Moxie premiered on Netflix on March 3 and is a sweet movie that revolves around teenage girls at a Pacific Northwest high school that deals with sexism and double standards in school. Inspired by her mother’s youth, Vivian begins an anonymous sentence Moxie, which started a club and a revolution in the school. Although it is not based on a true story, it is based on a book of the same name.
The new Netflix movie, ‘Moxie’, is directed by Amy Poehler
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Moxie is not only directed by Amy Poehler, but also produced by her. In fact, her company, Paper Kite Productions, is the one producing the film. Poehler is also in the movie. She plays Vivian’s mother, Lisa, who is a pretty relaxed single mom. Vivian does not know much about Lisa’s high school experience, but she eventually finds out that her mother was an outspoken feminist. She led many demonstrations and held many memorabilia.
In Lisa’s suitcase of things in high school, Vivian finds many rebellious band items such as the group Bikini Kill. The rebellious grrrl movement was a punk-rock feminist subgenre of music that cared for feminists in the ’90s and was highly concentrated in the region in which this film takes place. It plays an important role in the film because it quickly starts Vivian’s activism and a main reason she creates Moxie. It also plays a role in the book on which this film is based.
The film is in fact based on a book from 2017
Moxie was originally a novel written in 2017 by Jennifer Mathieu. Although she did not write the screenplay for the film – this is usually not how adaptations work with authors – she does not seem to have been kept in the dark. Mathieu and Poehler appear on The Kelly Clarkson Show on March 5 and the two of them talked about the project.
Mathieu is still learning English in high school in addition to being a writer, and she has stated that she does not force her books on the children, but they are still finding out and are excited about it. Moxie.
“I don’t want them to think I’m weird like, ‘Watch this movie, read this book,'” she said. “When I’m with them, my main focus is to connect with them as a teacher. “
In 2018, Mathieu spoke to Novel2Screen about how long it took her to write Moxie and how timely it was. It came out after Donald Trump was elected president and started about #MeToo movement. Mathieu said that although it, like all books, took the ‘pace of death’, she wrote it before Hillary Clinton was on the ballot in 2016. Although she wrote it and thought that the election would go the other way around, it felt very much – needed.
‘I think so Moxie came out at a particularly important time for women and during the fight for women’s rights, which is useful in terms of sales, I assume, ‘she said. “But the truth is that the fight for women’s rights is always critical, and even if Hillary won, that would not mean we would not need feminism.”
Many of the unfortunate things in the book – and film – Jennifer Mathieu experienced in real life
What inspired Mathieu while writing the book, and why it will always be timely, she told Novel2Screen that many of the bad experiences the girls had to go through were unfortunate.
‘Unfortunately, everything that happens in Moxie happened to me, to a friend, or is something I observed as a teacher in a real high school environment, ”Mathieu said. ‘You just have to read the dedication Moxie to know what happened to me as a teenager in high school. ”
She refers to her 12th grade teacher who called her ‘feminazi’. While times have changed since the ’90s, she said many injustices and sexist actions against girls have not done so.
On The Kelly Clarkson Show, Mathieu also shared that there were two words she kept in mind while writing Moxie: joy and liberation.
“To me, that’s what feminism is,” she said. ‘It’s about liberating ourselves, all of us – men, women, who you identify with – liberating yourself to your full, complete and true self. And to forget strange constructs like that boys should not cry, or that girls should be this way. If we liberate people to be their full human selves, I benefit everyone. And that to me is really the core of what feminism is. ”
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