13 Going on 30
13 Going On 30—I watched this because my niece said it was one of her favourite movies of the year. I had heard it described more than once as the female version of Tom Hank’s Big, which is a wonderful movie about a young boy who suddenly pops into a grown-up body, has hilarious adventures, and uses his youth to design some great toys for a toy company. If you watch 13 Going On 30 in this erroneous context, it is a failure. If you watch the movie in its own right, it is fairly good and has something valuable to say. Thirteen-year old Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen) wants desperately to be part of the in-crowd of snotty girls at her school, and she rejects the friendship of the friendly, chubby guy next door as part of her ambitious plan. When she flashes forward to herself at 30 (Jennifer Garner), she slowly realizes that she is a nasty, backstabbing, ambitious career bitch. To figure things out, she has her secretary track down the guy next door (Mark Ruffalo), and her old friend turns out to be a grounded, warm, and good-looking guy engaged to be married. She realizes that at 13 she made a fundamentally wrong decision. She had valued the wrong things, and, while she proceeded to get everything she wanted, she became a progressively more disgusting person.
Jim Bell