Tart

Can someone tell me what is the song title we hear at 50min I have done some researches and couldn't find it even with the lyrics: If the little boy, likes the little girl, he should give her the world to that little girl. Tell her that he loves her, put his arms around her, chase the clouds away. If the little girl, likes the little boy, she shouldn't get upset, she shouldn't get annoyed, if that little boy, takes a little time waking up his heart, making up is mind. Note: it sounds like a song from Leonard Cohen

I anticipated something with a little more substance than this, although not much. It seemed to have decent casting, a potentially interesting story, but pretty much left you going "Hunh?!" afterwards, wondering what the point of the whole thing really was. No amount of personal insight or imagination could put any of this into any kind of perspective that makes sense. It's basically just stupid. You wonder why she periodically narrates a letter to someone you're unsure of, and when you DO find out, you're confused as to why and what relevance it finally serves, which is absolutely none. The revelation that her father is jewish, among other things, as just a mention, but with some inference that it is important, is ridiculous. Idiotic waste of film.

Betcha my bottom dollar (not that I have any) that Dominique Swain watched MY SO- CALLED LIFE. She channels Angela Chase in her movie GIRL (which I've only seen snippets of) and again, here in TART. She gives us teenage angst, a sense of desolation and despair, to perfection in this outing. And then there is Mischa, lovely as always, as the mean girl, and Bijou Phillips as the wild one.

Problem is, what went into the mix, choice ingredients; but the cake turns out kinda bland. Many of the scenes are far-off, the entire movie is oddly distant. It could have been great, but whoever was at the helm, avoided that achievement skillfully.

Is the movie true to real life, though? I have to concede, yeah. But real life is mostly about as interesting as closed circuit security monitoring on an uneventful day. The movie lacks zing. And please, if your idea of something controversial was the toilet + ice bucket scene, please keep it to yourself.

The director also avoided a nude scene while delivering what the script described. The Bijou Phillips character was supposed to be dancing with her top off, instead it was filmed rather puritanically with just her jacket off. Yeah, that boy would rush out the way he did to go see a girl removing only her jacket. I'm pretty sure the script called for more, but bare flesh was circumvented (for whatever reason, lots of possibilities spring to mind).

All in all, we the viewers, lost out on what could easily have been a much- better experience. This small-budget movie need not have cost much more in order for it to be great. Only a little bit more and it might have been something truly worthwhile. As it is, a weak botched attempt that only shows wasted potential.

On their own, both Dominique and Mischa deserve much better scores. The vague lethargic storyline bogs them down completely. And the title of the movie would be off-putting to the intended audience, while the poster/box design hints at a sexy schoolgirl. Who is that on the poster/box anyway? Totally misleading.

The box to this movie totally misrepresents itself. The cover shows a view of legs & panties in a short skirt. The title is `Tart.' The synopsis on the back of the box made it seem as though Cat, the main character, was an outcast who became one of the popular students, but that popularity lead to a bizarre lifestyle that she could not escape from. Everything that the box built this movie up to was a horrible lie. I expected a sort of crappy, direct-to-video version of `Heathers' targeted at the teenagers of today.

Let me tell you what `Tart' was really about. Yes, this really is the plot; so if you don't want to know what happens, stop reading. We have one unlikable, boring rich girl. This unlikable girl's best friend is a skank. The skank gets expelled from school, so the unlikable girl befriends some British girl. This leads to the unlikable girl dating this boring guy, who the box refers to as the `most popular boy in school.' If that guy was the most popular guy in their school, I wish I would have gone to that high school, because I could have kicked the crap out of him. Anyway, as any movie will tell you, the most popular guy in school is invariably a murderer or drug addict or thief, or in this case, all of the above. Anyway, everyone ends up disliking the unlikable main character because she is Jewish. Then the most popular guy in school beats her best friend, the skank, to death with a rock because the skank caught the most popular boy in a homosexual act. The unlikable girl's stoic mother and hypochondriac younger brother are there for her at the end. Oh, and the entire movie is about snotty rich kids and their horrible parents too. Gee, what is wrong with that? That sounds like a fantastic movie! Well, that's what I thought. But you see, there are NO likeable characters in this movie. The main character is boring. The filmmakers made her average, while during the film she keeps spouting off about what a freak she is. The skank is not skanky enough, and has little screen time. The popular guy is nothing to write home about. The popular girls are just your run-of-the-mill rich girls. There are no moral lessons. Cat, the boring main character, is not a freak, does not ever become one of the truly popular girls, and (worst of all) after all the crap she goes through, she thinks she is still too good to befriend the only nice girl, the dorky girl. To be honest, I have no idea why the movie is called Tart. I kept asking, who's the tart? Is she the tart? Are they all tarts? At 94 minutes, theoretically this is not a long movie. But after actually watching this awful waste of a VHS tape, and not knowing who the tart was, I was surprised that the movie was only an hour and a half. The movie felt like it was two hours and some change. After a while, I was hoping the movie would be about pop tarts. At least when you look at a box of pop tarts, you know what to expect.

For me this movie is about losing things and being lost. And it makes the observation that when you're lost you can end up losing things that you didn't know you had much less that you wanted to keep.

Cat (Dominique Swain) doesn't know who she is, which ironically doesn't keep her from not liking who she is. And in the people around her -- family and friends, adults and peers -- she finds varying amounts of belonging, rejection, hope, and disillusionment. In other words, Cat is just 17 in a way that should be familiar to us.

That's one of the strengths of Christina Wayne's quiet, mature film is the feeling of verite. I've never been young and rich in NYC (or near-rich, or formerly-rich, or trying-to-keep-up- with-the-rich) but Wayne's portrait seems so detailed it makes me really curious to know if she has been. Far from being "Just another spoiled rich kids film - _Kids_ meets _Metropolitan_!" Wayne shows us Cat trying to "fit in" and a diverse number of reasons -- from financial to social to emotional to behavioral -- why you can cast out of this insular, cannibalistic sub-culture.

Another strength is Wayne's direction and writing. The film is well-constructed with strong characters, with images and (Yeah, I'll say it ...) motifs that appear once and then quietly reappear in different contexts. And all throughout Wayne shows a really nice eye for pictures.

Plus she's got really good people doing good work. I mean, everyone is in this movie: Swain, Renfro, Phillips, Zehetner, Chabert and Barton (before they had to try to be smoking hot), Scott Thompson of _Kids in the Hall_ fame. She even gets Melanie Griffith to do a walk-on.

One thing the film has going against it is the marketing. Looking at the trailer and the film poster, it's clear that Lions Gate or whoever didn't know how to pitch this film. It seems like they wanted it to be naughtier or rowdier or ... brighter than it is. But it's not a melodrama. There are no simple heroes and villains, no moralizing on right and wrong, no suspense- ridden plot. It's the type of character-based, even, sad, dramatic storytelling that seems to go down better in Canada that here in the States.

I like it, though. If you've got a quiet morning and some time, it deserves a try.