this movie was horrible. Or *is* horrible, I should say, as I'm sure it is still playing at a theatre near you.<br /><br />Basically--and yes I need a new paragraph for this--I simply can't stand it when a movie is not a movie, but instead a stock car race of plot vehicles vrooming around a track, racing to get to the great, meaningful, dramatic, thematic finish. To wit: the mother of the poetess, whom we see only rarely in the first thirty-five minutes, comes off as a mostly absent entity whose only purpose is to arrive home waaay late every night and give our long-suffering hero a hard time for not taking proper care of her little sister (read: yet another obstacle for our poet hero to overcome on her way to heartfelt expository writing). Vroom. And as for that little sister, let me tell you what *she* does: she looks forlorn, cuts herself, starves herself, looks forlorn and hungry, acts like an angel on the altar in the middle of church, passes out during said performance, dot dot dot, and finally jumps out her psych ward window to her death (and if you think I'm being callous then that's because you didn't see the film's eleven second treatment of her death). Vroom, as we race on towards the making of a real teen poet.<br /><br />And then the teacher.... Okay, at one point he puts a gold star on her forehead. Which is all I'll say, except for: vroom goes the confusing adult world car.<br /><br />And the poetry? And the excerpts from the brave teacher's leather bound novel? Hai ram--if you appreciate literature or poetry, if you have any respect for the craft of writing, then you will most likely wince at the trickling treacle that is served to us as (presumably) exemplary writing.<br /><br />Is it too much to ask for real characters? Too much to ask for characters that do more than emotively mope, but tell us *why* they are so sullen? Is it really so bothersome to spend the extra fifty hours writing good dialogue, to actually reach down within yourself--as this movie, by the way, pedantically tells us to do--to come up with real feelings and real people and not just their sit-com approximations? Because please, all I'm asking for are two true hours, a darkened interstice of theatrical time when I don't for once have to slap my knee with a rolled up paper, clap my palm to my forehead in an exclamatory wince because I've just been suckered again.