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With all the love for uber-teens like Hannah Montana and the Twilight brood, what's with all the hype over a child who professes himself to be "wimpy?"
If you're not familiar with Diary of a Wimpy Kid, you simply don't have your thumb on the pulse of the average elementary school child (lucky you). The series of books is fairly new to the kid-lit scene, combining scrawled text with hand-drawn scribbles as it outlines the trials and tribulations of the titular wimp, Greg.
Now entering middle school, Greg is dreaming big of becoming Mr. Popularity, despite the fact that he's a foot shorter and 30 pounds lighter than all the other kids, has limited social skills, and has a best friend (Robert Capron) who rides a girl's bike. Naturally this dream doesn't come remotely close to coming true: Greg is ostracized from the start and subject to endless humiliations from day one. Any perceived popularity he has is gone by the time he's featured on the front page of the school paper, beaten up by a girl.
The movie follows Greg's attempts to be cool, namely through the tried and true conceit of following his filmic travails as a member of one club or another. He'll try anything. Wrestling, safety patrol, the school play, and even drawing his own cartoon for the aforementioned paper: There's nothing Greg won't do to attempt to fit in. Meanwhile, at home we mark the time for the usual family goings-on: The plight of the older kid still out trick-or-treating, truck-driving bullies terrorizing the neighborhood, the abusive older brother (a very entertaining Devon Bostick) wreaking havoc, and idylls with mom and dad (Rachael Harris and Steve Zahn), who certainly help as well as they can but know it's time to let go of the reins.
If you had a rough time in your pre-teen years, you'll probably find a snicker or two to be had from Wimpy Kid's walk down memory lane -- turns out nothing has really changed after all these years. But for grown-ups, Wimpy doesn't come across as much more than a pleasant and mostly harmless diversion, its lessons about telling the truth and being who you are having long since wandered into the realm of cliché.
Kids, however, will absolutely swoon. The combination of live action with hand-drawn interludes keeps them connected to the source material, and the casting of Greg is spot on. Young Zachary Gordon is nothing less than a baby Paul Rudd, complete with all the goofiness and vague insecurity that that connotes. The other kids are stereotypes writ large -- the clearly inbred Fregley (Grayson Russell) representing perhaps the very nadir of gross-out kid characters.
For kids, of course, that's a good thing. My seven-year-old daughter, who's been raging to see this movie since it was announced, has already called it "life-changing." How do you argue with that?
If you're not familiar with Diary of a Wimpy Kid, you simply don't have your thumb on the pulse of the average elementary school child (lucky you). The series of books is fairly new to the kid-lit scene, combining scrawled text with hand-drawn scribbles as it outlines the trials and tribulations of the titular wimp, Greg.
Now entering middle school, Greg is dreaming big of becoming Mr. Popularity, despite the fact that he's a foot shorter and 30 pounds lighter than all the other kids, has limited social skills, and has a best friend (Robert Capron) who rides a girl's bike. Naturally this dream doesn't come remotely close to coming true: Greg is ostracized from the start and subject to endless humiliations from day one. Any perceived popularity he has is gone by the time he's featured on the front page of the school paper, beaten up by a girl.
The movie follows Greg's attempts to be cool, namely through the tried and true conceit of following his filmic travails as a member of one club or another. He'll try anything. Wrestling, safety patrol, the school play, and even drawing his own cartoon for the aforementioned paper: There's nothing Greg won't do to attempt to fit in. Meanwhile, at home we mark the time for the usual family goings-on: The plight of the older kid still out trick-or-treating, truck-driving bullies terrorizing the neighborhood, the abusive older brother (a very entertaining Devon Bostick) wreaking havoc, and idylls with mom and dad (Rachael Harris and Steve Zahn), who certainly help as well as they can but know it's time to let go of the reins.
If you had a rough time in your pre-teen years, you'll probably find a snicker or two to be had from Wimpy Kid's walk down memory lane -- turns out nothing has really changed after all these years. But for grown-ups, Wimpy doesn't come across as much more than a pleasant and mostly harmless diversion, its lessons about telling the truth and being who you are having long since wandered into the realm of cliché.
Kids, however, will absolutely swoon. The combination of live action with hand-drawn interludes keeps them connected to the source material, and the casting of Greg is spot on. Young Zachary Gordon is nothing less than a baby Paul Rudd, complete with all the goofiness and vague insecurity that that connotes. The other kids are stereotypes writ large -- the clearly inbred Fregley (Grayson Russell) representing perhaps the very nadir of gross-out kid characters.
For kids, of course, that's a good thing. My seven-year-old daughter, who's been raging to see this movie since it was announced, has already called it "life-changing." How do you argue with that?
