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The Edge of Seventeen (2016) - ★★★★★


Believe it or not, The Edge of Seventeen is the movie which struck the match that set the fire that became the Woody Harrelson Film Festival.

It was a dark and stormy night in April, just a few weeks after I'd been forced to return home from school due to the impending threat of the corona virus, and I was, to say the least, feeling down in the dumps! Doing school online is not for me (surprising, isn't it? Considering how very much "for me" blogging is?), and I was lonely! What better to cheer me up, I thought, than a classic coming of age film starring one of my favorite actors? I'd seen The Edge of Seventeen once already, so I knew that Woody's performance as a gruff history teacher with a hidden heart of gold was exactly what I needed to cheer me up. 

My idea worked, and as the ending credits rolled, I found myself struck with an idea—here I was, drowning in spare time, with no friends, and school work that I absolutely under no circumstances wanted to do! And here Woody was, with no doubt a vast filmography! I'd seen only a paltry eight or nine Woody Harrelson movies before, and that really was not okay, especially if I wanted to call myself a real fan of his work!

After a quick search which led me to Fandango dot com, I found that Woody had been in a whopping sixty-two movies! Sixty-two! I wrote them down with a black marker on a yellow legal pad, and taped the three pages which the list took up to the wall directly above my bed, scrawling four letters across the top right before I drifted off to sleep: W.H.F.F. 

Once I woke up, I went about constructing my blog, and I typed my list out here. It occurred to me then that it was probably silly to just blindly trust the list on Fandango, so I decided to check my list against the ones on Wikipedia and IMDB. As you know, I came up with thirteen more movies than what I had originally written down, bringing the grand total up to seventy-six. I added them to the list (though it did ruin the chronological order), and that very day, I got to work.

Back then, I had considered writing my very first review about The Edge of Seventeen. But that didn't seem right—for a few reasons. First of all, I hadn't watched the movie with the intent to review it, and therefore didn't feel confident enough to write about it, even though I'd already seen it twice. Secondly, I liked it so much that I wanted to make sure I did it justice—I wanted to develop my voice writing about other movies first, before I wrote about this one, which I presumed would be one of my very favorites out of the seventy-six. Finally, I was worried because I liked the movie so sincerely and could not think of funny way to approach the review. So I decided to save it for later. 

That brings us to today. Or rather, yesterday, which is when I actually watched the movie (for the third time). While the first two issues have been (I believe) resolved, the third persists! The Edge of Seventeen is just a really nice movie that I really like! Woody's character is still my favorite one I've seen him perform. And that's just about all I feel like I need to say! 


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