Summer Eleven

I just finished watching Summer Eleven (2010). It is a family comedy/drama about four 11 year old girls who are best friends and their last summer before middle school. Even though I am not in the target demographic, I really enjoyed it. The girls are adorable and I was invested in their characters and their friendship. I think young girls would especially enjoy the film. My rating is an 8/10.

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.

I actually loved this movie. I was just browsing through netflix when I came across this. I thought that it would be an easy going pre-teen based movie, where the girls get up to girly things. I thought it would be similar to 'An American Girl' movies, which I like to watch. However it was completely different. The movie didn't require a high budget or A-list actors to tell a good story about little girls experiencing big world problems. I really enjoyed the movie and thought that it was really gripping. All the girls were very nice to each other which also inspired me. They dealt with their problems in a very appropriate way which I admired.

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 just gave it a straight ten, this film totally surprised and charmed me. It completely avoids any cliché that seems to perpetuate in so many girls films. In this film girls are so refreshingly _not_ the little self - centered gigglers whose main and only subject are boys, and main plot is _not_ around petty fight that two of them had.

There are some deep and challenging events for kids at that age in the plot, and yet the movie is never a *drama*. It is represented the way kids handle it - just like you rarely see a kid just blocked - they accept and move on. It may appear light hearted, an it is in a way, but that is because it remains true to that particular perspective - kids cope with certain events, ups or downs, better than the adults do (obviously, not talking about extremes now).

Another point that I loved about the movie is that I have miserably failed whenever I thought that I had a particular character all figured out. I didn't. I loved the Valerie Mahaffey performance - brilliant. Girls as well.