Every once in a awhile a movie sneaks up on you and makes you remember why you fell in love with movies in the first place. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of seeing the right movie at the exact moment you need to see it. Sometimes, the sheer artistry of the movie speaks to you in a way only movies can.

All The Real Girls snuck up on me. I’ve been watching a ton of movies in the theater and on DVD, mainly so that I can write reviews and make it look like my puny little site has lots of content. Once you get into the groove, it’s not too hard to hard to crank them out. After all, most movies aren’t hard to process. This one caught me off guard and I’m still not sure I can really articulate my feelings about it.

This is the second film from director David Gordon Green, who made quite a splash with his first project George Washington. I haven’t seen George Washington, but it’s already available as part of the Criterion Collection. That in itself speaks quite a bit to its quality.

On the surface, All The Real Girls is about young love and the excitement and heart break that comes with it. But the movie is about so many other things.

The central character is Paul, a likeable guy who still lives with his mom and works as a mechanic for his uncle. He has lived in this small town all his life, and doesn’t seem to give too much thought to ever leaving it. Paul has been through pretty much every girl in town and has developed a reputation as the worst ex-boyfriend in town. This complicates things when he falls in love with his best-friends younger sister Noel.

He falls for her in a way he hasn’t experienced with any of his past conquests and this freaks him out. They fumble through the first stages of love and a lot of things work out very well. However, falling in love can get complicated and sometimes timing is a real ***censored***. As the film progresses, Green uses the love story as a means of telling a much bigger story:  a vivid and impressionistic story about growing up in a small town and the complicated bonds between family and friends.

There is a very strange quality to the film. The pacing is very strange, especially the dialogue. The awkward pauses, faint whispers and indiscernible lines are as important as the lines that are delivered loud and clear. Much of this strangeness is probably due to the fact that improvisation played a heavy part in the creation of the film. Green carries this seemingly awkward pacing over into the way the movie is cut together. The end result is a very poetic and lyrical film.

The style of the film will probably be off-putting to a lot of people. You will probably know in the first 10 minutes whether you are going to love or hate his movie.  I chose to go along for the ride, and as the movie progressed, I was riveted. It’s very rare when I actually forget that I am watching a movie, but this time I did.

Green is a unique and original director and I hope he is able to keep to the aesthetic path he is chosen. His style recalls 70’s cinema—evoking the very best elements of Terence Malick, Robert Altman and early Martin Scorsese. But the end result is something very unique. Green refers to his work as “redneck surrealism” and that’s pretty dead-on. With All The Real Girls he takes the tiny ordinary moments that most filmmakers avoid and makes something beautiful out of them.

In Quentin Tarantino’s introduction to Chungking Express, he remarked that he had cried while watching that film. Tarantino cried, not because Chungking Express made him sad, but because he was just so happy to love a movie so much.

That pretty much sums up my feelings for All The Real Girls .

Director: David Gordon Green
Cast: Zooey Deschanel, Paul Schneider

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