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Starring Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, Anna Chlumsky, et al. Although my enjoyment of this film was tempered with lead actress Anna Chlumsky's opening line of dialogue, when she informed the audience that she had once had hemerrhoids, I got over it, and in a weird way, enjoyed the rest of this movie. Personally, it is my opinion that no one, on or off the silver screen, should ever tell another person that they have or had hemerrhoids, least of all a 11 year old girl wide-eyed and full of innocence, to open a film, but as I have already stated, I did eventually get over this. My Girl is a slice-of-life film about one girl's, Vada's (Oak Park's own Chlumsky), summer in the early '70's. This material really could be described as a long episode of The Wonder Years with a girl in the lead, but I digress. Just as was the case with The Wonder Years though, My Girl focuses its premise around one young person's journey through puberty. Vada's father (Dan Akyroyd), is a mortician who works out of his home. The nature of working with the dead has affected Vada, to which I say, "duh". The result of this is that Vada is a hypochondriac of the Nth degree. Other than hanging around with her best friend, a bespectacled, and shaggy Thomas J. (Macauley Culkin), Vada's favorite pastime is running to her doctors office, complaining of some new malady or other that are always fictious, a trait especially evident when her "prostate" starts to hurt. Lawrence Elehwany's script is fairly solid, with the plot taking interesting turns at the proper times, but some of this is forgotten, due to the high level of awkwardness that is present. Swingers was ripe with this awkwardness, particularly while Jon Favreau was making call after call to a new girl he had me, but in Swingers this was used as a tool to have the audience both identify with the situation Favreau was in and to show what a basketcase his character was. The level of awkwardness in My Girl is caused by the fact that Chlumsky's lead is a total--what's the technical term for this?--spaz. Chlumsky's character is the type of girl who, if things can go wrong for her, they will. She's cute, she's cool, but if she was walking up a flight of stairs in front of you, she'd be the person to trip and fall on her face. Chlumsky's feelings about the new woman in her father's life, Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis), have been seen before elsewhere in many other movies, but did produce for some rather twisted little scenes, namely where the two go after each other in bumper cars. However it was Vada's relationship with Thomas J that most entertained me. The two children talk about things that I remember talking about as an 11 year old, and regard the world as their own personal playground, which I especially liked seeing on screen. This was decent, though I wouldn't immediately recommend it for families with young children. There are a lot of traumatic happenings in the film especially involving Culkin's character that didn't sit especially well with me, that I know won't sit very well with younger children. That was enjoyable to a degree, and really put me inside the shoes of an 11 year old girl, to which I can only say "AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!"
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