This is a vast improvement over the other film I had seen by writer-director Holly Goldberg Sloan. That one was 'The Big Green,' and it was a totally unoriginal cliche-ridden formula picture. A change of scene and subject did wonders for this movie. The focus here is on a teenaged girl growing up in a very eccentric family who has to cope with her parents' breakup right in the middle of her adolescence. Of course, even a movie about an aggressively weird family can be cliched also, but those traps are steered clear of for the most part. Sloan obviously has major empathy with her main character, played by Majandra Delfino, and it translates well to the viewers. Natalie's family is about as odd as the one in 'The Hotel New Hampshire.' When the mother (Linda Hamilton) frantically tells her children, "Everybody act normal," her son (Aeryk Egan) asks incredulously, "Us?" Luckily things are played for laughs in this movie, but it makes it points. This isn't a perfect film but it succeeds where some similar ones have come off as too contrived.
Review of The Secret Life of Girls
