The fall weather is so beautiful lately, so I've been spending a lot of time outdoors, at least until the sun sets. This means that by the time I get home from work, I don't really have much daylight, so I've been watching a lot of movies. This installment of my movie reviews will focus on coming of age movies, two that you may or may not have heard of. When I found them on Netflix I had never heard of them, so these reviews are based on nothing that anyone else said about them. They are also from the 90's, so they were both fairly cheesy. There was one very striking difference: one was great, the other I would avoid like dirty socks in a locker room. We'll start with the bad, since I just finished it about an hour ago.
I Love You, I Love You Not (1996)
I chose this movie because it had an all star cast: Claire Danes, Jude Law, Julia Styles, and James Van der Beek. I couldn't believe I had never heard of this movie, since it came out the same time as a lot of other teen dramas that I enjoyed. After watching it, I can see why it didn't go very far. The main character, Daisy, has a grandmother who was in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Other than her having brief two second flashbacks and talking about the numbers on her arm, her story never develops beyond that. Daisy is constantly switching moods, one minute loving her grandma, and then throwing books at her grandma's face in the next. There is supposed to be a romance between her and Ethan (Jude Law), but it doesn't develop very far because he thinks she's too intense after fainting in a school assembly, as well as getting upset with others for making fun of the characters in the current book she is reading. Clearly her maturity isn't well developed, so he decides to end things. Then she decides to end things by standing in front of a train (sorry if I'm giving too much away, but I'm trying to save you 88 minutes). Her grandmother, of course, saves her at the last minute, which is right after she was screaming in her face that she was tired of being made fun of for being a Jew. Yes, the granddaughter is screaming at the grandmother, who is an Aushwitz survivor, that she's tired of the anti-Semitic comments. In the next scene she is of course shouldered up to her grandmother and they are back to sharing stories. I was thoroughly disappointed...
The Man in the Moon (1991)
I chose this movie because it had Reese Witherspoon in it when she was only 14 years old! I also seem to recall someone bringing it up at some point as a good movie to watch. It was advertised in the Netflix summary as a coming of age movie, and boy was it ever! The characters were very real and I can now see that why Reese Witherspoon is such a big actor now. This was one of her first movies, and it comes natural for her. The story is of a family in the 1950's, the parents have three kids and one on the way, living on a farm. Then a family friend moves back home to their farm, which happens to be next door, and of course this family friend has a handsome son, a young Jason London. Dani, Witherspooon, falls for him, but he doesn't want to give her the wrong impression because he is older and afraid he would take her innocence. Then he meets the older sister and falls in love. There are a couple surprises in the movie that are tragic, but the surprise is what makes them very real. Both of them caught me totally off guard and one of them had me in tears. That's the way life is supposed to be, though, catching you off guard when you least expect it. Check this one out if you're looking for a feel-good coming of age film, or if you just want to see what Reese Witherspoon looked like twenty years ago. Just make sure to save a seat for that box of tissues.
I chose this movie because it had an all star cast: Claire Danes, Jude Law, Julia Styles, and James Van der Beek. I couldn't believe I had never heard of this movie, since it came out the same time as a lot of other teen dramas that I enjoyed. After watching it, I can see why it didn't go very far. The main character, Daisy, has a grandmother who was in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Other than her having brief two second flashbacks and talking about the numbers on her arm, her story never develops beyond that. Daisy is constantly switching moods, one minute loving her grandma, and then throwing books at her grandma's face in the next. There is supposed to be a romance between her and Ethan (Jude Law), but it doesn't develop very far because he thinks she's too intense after fainting in a school assembly, as well as getting upset with others for making fun of the characters in the current book she is reading. Clearly her maturity isn't well developed, so he decides to end things. Then she decides to end things by standing in front of a train (sorry if I'm giving too much away, but I'm trying to save you 88 minutes). Her grandmother, of course, saves her at the last minute, which is right after she was screaming in her face that she was tired of being made fun of for being a Jew. Yes, the granddaughter is screaming at the grandmother, who is an Aushwitz survivor, that she's tired of the anti-Semitic comments. In the next scene she is of course shouldered up to her grandmother and they are back to sharing stories. I was thoroughly disappointed...
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