Suprisingly Good

Rating: Null/10 (13 April 2004)

The Girl Next Door (2004) (***/****) Director: Luke Greenfield Starring: Emile Hirsch, Elisha Cuthbert and Timothy Olyphant
I must say that entering this movie I had the lowest expectations, which may have been the reason I found the movie so good. To begin, I feel that this movie, although seemingly stretched thin in parts, recaptures the familiar "teen movie" days of such classics as "The Breakfast Club" and "Say Anything" which embody both a dramatic and comedic end to the story. Although those movies had a more flowing comedy/drama script than this, I also feel that the director did a remarkable job, I was impressed with the filming of this movie very much, and it was quite imaginative. Some down points that I noticed were the usage of the clichéd "dream" scenes or whatever they are called, this only made certain scenes confusing because I wasn't sure as they played out whether they were a dream or not. Also, Timothy Olyphant's character seemed to change sides too frequently, and I was never quite sure whether or not he was genuine or merely tricking the main character again. I felt Emile Hirsch presented another great performance, and made his character truly believable. Also, I found the character Eli, played by Chris Marquette, to be one of the funniest I have seen in this genre of film (his ending scene was absolutely hilarious). I just feel this movies only drawback was that it seemed to jump around too often, from location to location, from comedy to drama, and from stressing Matthew's (Hirsch) relationship to Danielle (Cuthbert), to stressing the importance of his friendship to Eli (Marquette) and Klitz (Dano).
Overall, I would say it was a movie worth seeing for a funny, far out there movie which still has the ability to strike a chord in the heart.