Beautiful Girls

I vaguely remember seeing this in college and thinking it was alright, and after watching it again I guess its still okay but probably a bit to full of itself.



Let me just give you the ONDEMAND recap for the plot:


A young man on the verge of marriage returns to his hometown to reconsider, hanging out with his old pals and seeing the ruts they're stuck in.


Its written by Scott Rosenberg who covered similar in his adaptation of High Fidelity, but with much more subtlety and humor in the latter work. The first problem is that Natalie Portman plays the world's most well-spoken, all knowing 13 year old who constantly comments on the action and represents the ideal woman to the main character Timothy Hutton (which actually is kind of creepy). It also doesn't help that one of the film's big points is that men are avoid commiting to normal women because of some pipe dream about landing a super model. However the fact that the supposed average women in the film are played by Mira Sorvino, Lauren Holly, Annabeth Gish, and Rosie O'donnel (okay the last one works) sort of mutes the point. But whatever this is hollywood, I've worked in Beverly Hills and the average isn't far from what the film portrays. The biggest problem is that every character (including Michael Rappaport) feels the need to speechify all the time, with no real sense of humor either. Its not completely uninteresting, but it feels overbearing after awhile. Part of my problem is probably that I never felt the late 20's malaise often portrayed in these type of films, which would of course require me to you know care about stuff which we all know is ridiculous (except for hummus, I do love me some hummus).


Also what is with these towns that apparently only allow one guy per high school class to move away? It seems like all these films feature a protagonist who returns home to see all his high school friends (who haven't left even though the town sucks, in my experience if the town is that bad you move but whatever) while he's in the midst of some existential crisis. I go home several times a year and most of my high school friends have moved on and I rarely learn a life changing lesson that shakes me out of my rut (except for that one time I learned how to be a drug charge, that was definitely life changing).

This is a corollary to the film towns that have one person who moves a way to big city, becomes absolutely insufferable, but after a dose of some good old fashioned rednecks they decide that they no longer want to live someplace that has museums, mass transit, and more than two restaurants. But I digress, Beautiful Girls has its moments it just tries way too hard to be profound.