Latest news with #Forever…
The Hindu
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Forever' series review: Young hearts run free in this timely and timeless love story
On New Year's Eve, Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.), a high school senior, decides to go with his friend, Darius (Niles Fitch), to a party where he meets Keisha (Lovie Simone). The two knew each other as children and sparks fly. Justin and Keisha meet the next day for shopping and a movie. Things are going well, till they are not, and they end with Keisha blocking Justin. Justin manages to get through to Keisha after begging her friends on socials to get her to reconsider and hijacking his driving instructor's car to visit Keisha in her school. Just as Keisha relents, Justin's mum, Dawn (Karen Pittman), confiscates his phone as punishment for the stunt he pulled with the car. As the two go through the peaks and troughs of love and intimacy, there are also college admissions to think of. Both Keisha and Justin are athletes — Keisha in track and Justin in basketball. Keisha's mum, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), and Justin's parents, Dawn and Eric (Wood Harris)—a talented chef and easy-going father—have big plans for their children involving athletic scholarships. Though Keisha is sure she wants to go to Howard University, and works towards her admission, Justin is not so sure of the future that his parents have charted out for him. Forever (English) Creator: Mara Brock A Cast: Lovie Simone, Michael Cooper Jr., Xosha Roquemore, Marvin Lawrence Winans III, Wood Harris, Karen Pittman Episodes: 8 Run-time: 43–52 minutes Storyline: Keisha and Justin meet, fall in love and have to negotiate the fraught senior year at school with college admissions, invested parents and the perils and joys of social media While Dawn and Eric have set their sights on Dawn's alma mater, Northwestern, Justin, who has struggled with ADHD, and loves making music, is undecided even after getting a full scholarship at Northwestern. There is also Keisha's ex, rising basketball star Christian (Xavier Mills), whose actions forced Keisha to change schools, to consider. And there's prom. As much as Forever is about first love and growing up, it is also about parenting, about trusting your children enough to let them make their choices. Judy Blume's 1975 novel, Forever…, was controversial for its frankness while dealing with teenage sex. There are call-backs to the novel including Keisha's best friend, Chloe's (Ali Gallo) aunt in Martha's Vineyard being called Kate who is married to Mike. The teenagers in Blume's novel are called Katherine and Michael and it is nice to imagine the two got together after all! Forever, apart from talking about teenagers, explores the difficulties of being Black in America. Dawn tells Justin, 'you are a black man in America, you have to be undeniable,' or there is Eric telling Justin as he takes his new Jeep for a spin, how he should behave if an officer flags him down. Code switching and micro-aggressions are very much a part of their lives, as Keisha comments. The clothes are lovely and Keisha's nails and braids are eye-catching. Justin's younger brother, Jaden (Marvin Lawrence Winans III), gets most of the funny lines. This sharply written modern-day Romeo and Juliet story with its likeable leads, and believable characters, reminds us of the terrible beauty of being young and restless. Forever is currently streaming on Netflix
Chicago Tribune
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Forever' review: Updating Judy Blume's classic about first love — and sex
Judy Blume's 1975 novel 'Forever …,' about a New Jersey high schooler's first love — and first experiences with sex — is a book I initially encountered with a childhood friend who got her hands on a copy. We snuck off to read the more explicit portions, giggling about them afterwards; the boy has named his penis Ralph and, , you have to laugh! Blume has always been able to capture the inner lives of teenagers as they struggle to figure out how to move through the world in that awkward limbo between child and adult, and it makes sense that Mara Brock Akil (creator of the sitcom 'Girlfriends' and the drama 'Being Mary Jane') would want to rethink some of those themes for the 21st century with her TV adaptation for Netflix. Blume has said she wrote the book at the urging of her daughter, who asked for a story about 'two nice kids who have sex' without dire consequences. That's because, at the time, in novels about teenagers in love, 'if they had sex the girl was always punished. … Girls in these books had no sexual feelings and boys had no feelings other than sexual. Neither took responsibility for their actions. I wanted to present another kind of story — one in which two seniors in high school fall in love, decide together to have sex, and act responsibly.' Akil has similar intentions in mind and the result is a lovely and wonderfully textured TV series about a couple of teens finding a romantic connection with one another. (This is actually the second screen adaptation; in 1978 CBS, turned the novel into a TV movie starring Stephanie Zimbalist.) Though the book is told from the girl's point of view, Akil has adjusted 'Forever' (and removed the ellipses from the title) so that we see the story through the eyes of both characters, beginning with Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.), who is cute and a little shy and comes from a wealthy family. At a New Year's Eve party in his junior year, he locks eyes with Keisha (Lovie Simone) who goes to a different school. She's stunning and quietly confident and comes from far more modest circumstances. At first he doesn't recognize her, but she reminds him that they knew each other as kids. The spark has been lit. The setting is now Los Angeles instead of New Jersey. Individually, Justin and Keisha are going through what are fairly normal adolescent experiences, but they're weighty all the same. The pressure of measuring up to expectations. When kids don't feel comfortable telling their parents what's really going on, or have trouble figuring out when to be vulnerable and when to protect themselves. (A text is composed — 'I'm sorry I pushed you away, I was hurt' — only to be deleted in favor of 'hey.') You like them as people, and you have compassion for their growing pains. They are fundamentally kind, but bruise one other's feeling easily. It's a story of fumblings and misunderstandings at an age when everything seems so raw, so precarious, because you're still growing up and deciding who, and what, matters. The show retains a handful of details from the original (fondue is served at the party where they meet; Ralph is indeed referenced briefly) that serve as nods to the source material, but the show itself is a wholly original creation tackling complications that kids face today, specifically through the prism of Black teen life. Things like social media or the three dots of a text message that never comes. The prevalence of phone cameras that can record even the most intimate of moments, only to see them blasted out to their peers. The latter is something Keisha has to contend with and this contradicts some of Blume's original goals, because Keisha adversely affected — punished, if you will — by a sex tape that gets shared at her school. Her classmates judge her but the show doesn't, at all. In fact, 'Forever' is deeply compassionate and understanding when it comes to the anxiety Keisha experiences afterwards, and you could argue Akil is just addressing the realities of teen life today. Sometimes kids have bad judgement and it's valid to see that through the eyes of the young people at the center of this story. This life stage can be emotionally messy. That's a given. But the show spends too much of the narrative contriving reasons Justin and Keisha can't be together (this comes up often and makes the show feel longer than it should) rather than letting us see the relationship develop more in the early going, when we need to believe they've established something deeper than a teenage infatuation. So much rests on Cooper and Simone's performances, which are terrific. His eyes light up when he spots her walking towards him to meet for their first date. She's a wonderful mix of assertiveness and sensitivity. It's hard enough figuring out who you are, let alone who you are as one half of a couple, and both actors navigate this uncertainty with nuance. (The larger ensemble is just as strong, including Karen Pittman and Wood Harris as Justin's patents, and Xosha Roquemore as Keisha's mom.) Young love can feel so intense and words like 'forever' get tossed around because that's how those feelings in the moment. Like the book, the show understands that this is usually just one chapter — albeit an important chapter — among many more to come. 'Forever' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) Where to watch: Netflix
Los Angeles Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Review: 'Forever' is a sweet ode to first love (and L.A.) based on Judy Blume's novel
'Forever…,' the 1975 Judy Blume YA novel about teenagers losing their virginity, has inspired a Netflix series with changes you're free to regard as substantial or superficial. Premiering Thursday, it's a very sweet show, full of characters whose differing needs and ideas sometimes put them at odds, but who are for the most part very nice. The worst you can say about any of them is that they are clueless or confused in the way that people, especially young people, with their incompletely formed brains — a scientific fact someone raises helpfully — often are. I've never read any of Blume's books, though I have read reviews and synopses of 'Forever…,' and visited Reddit groups where contributors recall secretly passing the novel around in high, middle or even elementary school — Blume (already a kid-lit superstar for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret') plus sex being an irresistible combination: adolescent hot stuff, mid-'70s style. I can report at least that in both the novel and the series, a character has named his penis Ralph. The TV show, created by Mara Brock Akil ('Girlfriends'), cuts the ellipses from the book's title. The characters are Black, a change that is both superficial and substantial. It honors the shape and intent of the novel while adding issues not on Blume's agenda regarding Black culture and advancement. More significantly, the series has been set in the near-present day — 2018 — and moved from quiet suburban New Jersey to sophisticated, sprawling Los Angeles. The first episode is directed by Regina King ('One Night in Miami'). Things have changed in the half-century since 'Forever…' was published, even subtracting the years the series backtracks. Not that teenagers weren't falling in love and having sex — or not falling in love but having sex — in the year that Captain & Tennille released 'Love Will Keep Us Together.' But the texting and blocking, the free-for-all backwaters of the internet and the carnal shenanigans that color contemporary TV teendom do put a different complexion on growing up. Of course, young people can be having a lot of sex while not, in the strict formulation, 'having sex,' if you get my meaning. Yet a show about a couple of high school kids who, whatever else, have never Gone All the Way, and take the prospect seriously, can feel like a throwback to more innocent times — and that is not a bad feeling at all. Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) are our young lovers, who meet, or meet again — they had known each other in elementary school — at a New Year's Eve party, thrown by Keisha's rich but not snooty friend Chloe (Ali Gallo), the series' only regular white character. (There is fondue, the whitest of all foods.) Justin and Keisha come from different sides of the tracks , or 'the 10,' in L.A. psychogeography; his family has a big modern mansion in the hills, while she lives with her mother, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), in an apartment down around Slauson and Crenshaw. Playing Justin's (Michael Cooper Jr.) parents are Wood Harris and Karen Pittman. Keisha is an A student (and track star) whose friends call her Urkel; her mother struggles to pay for the Catholic school to which she's recently transferred. A full-ride scholarship to Howard University is in her sights, and there's no reason to think that she won't get it, even with a sex tape that's gone around. Justin, who has 'a learning difference' and problems with 'executive function,' struggles in school, but his mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman), a successful executive — it's one of those jobs that requires barking into a phone while walking quickly through a room — has supplied him with tutors and wants big things from him; he's not sure what he wants. (Mother and son alike may be putting perhaps too much faith in Justin's ability to shoot three-pointers when it comes to college admissions.) His father, Eric (Wood Harris), who cooks for the family and runs restaurants — including, in this TV reality, the real-life Linden, a Hollywood center of Black society — and never went to college, is more easygoing. ('Life works things out when it's supposed to,' says he.) The kids are honest and sincere, not stuck up, not phony. Keisha seems a little more on top of things, life-wise, though she will jump to conclusions. Justin, less interested in whatever high-powered business future his mother imagines for him, dreams of a career in music, which in this context means 'making beats.' Though Simone and Cooper are not actual teenagers, they are fresh-faced and radiant and youthful; they're pretty adorable. Their parents, too, are likable, loving, hard-working people, a little bossy now and then, but genuinely concerned for their children. As in the real world, the kids handle some of their business better than their elders, and sometimes the elders prove wiser than the kids. (Not too often though — this is a series aimed at young viewers, who won't have come for a lecture.) Keisha and Justin bumble into and out of a bad first date, but before too long, he's texting her, 'think I woke up with a girlfriend can u confirm' and she is replying 'how can I be ur girlfriend if u haven't asked me.' (He will.) Things get better and worse and better, happier and sadder and so on, as the couple travels through eight episodes of mostly ordinary drama — jealousy and insecurity, mopiness and mooniness, desolation and elation, miscommunication and reconciliation — on the way to maturity. They'll get into minor trouble with school and parents. The infamous sex tape — something shot by Keisha's former boyfriend, Christian (Xavier Mills), but distributed by an offscreen character — leads to a conversation or two, but is more or less old news by the time story begins. Justin isn't bothered. Interestingly for a modern teen show, nobody's getting drunk or doing drugs, apart from a couple of pot-smoking adults and flirty old friend Shannon (Zora Casebere), who comes on to Justin during the family's annual summer decampment to Martha's Vineyard. 'I want you to be my first,' she says, 'It would be awkward and we would laugh through it.' He thinks love should have something to do with it. As a coming-of-age story, it's more about the electrifying present than the unwritten future, however often that future comes up for discussion. Ultimately, it leads our heroes to the common enough question of what happens to their union after graduation. Not to give anything away, but anyone who's survived their youth will understand that the title is ironic — or, with Blume's ellipses, reattached for the title of the final episode, at least inconclusive.
