1 Aug - "The supermodels, Willy? That's all they are. Bottled promise."

Beautiful Girls (1996)

dir. Ted Demme (The Ref, 1994)

CAST
Matt Dillon (There's Something About Mary, 1998)
Noah Emmerich (The Truman Show, 1998)
Annabeth Gish (Mystic Pizza, 1988)
Lauren Holly (Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, 1993)
Timothy Hutton (Serious Moonlight, 2009)
Rosie O'Donnell (A League of Their Own, 1992)
Max Perlich (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986)
Martha Plimpton (The Goonies, 1985)
Natalie Portman (The Professional, 1994)
Michael Rapaport (True Romance, 1993)
Mira Sorvino (Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, 1997)
Uma Thurman (Les Miserables, 1998)
Pruitt Taylor Vince (JFK, 1991)
Sam Robards (American Beauty, 1999)
David Arquette (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992)
Adam LeFevre (Jungle 2 Jungle, 1997)
John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, 1996)

Beautiful Girls is one of those movies about High School friends being unable to cope with the reality of adulthood. You can put it on the shelf next to The Big Chill and St. Elmo's Fire. Uniting the friends is an inability to manage their romantic relationships. There are two rational, self-aware characters in this movie, one is Vera, the bartender's cousin from Chicago, played by Uma Thurman. The other is the sassy friend, played by Rosie O'Donnell. The men seem to excuse their own inability to commit to their respective womenfolk by the fact they haven't yet found "the perfect woman" the sassy friend scolds them for chasing a fantasy, and says that they would get bored of their imaginary supermodels even if they ever managed to find them. That's true enough, their girls may dress like New Englanders in the '90s, but they're all played by very attractive actresses. Uma Thurman's characters I guess is supposed to represent the perfect woman made real. but she's unattainable because she has a boyfriend back in Chicago that is mentioned all of twice. She's cool, does he own thing, and her friendly gestures are always misinterpreted as permission for a romantic advancement. She turns all the guys down.

So what's the point? It would seem that based on this movie, men are children and women are adults that must put up with their ridiculous behavior. That's a silly idea.