Getting old is weird. Beyond the failing eyesight and heightened blood pressure, the utter confusion of who anyone is at the Grammys and the constant desire to scream “Get off my lawn, you damn kids” is the way your memory plays tricks on you. I’m especially thinking about movies. Oftentimes, I’ll pick out a movie I think I’ve never seen. Then ten minutes into it something will seem familiar. Then 20 minutes later I realize I know how it ends which means I must have seen it sometime before. Other times, I’ll put on a movie I know I’ve seen before. It will have been logged into my Letterboxd account. But then when the movie plays I’ll have absolutely no memory of anything I’m seeing on the screen. Did I imagine watching it? Did I accidentally log it? Or has so much time passed that I’ve completely forgotten everything? But then why do I remember watching it?
Buy My Girl 4K UHDWhen this new 4K UHD release of My Girl arrived on my doorstep, I didn’t even remember asking to review it. I had to check my email to confirm it was meant for me. It is a film I do remember watching when it first came out in 1991. Or rather, I remember talking to my friends about it. One of them was devastated by it. She cried and cried for days she said after watching it. But I don’t really remember the movie. I knew somebody died, probably one of the kids. I knew it starred Macaulay Culkin as he was just coming off starring in Home Alone which was a monster hit. Other than that, I remembered not liking it that much. I didn’t hate it or anything. It was fine. It was a perfectly fine movie that didn’t do much to make me remember it.
Watching it again after all these decades, my opinion hasn’t changed that much. It is still a perfectly fine movie with a good lead performance but in a few weeks, I will have forgotten I even watched it. My Girl was part of a wave of films and series that came out in the late 1980s to early 1990s that treaded in nostalgia through the lens of adolescence living in an earlier time. Think of The Wonder Years or The Man in the Moon with Reese Witherspoon. All of which was a part of Boomer filmmakers mythologizing themselves.
In the early 1970s, in small-town Pennsylvania, 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) lives alone with her Dad Harry (Dan Aykroyd) who runs a funeral parlor out of their home. Her mother died during childbirth. She is plucky and sweet and obsessed with death. She regularly runs to the doctor claiming to have some life-threatening illness.
Her best friend is Thomas J. Sennett (Macaulay Culkin), who is allergic to everything (three guesses as to how this film made my friend cry). They are unpopular at school but have fun together. Her father is kind but inattentive and aloof. The loss of his wife has made it difficult for him to let anyone in.
Enter Shelly DeVoto (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cosmetologist who applies for a job at the funeral parlor not realizing she’ll be applying makeup to the dead. But she stays because she doesn’t have a family and working for one might be just as nice. Naturally, she and Harry fall in love. Naturally, Veda is not too keen on this development. She’s got a crush on her English teacher (Griffin Dunne) and she’s got enough pluck to come up with the $35 to take his summer poetry course.
This is a slice-of-life movie. It is about a little girl learning to grow up, learning to live with all the things life gives her, both funny and tragic, sweet and maddening. It is about how adults must learn that too. Chlumsky’s performance is warm and endearing with just enough spunk to make her interesting but not so much that she becomes annoying. The rest of the cast is fine. The movie is fine. It is a little bit funny and a little bit sad. It tries a little too hard to be meaningful without ever saying anything. It is warm and nostalgic and yeah, rather forgettable.
Sony Pictures Entertainment presents My Girl with a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative. It looks good, but not particularly great. But that may have more to do with the way it was shot than anything going on with this restoration. I didn’t notice any particular flaws. Extras include an audio commentary with writer Laurice Elehwany, an on-the-set featurette, and a beyond-the-scenes feature.
