D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Bill’s Review
Every so often everybody in Hollywood will get a similar idea at the same time. Recently, there were two Alexander the Great bios proposed (one was dropped). Nearly a decade ago, we had rival “big rock hits the Earth” movies (both sucked). But in the late ‘80s Hollywood was positively besotted with movie that involved body switching or some variation that would allow an actor to play a child suddenly put in an adult body. As with any formula, most were pretty dreadful (Dudley Moore was particularly unconvincing as he had spent most of his film career playing immature cretins and so no one noticed the difference). The best of these movies featured Tom Hanks as a 12-year-old who makes a wish and becomes Big. The movie revived Hanks’ movie career and gave him his first Oscar nomination.
In 13 Going on 30, Jenna Rink (Christa B. Allen) is having a particularly traumatic 13th birthday. She wants the cool kids to like her and come to her birthday party, but the only one who really cares is her nerdy neighbor and Jenna is left abandoned. There is some silly crap with fairy dust and no sooner does Jenna “wish that she were Big” and the movie has jumped ahead 17 years where Jenna wakes up in a strange apartment as Jennifer Garner. Needless to say if there were magic dust that would produce Jennifer Garner in a nightie, the government would have the deficit solved. As Jenna wished, she is now 30 and living the life of her dreams as the editor of a big-time fashion magazine, main squeeze of a star from the New York Rangers (the Rangers as a playoff team may be a bigger stretch than waking up 17 years older), and is best pals with the main mean girl from her 13th birthday.
Eventually (read: slowly), we learn the “lesson” of the movie, which turns out to be the predictable chestnut of being careful what you wish for. But the movie’s true moment of high hilarity comes when one realizes that with a subplot about people stealing ideas from other people and passing them off as their own, 13 Going on 30 actually has the temerity to take a stand against using other people’s intellectual property without proper credit.
Now, as I have already stated, it is not as if Gary Ross, Anne Spielberg, Penny Marshall, and the other Big people thought this up all on their lonesome. The antecedent of these movies is the original Freaky Friday and I even remember a Little Rascals short that had a pair change ages thanks to a magic lamp. Lack of originality would not be a consideration were this whole thing not such a dreary exercise. The laughs are so few as to make you wonder if it was intended as a comedy and the stars Garner and Mark Ruffalo (as the adult version of Jenna’s true friend) are so ill-used that anyone unfamiliar with their resumes might question them being considered competent actors. Andy Serkis (as Anna’s fruit loop boss) does such an insignificant job that he will soon be begging to play Gollum again. There is little plot that is not easily predictable and by the numbers including the audience-pleaser ending. The movie’s big dance number would have us believe that the pretentious folk who run the party circuit in current day NYC are just waiting for a chance to dance to two-decade-old tunes from a loony has-been that most people are convinced is a serial pedophile.
Director Gary Winick has achieved some notoriety as the director of the overrated Tadpole and as one of the prime movers behind InDigEnt (Independent Digital Entertainment) which produced a slew of lousy-looking, hastily-produced videos with big stars such as Tape, Personal Velocity, and Pieces of April. Working here on film and with a bigger budget than InDigEnt would spend on ten, Winick has produced a feature every bit as execrable as the Hollywood junk that independent cinema is supposed to be the remedy for.
13 Going on 30 got so bad that at one point the movie used “Vienna” as a musical segue. It was all I could do to keep from screaming, “Stop it you bloody bastards before you ruin Billy Joel for me.”

Bill’s Review
Nine years ago characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy met, connected, spent the night walking around Vienna (Austria not Virginia), got to know each other very well, and swore to meet up again in six months. So what happened after Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise? We now have at least one answer in the sequel, Before Sunset (although animated versions of the pair were featured in the same director’s Waking Life and it did not look like nine years between meetings). Perhaps this is the “official” answer to the question, but every member of the first movie’s audience had already written their own sequel.
In Mr. Linklater’s version, Hawke and Delpy do not reunite in six months, but rather nine years later in Paris when he is on a book tour with a Paris stopover. The movie begins with Jesse (Hawke) speaking to a throng at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore speaking about his novel which we quickly come to realize is a thinly-veiled roman a clef of his long night’s journey with Delpy’s Celine. She has come to his reading and the pair decide to spend the just over an hour before he has to leave for the airport catching up (the movie never expressly states it, but it appears that the movie’s time takes place in real time a la 24). And for the rest of movie, the pair chat, reminisce, debate, speak of missed opportunities, and give a state of their lives report.
This movie can be classified best as belonging to a category I call, “A Couple of White Guys Sitting Around Talking.” And as such I would be hard-pressed to recommend (despite my enjoying it) to anyone save those who were besotted with the original. Evaluating movies or any other work of art is highly subjective at best, but this whole movie’s appeal rests on the likeability of the pair and how much you are willing to put up with. Although the walking (and some bits of boating and driving) tour of Paris is refreshing (very few touristy shots except one of the Notre Dame Cathedral to illustrate a point about impermanence by Linklater), there will be very little else to any who find this pair insufferable. With the difference between enraptured and intolerable so razor thin, one has to jump in with both feet and simply let the movie roll over you.
None of their conversational topics are particularly memorable and the film’s most intriguing bit of dialogue comes during the beginning sequence in the bookstore where Jesse is being probed as to just what degree his book is autobiographical. In response to the inevitable question, Jesse sidesteps revelation and instead supplies the most intriguing point of the movie as well as a potential dismissal of why anyone should care for the next hour’s transpirings.
The Austin auteur is quick to remind us (albeit using Mr. Hawke’s mouth), it does not really matter how he wrote the ending since everybody that saw the first movie had already written an ending for the two lovers and that whatever the ending we furnish says more about who we are and what we stand for.
In mine, for instance, the pair unite and live happily ever after though Mr. Hawke becomes depressed after he realizes how stupid both Training Day and cheating on Uma Thurman are and he gives up acting altogether in atonement for his Hamlet and settles down for his career as a novelist… possibly in Paris.