Une fille pour Gregory

This is one of the funniest and most warm-hearted films ever! John Gordon Sinclair and Dee Hepburn were absolutely wonderful in this story of teenage love and the sudden twists & turns that occur when you think you've met THE ONE, but then someone else...

Back in the eighties when my family first purchased a (Betamax!) video recorder, I watched this all the time. There's just something about the combination of youngster actors who obviously hadn't come from the usual stage schools, the lines from minor characters that you almost miss the first few times (the school reporter - 'I want to interview you and that girl in 4A who had the triplets' - and so many more!) and just the general surrealism (the penguin wandering around the school must surely have influenced the writers of 'Teachers'?) There's a wealth of bizarre characters, both pupils and staff, and for someone who was 13 when it came out, it will never fail to take me back to those awkward teenage crushes and raise a smile. Well, several smiles actually.

A lot of so called comedies get one or two big laughs in the whole film, often by reaching down for a reference to one or another substance that comes from the human body. Gregory's Girl makes me laugh every few seconds, and the only mention of a bodily excretion I can remember is Andy's "chat up line" in the school cafeteria: "Did you know that when you sneeze, it comes out of your nose at a 100 miles an hour?" Even though I thought I knew all the funny bits after seeing it so many times, each viewing finds me laughing at things I hadn't noticed before, as well as at all the other bits that never seem to grow stale.

There's the occasional Pythonesque line, as the football coach's description of the "two basic skills" of a goal scorer: "Ball control, shooting accuracy, and the ability to read the game." But Forsyth the writer creates a constant stream of little gems that are very much his own style of wry humour, taking real life and stretching it just that little bit further, but not so far that it's no longer recognisable. He's got teenage life down perfectly. Girls talk, plan, and seem to know what they want. Guys are clueless. Guys are obsessed by numbers. But girls know all the best ones.

It's fun to see how comic setups and situations from Gregory's Girl come back in Forsyth's Local Hero ("everyone's second favourite film", as Mark Kermode put it), deeper and more fully developed.

Despite the dated fashions and soundtrack, highly recommended.

There is only one thing negative I could say about Gregory's Girl...it makes you sad that the innocence of first love and first dates is gone forever, and also makes me wish my school had been as cool as Gregory's. Excellent performances by all and sundry, no attempts to sacrifice realism for laughs and Clare Grogan at her prettiest. Special mention must be given to the music, wonderfully twee and with a kind of nostalgic delight. Only Bill Forsyth seems able to avoid mawkishness yet still make utterly inoffensive and delectable movies. One of my top ten favourite films and one I never stop enjoying.

I've caught this movie a few times playing on Stars in the states, and there is something indescribably charming about it. Maybe I'm biased because I've always loved British movies and television shows, but I found this movie very cute. The story is nothing big and dramatic, just a boy liking a girl and learning a bit about himself and about love in general in the end. The lead character of Gregory is very convincing and very real, you like him but at the same time you can't help wincing a bit at his awkwardness, especially in the scene where he's helping Dorothy out in football by playing goalie. I find this movie very refreshing when compared to teen comedies that are being made nowadays. Gregory's Girl has a realness and innocence to it that is severely lacking in Hollywood now.

And also thanks to whoever posted that the US version had the Scottish accents dubbed. I always noticed there was something "off" about the voices, especially the younger kids and now I see why. I hope someday I can see a copy with the original voices intact.