All the Real Girls

All the Real Girls is a 2003 romantic drama film written and directed by David Gordon Green. The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2003. It stars Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Shea Whigham, Danny R. McBride, Patricia Clarkson, Maurice Compte and Benjamin Mouton. The film follows the romance between a young, small-town womanizer and his best friend’s sexually inexperienced younger sister. While the film fared poorly at the box office, it was generally well received by critics and was nominated for several awards when it was shown at film festivals in 2003.

Plot

Paul (Paul Schneider) is a womanizer in his early twenties who lives in a small Southern town, where he earns a living fixing cars for his uncle. Paul still lives with his mother, Elvira (Patricia Clarkson), who works as a clown cheering up children at the local hospital. He spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend and self-proclaimed partner-in-crime, Tip (Shea Whigham), and their friends Bo (Maurice Compte) and Bust-Ass (Danny R. McBride). Among his friends, Paul has a reputation as a ladies' man, but he's not at all known for being involved with long-term relationships; most of Paul's romances last only a few weeks, and he's slept with nearly every girl in town. Paul is beginning to reach a point where he would like to lead a different life, and that feeling becomes all the more clear when he meets Noel (Zooey Deschanel), Tip's teenage sister who has come back home after attending a boarding school. Noel is more thoughtful and mature than the girls Paul is used to. Paul and Noel soon fall in love, but for Paul this is a different sort of relationship than he's accustomed to — Noel is still a virgin, and her contemplative nature gives him a desire to be a better, stronger person. However, Tip doesn't approve of Paul dating his younger sister, which leads to a rift between these longtime friends.

Cast

Reception

All the Real Girls got mostly positive reviews when it was initially released in 2003. All the Real Girls currently has a 71% rating at rottentomatoes.com^[1] The film’s current rating on metacritic.com is 71 out of 100.^[2] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times said “Green is 27, old enough to be jaded, but he has the soul of a romantic poet. Wordsworth, after all, was 36 when he published, ‘The Rainbow comes and goes and lovely is the Rose.’ How many guys that age would have that kind of nerve today?” He gave the film a four out of four star rating.^[3]

All the Real Girls was not a financial success at the box office. It was made on a budget of $2,500,000 and premiered on January 19, 2003 at the Sundance Film Festival. The film was released on February 14, 2003 and played in six theaters, bringing in $39,714 in its opening weekend. By the time the film ended its theatrical run on July 10, 2003 it had made $549,666.^[4]

The film was nominated for awards at several different film festivals all over the world. Green was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize but won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival along with Clarkson for her role in the film. At the 2004 Chlotrudis Awards, All the Real Girls was nominated for Best Actress, (Deschanel), Best Cinematography (Tim Orr), Best Director (Green), and Best Original Screenplay (Green and Paul Schneider). Deschanel was also nominated for Best Female Lead at the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards and Best Actress at the 2004 Mar del Plata Film Festival.^[5]

References

External links

• All the Real Girls
• All the Real Girls at AllRovi
• All the Real Girls at the Internet Movie Database