Summer Eleven

This is a great movie, especially for parents with elementary to middle school-aged children. As a cognitive neuroscientist and one who develops educational programs for parents, this move shows how adult behaviors and life experience affect children. And the real-life experiences among school-aged children. Overall, I loved it and recommend it.

For what it is, it's perfect. It's not pretentious or sentimental or trying to be something it isn't. It makes no claim to be a film for kids as far as I can see, it's just a film about kids, facing real life situations, and managing them well. The adult players are integral to the story and there's a nice balance between the kids playing with other kids, and interacting with their far from perfect parents.

It scores high because it deals with happiness, sadness, success and grief in a realistic way, not getting bogged down with sentimentality or ramming 'important lessons' down our throats. I don't see why kids around the same age as the stars couldn't watch this, but as I said it certainly doesn't set out to be a film for kids. It's by no means hard-hitting, more quaint than edgy.

These four girls are all little stars and I'm surprised to see none of them have appeared in another movie. What their character show is is although we don't live in a perfect world, we can make our world perfect. Well done all of you :)

I had the misfortune of being subjected to this ...'film' at a house today, while I was working. I love Tim Daly and Valerie Mahaffey, but...this was just plain awful. Acting was terrible, directing, characters...there was nothing good about this movie...Thankfully I left after an hour of working in the house, so don't know what happened with the big audition, or other completely contrived situations or characters...I was horrified that preteens and teens were watching this and thought it was good! My daughter would have turned it off in about 4 seconds or watched it only to make fun of it...awful!! Okay, you need ten lines of text...how many more times can I write awful??

I rented this movie to watch with my 11 year old as we were going away for the weekend and thought it would be a perfect movie night movie to watch together. It looked heartwarming, entertaining, enjoyable and easy to relate to for my Miss 11. It was the MOST depressing, worst movie we had both seen. My 11 year old who is very easy to please extremely disliked it and at the end of it she even said, "I think that was the worst movie I've ever seen, Mum!" The acting was terrible, the story-line was depressing. Its basically a movie about four 11 year olds and all their problems in their lives. It doesn't even have any life lessons. Pity I hadn't taken another DVD on holiday with me as a back-up!

It's the summer before middle school for Vanessa, Lizzie, Jess, and Peri-- four school friends--but that's not all they have to think about. Each girl faces her own challenge to tackle, challenges relatable to the audience, perhaps. All while staying together and soaking up the summer sun.

While the protagonists are 4 ten and eleven-year old girls, some of the issues that they face could be a little suggestive for younger children. Nevertheless, adults and older children will reminisce about their vacation days, and may find some traits in the girls to compare themselves to.

A low-budget film, but a fine one, in my opinion.