message in the movies By Rev. Bruce Batchelor Glader

                     
13 Going on 30    Rated PG-13
Directed by Gary Winick. Starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo.

Photo © Revolutions Studios
If you’ve seen the trailer, you might think that this film is about a 13-year-old girl waking up in a 30-year-old body (as in the 1988 Tom Hanks comedy Big).  And you would be mostly wrong.  Young Jenna has just turned 13, but she wonders what it would be like to be “thirty, flirty, and fun”. Her wish is granted when she awakens seventeen years in the future to discover her grown-up self.  She finds out that she is a successful editor of a woman’s magazine and has everything that a self-centered grasping career woman would want.  Her middle school nemesis is her best friend, and she is living a fairly immoral life.  Forget about the childhood discoveries of Big; this film is more like a backwards version of It’s a Wonderful Life, in which our heroine discovers what a terrible person she would grow up to be if she made the wrong decisions that she hasn’t made yet!  And that’s not even half of the problems with the script of this film.  There is a major subplot about office politics that is totally ridiculous, and 13-year-old Jenna spends so much time trying to clean up the messes that 30-year-old Jenna made in her life, I stopped caring about an hour into the film.  Since these movies predictably return the heroine back to their original innocence, I knew that eventually this nightmare would be over and life lessons would be learned.  Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo are charming as Jenna and her childhood friend; it’s a pity that their talents are wasted in this drivel.  The message of this film (to any 13 year olds girls who go to see it) is simply this: Choosing a professional career is a fool’s game.  Wise up, find a good man, settle down, and be happy.  Any parent who takes their pre-teen to this movie is (to quote the great Ricky Ricardo) “gonna have a whole lot of splaining to do”.

Halo and Pitchfork Rating: Three halos. (A basically positive message about the virtues of being a good person trapped in a confusing and often frustrating film.)  Two pitchforks. (A whole bunch of implied sexuality, with nothing really happening; brief profanity; some unethical behavior.)

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