Any similarity between Curly Sue and Shirley Temple is practically intentional.
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This is a mood movie. Not the movie's mood. Your mood while you're watching it. If you've got the itch for a syrupy, sentimental, blatantly manipulative film experience, then "Curly Sue" is just your ticket. And who isn't ready for something gushy once in a while? As much as I resisted through the whole first ninety minutes of this picture, I felt a minor throb in my heart at the end and a smile crossed my face. It's exactly the payoff I expected, yet it affected me anyway.
Enough to make me want to watch the film again? Not on your life. "Curly Sue," filmmaker John Hughes's 1991 take on Peter Bogdanovich's "Paper Moon" fairy tale, is much too maudlin and predictable for that. Once is enough, thank you. But taken in the right spirit, that once may be just what you need.
The movie's got all the ingredients of an old-fashioned, emotional romp: a darling, sweet-faced, nine-year-old girl (Alisan Porter) with a mop of curly hair for which she was not named (she got her nickname from one of the Three Stooges); a happy-go-lucky, single father-figure, Bill Dancer (Jim Belushi), who loves her more than life itself (I kept picturing Bill Murray here); a coolly detached female lawyer, Grey Ellison (Kelly Lynch), whose icy exterior belies a tender heart; and a villainous boyfriend, Walker McCormick (John Getz), who is easy to hiss from the opening bell.
Unfortunately, these stereotypes don't hold up well under much scrutiny, and the first half hour of the story is slow enough to force the viewer to do a lot of scrutinizing. It seems to take forever for us to get acquainted with the odd couple of Belushi and Porter as a pair of homeless scam artists traveling from city to city conning people out of food and shelter. When you think about it, it's pretty shameless, really. He's shown later in the film to be an accomplished piano player, but he reluctantly takes sporadic work as a common laborer. The child has had no education and cannot read or write. Belushi is seen in the beginning asking Porter to hit him across the head with a stick and then literally throwing himself against Lynch's car, pretending to be hurt in order to gain her pity and maybe a free meal or two. It's hard to sympathize with that kind of parenting.
So, what does Lynch's character do? She falls for the little girl instantly, of course, even though she has made it clear in the opening scene that she is hard as nails and has no room in her life for anybody, which presumably is why she's been going out with the same guy for four years and never settled down with him. Anyway, after a second encounter with Belushi and Porter, she takes them home with her (what are the odds?), and the rest of the story proceeds exactly as formula demands despite the absurdity of the situation. Conflicts with the jealous boyfriend, conflicts with the authorities over custody of the child, conflicts with interrelationships, conflicts with being a lawyer or being a laborer or whatever.
I always like seeing Fred Thompson in a picture, though. He's the guy who looked so much like a politician that he not only played them in the movies, he became one in 1994, getting elected Senator from Tennessee. Here, he plays Lynch's senior partner, not much of a role but a convincing one as he acts as a firm but benign paternal influence on Lynch.
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[release]10995[/release]