Angourie Rice evolves into zoomer Tracy Flick in The Honor Society trailer
Angourie Rice will do anything to get into college, including going on a date with… Gaten Matarazzo?!?
Aux News Tracy Flick
The trailer for The Honor Society, Paramount+’s new teen YA comedy, takes influence from the best of them. Election, Rushmore, Mean Girls, and Superbad all loom large on this one, with Angourie Rice’s character, the ironically named Honor, launching her campaign to become this movie’s Tracy Flick.
Here’s the synopsis:
Honor is an ambitious high school senior whose sole focus is getting into an Ivy League college… assuming she can first score the coveted recommendation from her guidance counselor, Mr. Calvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Willing to do whatever it takes, Honor concocts a Machiavellian-like plan to take down her top three student competitors, until things take a turn when she unexpectedly falls for her biggest competition, Michael (Matarazzo).
Rice has been perfecting her brand of type-A personality student for the better part of a decade. After graduating from the precocious moppet of The Nice Guys to ace student reporter Betty Brant in the MCU’s Spider-Man “Home Saga,” the actor looks like she might be skewering that archetype with Honor Society.
As for Matarazzo, he’s looking to make that jump from Stranger Things, where he’s played Dustin since 2016. But, unfortunately, Stranger Things has been tricky to break out of. Even a Finn Wolfhard, who has subsequently starred in It: Chapter One and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, seems to be stuck playing Stranger Things-esque roles in movies obsessed with tapping into that sweet rush of ‘80s nostalgia. Ah, nostalgia, that’s how you live forever.
Speaking of reminding our readers of the slow march of time that will one day return us to dust, McLovin himself, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, is in this trailer, playing a guidance counselor looking to help Honor get into the college of her dreams. It’s all a little too much to take. Life is so short. One day you’re dressed as Aladdin, trying to buy alcohol with gold flakes floating in it. The next, you’re a school administrator trying to get students to come to see you play the bass. Time truly makes fools of us all.
Honor Society hits Paramount+ on July 29.
43 Comments
I recently read the recent “Election” sequel “Tracy Flick Can’t Win”, never having read “Election” but seeing the movie several times and it is apparent that the movie made the character into a monster which wasn’t really the point. Yes, she’s annoying and aggressive, but the point was that when a guy acts that way we see him as ambitious, but when a girl/woman acts that way we see her as a bitch.
The excised scene at the end where Mr. McAllister goes to Tracy’s house went a long way towards explaining her behavior. The scenes with her mom gave a peek as well, but seeing that she lives in a very modest house on a fairly bleak street with a huge water tank (IIRC) dominating the horizon explains a lot of her drive and determination to get out. She’s not just deranged.
Never got into the film. The books actually sounds interesting.
It’s been a coon’s age since I saw Election but I don’t remember Tracy as being depicted as a monster. The worst thing I remember was sleeping with her married teacher which for obvious reasons reflects far more on the teacher.My takeaway was Matthew Broderick’s character having an unreasonable dislike of Tracy and her ambition that was sparked by blaming her for the work and marital trouble that his friend got in for his own idiot choice of having sex with a student. And given that he ends up having to move out of town after his actions of trying to sabotage a student election over a personal grudge came to light, I thought the film was pretty clear that while Tracy might not be someone the audience is supposed to like, Mr. McAllister is definitely the bad guy in that story. Particularly with the end, when he throws a milkshake at the limo he sees Tracy getting into – it drives home that he’s not just driven out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to his friend but jealousy of someone who is much younger but is clearly going to go much further in life.
Although the book sequel makes it clear that Tracy didn’t actually end up going much further in life despite the congressional internship — in the sequel she’s a assistant principal at a high school who never seems to get promoted (in her 40s when that would be past due) to full principal because of how off-putting her actions are (especially to men but also to a lot of women).
That honestly doesn’t make much sense based upon her trajectory in the first film. I thought a major part of the dark comedy was people who act like that sometimes do get ahead while those who roll their eyes at that kind of striving do not. We last see her as a Senate intern (or something similar), indicating her scorched-earth approach to life is working.
I never knew there was a sequel. I wonder if the author wrote it based on people’s reaction to Tracy Flick. I never saw her as an especially pleasant person – there was always a broken-glass edge concealed beneath the surface – but she clearly not someone who needed to be rooted against. She put in the work to get where she was/was going, while the genial doofus that McAllister pushed into running against her was rich and tall and basically had everything come easy to him. He was the kind of person you want to see take a fall (even if he personally didn’t do anything to deserve it) because it doesn’t seem like the world should reward the kind of dumb luck that it does and it shouldn’t punish the kind of work ethic Tracy had.
It was just published a couple of months ago.
TF did you just say
Yeah, that’s how I interpreted the movie as well. Broderick’s character is such a chickenshit little weasel that he’d rather feud with a 17-year-old girl than confront his own problems.
I hope the college she wants to get into isn’t Harvard. I’m so sick of shows and movies about teens who wanna get into Harvard. It’s so fucking overrated by this point.
Exactly. And it shows the anti-STEM nature of the writers. Nerdy teens aspire to get into MIT or Caltech, not Harvard.
One of the reasons I like the movie Orange County is because the main character wants to get into Stanford. Sure, it’s in the same state; but still, it wasn’t Harvard.
In the same state? Harvard and Stanford aren’t in the same state…or even in the same time zone…or even the same coast…
Same state as Orange County was presumably what was meant (Orange County is a large county in California south of LA and north of San Diego)
Give him a break, man–it’s not like he went to Harvard
Orange County is in CA, as is Stanford
I meant Stanford and Orange County.
My first thought was that maybe you meant that, but then I figured that can’t have been it because the setting of the movie doesn’t matter. They could have just as easily called it “Cambridge, Mass.” and had the person want to go to Harvard.
Same state!?! You sir, have the geographical acumen of a Yalie!
*Maybe you meant that it’s in the same state as Orange County, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss a chance to paraphrase one of my favourite Simpsons quotes!
I don’t think it’s anti-STEM as much as they have blinders on. Harvard dominates in the entertainment industry so writers either went or are jealous of those who did.
Well that goes back to the open secret that people don’t go to Harvard for an education, they go for the connections.
Even beyond that, “Harvard” is just shorthand for “best college” in the cultural consciousness. Sure, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, etc. are nearly as well known, but might as well just slot Harvard in there and move in.
And it shows the anti-STEM nature of the writers.I hear Harvard’s got an excellent music program, where they can train someone to play nerds the world’s tiniest fuckin’ violin. Seriously. You guys have a whole MCU; be happy with that.
There’s actually a university in L.A. County with the initials MCU: Marymount California University.
*Really* nerdy teens know that Harvard has very good engineering and science programs, and MIT is kinda crappy for undergraduate.
Eh, in some fields they aren’t bad. Harvard is very good at old-school (non-molecular) evolutionary biology, for example, but they’ve taken a hit in recent years with their greats like E.O. Wilson and Richard Lewontin dying.
That sounds like something that someone with the boorish manners of a Yalie would say.
Yale is still first in gentlemanly club life!
The University of Michigan, for sure. 😉
What, like it’s hard?(I’m embarrassed for the AV Club that nobody has said this yet)
Or at least have them come to the conclusion that a full ride to an honors program at a state school actually makes far more financial sense.
Looks good. I get the sense Rice is going to be the next big thing.
Betty Brant (and really everything related to the school news channel) was one of the most entertaining things about the MCU Spider movies.
And yet her character sees herself as too good for the university in Houston presumably founded by her family?
Probably the most stealth of the top 20 national universities. Well, maybe Wash U as well.
Although Rice doesn’t have the issue Wash U does in that half the time a discovery is made at Wash U the media get confused and credit it to the University of Washington (also a good school, but a different school!) instead.
That’s why they use the silky-smooth “Washington University in St. Louis” title.
Then maybe they’ll make a The Nice Guys sequel.
1) like in The Social Network, the more you watch Election the more Tracy Flick becomes not the villain2) Why is the Rice so Angry? Today I found out Angourie Rice is only a year older than Gaten Matarazzo! When I saw this headline I thought it was gross because I thought she was 22 and he was 16. She was also really watchable in Mare of Easttown despite that her storyline had zero to do with anything (other than that philly has a great music scene)3) Gaten Matarazzo is joining Dear Evan Hansen, but (I haven’t seen it) not in a huge part. I think this actually speaks really well of him, do the work!
It’s one of the great things about that movie. Everyone knows and has been annoyed by a Tracy Flick. But her ambition doesn’t make her a bad person (unlike the girl in this show since she’s actively sabotaging her competitors).
Today I found out Angourie Rice is only a year older than Gaten Matarazzo! When I saw this headline I thought it was gross because I thought she was 22 and he was 16Same. It’s probably because we’ve only see Gaten recently play a freshman in Stranger Things, while we’ve seen Angourie play characters from a little kid up to graduating senior. We just assume that she’s older because of the range of characters she’s played.
I only watched The Social Network once, but I do not remember Tracy Flick being in it.Maybe I got a different cut of it or something.