I also love that moment between childhood and adolescence where nothing makes sense, everything isn't as how you imaged it to be and the only way to grow up and get on with life is to make the stupid mistakes and then reflect back; hoping you learned something and didn't do irrevocable damage.
Flipped, Rob Reiner's best film is over ten years, has all of these things. It's a beautiful postcard to the early 60s, and a sweet tale of two kids who live across the street from each other. One is Juli Baker (Madeline Carol) who is desperately in love with Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) from the moment his family moves in across the street. They are both young and while playing their hands connect for a brief moment, more or less sealing their fate.
Grown up into adolescence, Bryce wants nothing but for Juli to leave him alone. His family is upper class, his father, subtly suggested to resort to the booze to make up for a missed life as a musician, is cold and demeaning while Juli's family is poor but full of love and are judged by the state of their front yard. Her father is an aspiring painter which also is greeted with scoffs across the street.
This goes on until, as events must transpire, Bryce realizes that he really likes Juli while Juli slowly realizes maybe Bryce wasn't what she had envisioned after all. This is all told in voice over as the same events are flip-flopped back and forth to be told first from Bryce's point of view and then Juli's.
And holding everything together is Grandpa (the invaluable John Mahoney) who has moved in with Bryce and who is kind, knowing and misses grandma.
All of this is sweet and innocent and doesn't hurt anyone. It takes place in a whimsical movie land which once doubled as America but now, all these years later, seems like a distant fantasy. It's exactly the kind of movie that makes you sit back, smile and remember the days when things were both so simple and yet so complicated all at once. The best days, some may argue, of our lives.
