Beautiful Girls | | Cast : | Matt Dillon, Timothy Hutton | | Director : | Ted Demme | | Studio : | Miramax | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen | | Released Date : | February 09, 1996 | | DVD Released Date : | January 04, 2005 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | August 05, 2005 | | Summary | takes itself way too seriously | Content
 | I wanted to like this movie, but it was so saturated with Hollywood fakery, it was impossible. Timothy Hutton is Willie - the first of a group of men we'll meet who inhabit a small town occupying a quiet and snowy part of America. When we first see him, Will is a small-time, New York City area musician who cleans out the tip-glass and heads home for a reunion. He's made little impact on NYC, though we can pretty much guess why he left home. When he gets back, he hooks up with his old buds who, like him, have aged without really maturing - a circle that includes Matt Dillon and Michael Rapaport, both exhibiting serious problems relating to women. Surrounding the men are their smarter halves - women who are also unable to mature despite being much smarter than their men. Between the two groups are Marty (Natalie Portman) and Gina (Rosie O'Donnell) - each of whom are meant to be as wise as they are unconnected to men. (Portman looks to be about 15 in this movie - to young to have a relationship with Will, but not too young to immediately engage him in incredibly arch dialog; Rosie O'Donnell's character is simply too annoying to have a relationship with anybody.)
Not much happens in this movie - which never becomes more than a loosely connected stream of scenes in which the men try to grow-up and get past their outdated ideas about women, and the women try to be patient about them. The script tries perhaps too hard, borrowing all sorts of Hollywood wisdom to flesh out the faults of the characters. Though set in Smalltown, USA, the script is full of the sort of dialog you'd expect to here in some Screenwriter's Writing Workshop: "I can't play Pooh to your Christopher Robin", Will says; Marty has an even more arch line - "If I'm not mistaken, you've come back here to the house of loneliness and tears, to Daddy Downer and Brother Bummer, to come to some sort of decision about life, a life decision if you will."; The chief indignity is heaped on Michael Rappaport's character, who must explain his open adoration of supermodels - "A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you've been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man - promise. Promise of a better day" but sadly not a better movie. Does that kind of dialog exist anywhere outside of a Hollywood movie? (Will, the unfortunate person on the receiving end of Paul's wisdom, quips about checking Paul's refrigerator for human heads, laughing at Paul while accepting the idea that men like him actually exist, and of course laughing at anybody who buys into those ideas as well, even if they wouldn't have known of them without seeing this movie.) "Beautiful" is so wedded to the idea that men don't know real beauty when they see it, that it falls back on familiar faces to play the small-town sweethearts - Mira Sorvino, Uma Thurman, Annabeth Gish and Portman. There's something incongruous about a movie that pokes fun with men who ignore real women because they're obsessed with beautiful women, then casts some of those beautiful women to play the ones the men are ignoring. Nothing in "Beautiful" is all that insightful or funny, and bery little of it actually reaches to the level of being "pretty". |
| Rating | | | Date | July 31, 2005 | | Summary | An outstanding performance from one of the stars | Content
| This film is the wonderful story of a character simply known as "Reunion Classmate #2". A semi-popular high-schooler who meets up with the most popular girl in school, Darien Smalls, at their high school reunion. The meeting at the raffle ticket table is a soft portrayal of long-lost love and "moving on" with life. The actor's portrayal of his realization that he has grown up is an magnum opus of quality character acting. A must see for this scene alone. [submitted by Matthew Nathan Castens] |
| Rating | | | Date | May 29, 2005 | | Summary | Oh Boy what trash.... | Content
| Needless to say that this was a movie just so young teenage geeks can drool at some of the cast members listed here, heck even the movie's title came from the studio's PR Department. Is there a script? No. Are there characters you like? No. Is there any point to this movie? No. Should it be taken seriously? No.Is there better written dialoge in a Kevin Smith film? Yes. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 15, 2005 | | Summary | Watch this movie iver and over | Content
| This is one of my all time fav movies. Everytime it is on TV, I tune in. On those long Sundays, I pop the DVD in.
What amazes me is that I always thought of this movie as a "Chick Flick". Yet, most of the reviews I have seen are from men who really enjoyed this movie. This is a movie that both sexes can watch and relate to. |
| Rating | | | Date | January 22, 2005 | | Summary | The real America | Content
| I saw this once back when it first came out around 1996. Recently, I watched it again. Sometimes when you watch a movie a second time, you're disappointed. I wasn't at all. If anything, I was depressed after it was over because I had to stop watching.
This movie is "superb," to quote one of the characters who overuses the word. It explores the woman problems of a group of friends who grew up together in a small town and, in doing so, makes some interesting observations about why it's so difficult for some people to feel completely satisfied with a relationship.
It's one of a small number of films that give you a glimpse of authentic contemporary America -- something you're not going to get from most Hollywood films. |
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