of regular water what if there was an actual emergency hello 9-1-1 help a fire broke out and all these kids are colorfully burning to death rafe deserves to be expelled for that one also speaking of that teacher i actually don't remember his name but he's a character so i'm gonna talk about him you're probably wondering who he replaced and it's pretty obvious if you read the book he's supposed to be miss donatello miss donatello was the english teacher and detention monitor so she spent a lot of time with rafe she was the one that understood him the most in the book and was the person to discover he had an artistic talent at the end of the book she's also the one who proposes ray should go to art school so yeah she was a pretty cool character they replaced her with mr hip teacher he's so cool he puts future and drake in his lesson plans and he sticks up for rafe when he's bullied by another kid he's only in a few scenes and shows up at the very end to help get dwight fired but that's about all there is to his character he never really forms that much of a bond with rafe unlike donatello i mean he tries to kinda but there are so few scenes of it that it really doesn't matter whatsoever no that role would go to the love interest for the film genie galetta out of all the characters in the book she was butchered the worst of all originally genie was a popular kid she was studious and good looking and pretty much everyone loved and listened to her in the movie she's a geek that runs the av club and no one claps for her speech except for rafe she's also the one that makes race pranking spree go viral on facebook because jinzies use facebook and after helping give rafe some advice that shows dwight did some framing and everything is sorted out she kisses him and they live happily ever after the book explicitly made it so this did not happen rafe had a crush on genie but for the longest time she barely knew who he was and though she did become friends with him later on it was never in a romantic way at all there's actually this great bit in the book where genie tells rafe he might be held back grade instead of what he was expecting to be a confession and he freaks out in the bathroom and she follows him in to try and talk unfortunately vice principal ida stricker was nearby and saw genie in the boys bathroom so she got detention but rave didn't for being a boy in the boy's bathroom and to try and remedy this and get the punishment he feels he deserves for dragging genie into this rafe makes a fool of himself and gets detention as well he still ultimately hurts genie and feels bad about it but it's implied she forgives him it's a bit that shows rafe does care if he entangles people in his rule-breaking web and even if he gets in more trouble in the process he's willing to try and get what's coming to him it also shows genie was willing to get in trouble if it meant helping someone out we never really get these character defining moments that break beyond her base level in this film she's just miss geeky tech girl that only rafe understands and is generally just a much more forgettable character while i'm on the subject of rafe's ensemble cast let me tell you about race family and also kind of family leo is perfectly fine in the film he serves his purpose as the sort of wingman to rafe but there's one fail flaw i think the film would have been much better if leo talked as scarcely as possible remember his name is leo the silent but he ain't that silent in this movie in fact he talks quite a bit maybe a little too much in fact the film could easily have made his character more interesting by having him speak mostly in his movements or expressions or they could have just adapted the book and made it seem like leo was drawing everything to express himself in the situation the filmmakers also didn't factor in some of the scenes where rafe is talking to leo since they can be in crowded spaces like a school hallway where people can see him so why don't they call out the fact that rafe is talking to nothing these complaints don't ruin him or anything but the lack of speaking was kind of a missed opportunity if you ask me georgia is also okay her actress isn't always great but she's a kid and as far as that goes she gives a fine performance the mom doesn't have as much room to speak though lauren graham i'm sorry what happened she she's not a bad actress but in this film she's just really bad at delivering her lines sometimes this is probably the director's fault i'm sorry lauren maybe you'll get a better role next time last kind of family member to talk about is bear and i just sort of feel like he wasn't portrayed the right way in the book he was manipulative but he was manipulative in the way that he was a slob who didn't go to work and manipulated rafe's mom's feelings he's still a slob in this film but he's just your average douchebag now the original bear didn't work so jules had to pull double shifts and could never see her children and therefore they'd be stuck with him a lot this bear openly flirts with other women cares about his car and is so upfront about his douchiness you gotta wonder why jules puts up with him if you can get what i'm saying they're both bad stepdad slash boyfriend to your mom tropes but bear in the books is just a bit more realistic the straw that breaks the camel's back is also all wrong too originally he pushes her down the stairs and she hurts her hand leading to an ambulance being called and the kids going in a police car in the film bear notices his incredibly expensive car is missing before he notices that georgia is gone and the mom has pissed at him for it i get they were going for the whole materialistic route with him but to be fair he said he had over 100 payments left on that car meaning that if he lost it he would have to spend a lot of time in poverty trying to pay it off and if i had a car like that and it was jacked you'd best believe i'd be a little more than pissed but no he's the bad man we as the audience know he's a bad character but it should have taken a completely different scenario to really get jules to open her eyes i guess this film is too light-hearted for domestic abuse but they could have still handled it better i already mentioned that the book had the subtlety to change bear from an anthropomorphic bear to a human when [ __ ] hit the fan in the book but the film is almost entirely live action so this moment never happens the last antagonist of sorts i've yet to mention is miller rafe's sort of bully and that's because he's barely in it i loved the book portrayal of miller because he acted like an actual bully he wasn't just a dumb guy that messed with rafe at any time he would wait to attack wraith at a moment where miller knew he would not be hounded by teachers he showed a level of strategy in his bullying like for instance when he gets rafe's notebook and finds all his plans miller decides to make rafe pay to get it back page by page under the threat of revealing it to everyone when wraith gets all the pages back you think that'll be the end but miller continues to torment rave by having made photocopies of the notebook and sending it to rafe's mom leading to the confrontation she and bear had that led to the push that's what a real bully would do miller showed the foresight to copy everything in the book he got a profit by making rafe pay for it back and then he threw it back in ray's face by showing it to the one person he didn't want to see it's perfect what is this miller like well he has no intimidation factor at all he's about the same height as rafe and it doesn't sound like he's even hit puberty yet you gotta admit it was kind of poor casting to get the voice of gumball to be the big bully character as far as actions he tries to bully rafe next to a teacher as if he isn't there he trips wraith and calls him catch a dorkian and then the end of the film happens and they're cool now i'm not exaggerating that's all they do with him outside of the small animations of the film while i'm on the animation i hate how it was used in the film if i can give the movie some credit it does have the advantage of really fluid animation considering the budget is only 7 million dollars this is impressive i just wish they did something good with it all of the animated sequences are used for either one-off jokes or segments that bring the film to a screeching halt in the beginning there was a mix of 2d and live action and i really liked that they could have done much more of that the entire bear issue i mentioned could be fixed if he was done as a 2d bear until the end where rafe's mom breaks it off they could have done that for all the antagonists and i'm sure it would have given the film a cool distinguishable look akin to roger rabbit but the animations usually come straight out of nowhere and are gone just as quick the one scene i think is done well to actually represent something is when rafe is freaking out about all the new rules dwight is throwing at the school it has some creative imagery and there's actually a point to the sequence that captures what the book was trying to do but other than that the animation is just used for what bear going after some random bartender woman and changing race hairstyle miller giving rae various wedgies a pointless chase scene with dwight and pedro from napoleon dynamite as a janitor a [ __ ] food chain seriously they actually animated a food chain that has nothing to do with the film has no relation to any events in the film and is never again brought up in the film sometimes i just wish it could get to the point instead of wasting animation money for these pointless scenes it's agitating there is still one thing more annoying though and that's the pandering oh my god this film tries so hard to pander it's the most 2016 film i've ever seen it goes down to the art style of the animated segments it's not a bad art style or anything but something about it just screams 2016. the book had rough characters with less detailed features and more curves to accentuate that these are being drawn by a middle schooler but now it just looks kind of generic and too clean in the soundtrack it starts with cake by the ocean it's got welcome to my house classic can't hold us i can make your hands clap i guess i can see where the tiny budget went with all the licensed music forget this film trying to be timeless they need to slip in all those references to call of duty facebook memes game of thrones the kardashians and who could forget the hilarious scene where the modern age kid tries to use a vcr oh genzirs and their lack of knowledge about the past go read a book you uneducated swines i'm not saying you can't do references in films but it has to have a certain class to it if you want it to not seem forced i actually watched eighth grade ones before i saw this film and it did referencing correctly in the only pop cultural aid moment in the movie while the main character is having a sort of date the szechuan sauce reference from rick and morty comes up but it isn't as much for a joke as it is just them talking conversation and it's naturally brought up i kind of cringed at the scene but i did so because it was so accurate to what me and my friends actually did in eighth grade it was natural and worked very well kids don't just randomly start making jokes about call of duty because haha i learned swear words from it that's such a 2012 joke but seriously beyond the super artificial stuff the entire movie screams how do you do fellow kids it's about a rebel trying to overthrow the oppressive school system by using super colorful pranks and graffiti that the grown-ups just don't understand i've heard this [ __ ] a million times and every writer that thinks they're being unique for doing this needs to get off their high horse and understand every middle schooler has thought of this kind of story in the 90s when everyone had already done it in the 70s the rebel against the authority figure still works as a storyline but there needs to be more god damn diversity for it to not feel like a rehash of the same film 20 years ago overall what do i have to say it's bad on its own and it's terrible as an adaptation of the book i'm glad i decided to look at it because it was fun to take apart but hopefully i won't ever have to watch this film again i was honestly expecting more from the director of such films as paul blard and dr doolittle too yeah who knows maybe i'll check out the next filming mate up nope nope nope never mind i'm done with this guy [ __ ] you all thanks for watching bye i'm not looking at anything else by this guy goodbye [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Just Stop

Views: 212,730

Rating: 4.9517508 out of 5

Keywords: Middle School, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life Rant, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life Review, Middle School Rant, Middle School Book, Middle School Movie, Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life Movie, Just Stop Middle School, Just Stop Middle School Rant

Id: e7iZWjEXNSY

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020