Participation in Saturday
Night live and the nicely laid-back TV series Parks and recreation as well as a lot of public contexts, such as this weekend's Golden Globe gala, has consolidated Amy Poehler as a comedian with sharp laconic bitterness, a female Chevy Chase.
One of those names that connotes (relatively) new good American humor.
But the film directing has gone well där The debut Wine Country passed the system relatively unnoticed two years ago and now comes this high school drama that is pretty lousy.
Okay, this pamphlet is not aimed at middle-aged Swedish reviewers, but at people in their late teens and - perhaps most importantly - at a conservative American school environment.
But still… Subtle as a notebook.
The main character
is 16-year-old Vivian who is tired of the sexism and male dominance that plagues her everyday life.
When she finds a feminist fanzine that her mother (Amy Poehler) wrote during her own school years, she takes up the fight against injustice at school and soon gets a lot of other girls (and a boy) with her.
The revolution is rolling out in the university - which feels strangely cut off from the rest of society.
Here, boys still slap girls in the ass, here they make digital lists every semester that assess the girls' sexiness and here you have a principal who is so upset at the patriarchal mast that she does not see what is going on around her.
Is it the 1980s?
Maybe even the 50s?
No, it is today in a school environment where time has stood still, where no one seems to have heard of Metoo or Black lives matter and where feminism seems like a whole new concept.
It should be said
that it still gets a little more interesting when Vivian gets a bit of a backlash from her Chinese-American friend, who introduces a dimension about race and class, but it is a very fast-moving discussion.
All the characters are squarely cut out of thin paper and the sympathies are extremely clearly distributed.
Worst of all is a nasty WASP guy (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger's son) and the only male that has anything to have is Vivian's boyfriend, a sensitive hummingbird who is so nice and okay that he thinks they should wait with sex ...
Moxie is based
on a popular youth book and was thus obvious for an American film adaptation, but if it were not for the credible Amy Poehler being involved, this Disney-scented fight film would have passed far below the Swedish radar.
To be as clear as the film (and perhaps avoid some of the most aggressive reader emails): The fight for equality and racism is obviously good, but it does not matter what is written on a poster if it is run up in the viewer's nose.
It hurts anyway.