All the Real Girls (2003)

You'd think moviemakers would have run out of new ways of capturing the trials and joys of young love--but director David Gordon Green finds a fresh take in All the Real Girls, a bittersweet small-town romance. By leaving out the usual humdrum exposition of a courtship story, Green cuts right to the little moments that form the high and low points of a budding relationship. It's an impressionistic style aided by the wonderfully spontaneous and unpredictable acting of Paul Schneider (who also co-scripted) and Zooey Deschanel--who look like they're improvising, even though they're not. As in Green's excellent debut feature George Washington, a small town serves as an atmospheric backdrop--this place looks a couple of decades shy of the 21st century. The mosaic approach makes the film play like a collection of memories, someone's first love recalled with fondness and just a bit of regret. --Robert Horton Amazon.com

A hard pill to swallow

I did give it three stars for being different and interesting, but I say that with a bit of reservation. For this film is unbelievably bleak. While I hate those fairy tale love stories like "sleepless in Seattle" as much as the next guy, this goes in a complete opposite extreme. This guy meets a girl who he thinks is different from the rest, and he does his best to do right by her and offers her the respect he thinks she deserves. Yet, she does not reciprocate that respect and the inevitable disillusionment sets in because of it. He soon realizes that the person he loved never really existed at all. That she only seemed that way due to her boarding school upbringing, that she isn't as she is by choice, but by environment alone. Now that she is out of school she quickly morphs back into a "real girl" if you will. As interesting as I found it I also found the cynicism of it all rather depressing. I say this because if this is what "all the real girls" are like, who would want one. For according to this, "all the real girls" are not worthy of a man's respect. At least, that is the way I saw it. In the end, it gave a voice to my own cynicism and disillusionment. For this movie resembles my love life. I just hope to God this isn't really true. March 31, 2008

Moving and Honest

We've all been there:
Young love, mind running wild, heart beating fast just thinking about that special someone. Films have run this idea into the ground, making it seem cheesy to many people; I haven't lost hope though, always looking for that perfect film which captures young love: a film that makes me miss having the reckless abandon that comes with fragile emotions and simply not enough time to understand what it all means.

This is a film for those who like to reflect. For some, Green's impressionistic style will bring back to the surface old feelings, capturing perfectly the idealism and the ups and downs of first loves. For the embittered who have grown up to be a product of the skepticism and sourness that plagues our age, this film might be just what it takes to bust through the mortal coil and into the heart, which never truly stops believing.

Set in a rural mountain town, the lovers do not have to compete with Hollywood hype and the mediation of other romantic films of this type. The acting is superb: if anyone leaves a viewing of this film without being entirely enamored with the onscreen chemistry between Paul Shneider's Paul and Zooey Deschanel's Noel than maybe it's time that person truly does give up on love.

This is more than a film for nostalgia's sake; it is a film for the ages, for anyone who has loved so deeply it hurts and then been hurt so deeply by that same feeling. It's a film about moving on. March 22, 2008

Finding Love and Attempting Privacy in a Small Town

ALL THE REAL GIRLS is strange little film written and directed by David Gordon Green, an attempt to capture the claustrophobia of a small North Carolina town where finding love in the midst of an atmosphere devoid of secrets. It boasts a strong cast, has some moments of touching repartee, but in the end we are left with a lack of feeling for/caring about any of the characters. Green's fidgety camera work, jumbled scene changes, and lack of character development prevent the good points to out weigh the weak ones.

Hometown lothario Paul (Paul Schneider) is best friends with another womanizer Tip (Shea Whigham) whose sister Noel (Zooey Deschanel) returns home from a boarding school and falls for Paul. Paul and Noel do a courtship dance, the first act of a relationship that includes more talk and self-confession than physical. Tip objects to Paul's interest in his sister and this of course only fans the flame of romance. The cadre of homeboys (Danny R. McBride and Maurice Compte) watch on the sidelines as the Romeo and Juliet affair takes place. Paul's mother (Patricia Clarkson) and uncle (Benjamin Mouton) add what words of twisted wisdom they can. The love affair is the first serious relationship Paul has ever encountered and for the first time it is the girl who throws the wrench into the experience, a factor that allows the story to simply end.

With a cast that includes some truly gifted actors (Deschanel and Clarkson especially) the viewer has to reflect on why there is no true concern for anybody in the film, no screen chemistry and no charisma that would have helped make this belabored effort worthwhile. David Gordon Green is young and has some very sound ideas about film, but he needs to talk to his audiences about communication to enable him to make solid movies. Grady Harp, August 07 August 11, 2007

alright....

Intresting movie but it kinda gets slow in parts. Shipping wise it came fast and in perfect condition. May 12, 2007

Some films should just be pitched over a cliff

This movie is a long, slow, earnest melodrama about small town twenty-somethings struggling to...you know...find themselves...get somewhere...grow up...ah, hell, I have no idea, really. The movie is shot so that we are stuck in that eternal autumn that permeates most small-town melodramas. All oranges, browns, and golds. The characters meander through their lives with little direction and no visible means of support. There's a factory which none of the characters seems to work in. Zooey Deschanel plays a very confused girl who is a virgin when she starts dating Paul Schneider. Schneider is a player (that's right, all of a sudden there are at least two babes in this town that we see Schneider has, erm...pleasured. They wear professional makeup and have their hair done in New York. Or at least that is what it looks like.) He falls for Deschanel and doesn't screw her because he's a changed guy. It's his new self. So what does Deschanel's character do? She does a bad thing at a weekend party at a lake. The whole rest of the film is devoted to the pain and inchoate ramblings of Schneider and the rest of the cast, all of whose lives seem to be hopeless and in need of repeated doses of stiff, tough-sounding and superficial philosophies which, it appears, everyone can spout. Nothing like dead-end stultifying, small-town life to turn a really average guy into a sage. The worst are the virtually tongue-tied ramblings of Deschanel which are so painful to sit through that I wanted to rip my own face off. While there are moments of dimmed insight in this movie, for the most part it is self-indulgent and plodding, filled with little meaningless scenes that give it an art-house feel. Deschanel is fine as the wounded/wounding girl, Schneider is stiff, pasty, and dull as the boyfriend (he also wrote the story). He looks way too old for the Deschanel girl which, apparently, he is. February 26, 2006

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