AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

intelearts ONe of the better slices of irony seen in a while that bears more than a passing resemblance to Woody Allen (If it were a girl gunning for her stepfather then you really would say it was obvious).Oscar is 15, trying to be cool and an intellectual, a fogey, and a lot of the humor comes from his pseudo-deep insights on life and Voltaire. Voltaire is no coincidence: Candide is Oscar in parts. Oscar wants the ideal - just in this case the ideal is Eva - his stepmother.A lot of this works because of the characterization and chemistry - Oscar fins himself caught in others' webs, but is somehow a good mix of mature and innocent that works well.All in all a nice effort, it never really bites and thus given the material and nature of the film fails to really skewer the comedy and ends up almost a nostalgic look at how 15 year old boys wish love could have been.Funny in parts and wistful this is a nice film about adult relationships.

maxwurr 'Tadpole' is one of those small-scale, 'intelligent' New York comedies that either works brilliantly (see Six Degrees of Separation, for example) or just comes across as smug. Unfortunately, this film falls in the latter category. It's not half as funny as it thinks it is (and no funnier or more clever for the tedious references to Voltaire and the classics) and almost all the characters are more annoying than endearing (including the old-before-his-time lead). The subject matter, too, is hardly ground-breaking and the soundtrack is repetitive and obvious. Still, it has some nice touches and the acting is mostly convincing (although I wasn't convinced by the gaggle of middle-aged women that seemed quite comfortable with vocally expressing their delight for what amounts to paedophilia - he's FOURTEEN, ladies).The 70-minute running time is unusual, but frankly if it had been any longer I'd probably have given up.

deflinus I've heard about the movie when it came out a couple of years ago. I thought the plot was intriguing because i figured there would be a lot of interesting developments and i just wanted to see how the film would come out to be. well, sadly - i didn't see the film in theaters but i did catch it on IFC for the first time. and i was impressed.i thought the story didn't really have much depth to it but the movie was really funny in some parts. i enjoyed watching John Ritter. for a movie, the story felt really thin - but it made up for it in the end i believe. And, it did interest me to keep watching it rather than just stop. overall i thought it was really funny and there were some interesting parts of the movie that i thought could of been executed better. i heard about the complaints about the quality of the film and how it was filmed in digital and that didn't phase me at all. i think it's stupid to think less of a film just because the shots in it weren't perfect. i loved the ending and it really fulfilled the time i spent watching it. like the summary, it's a very well done enjoyable simple film. i'd watch it again, definitely.

ldavis-2 Just caught this on IFC. Poster mwyarbrough thinks those who have a problem with "Tadpole" don't get it: "Because he is very intelligent, Oscar makes the classic adolescent mistake of overestimating his own maturity..." The problem with this assessment is that no adult in the real world, no matter how sophisticated (and the adults here twist themselves into pretzels to "prove" how "sophisticated" they are) would put up with this obnoxious little sh*t for 5 minutes! The only thing that rang true in this Murmur of the Heart wanna-be is Obnoxious Little Sh*t's paranoia about Step-Mama's Gal Pal. But how he tries to stop her is mean, and when she all-too happily drops the bomb, Dad (who's such a wuss, he opens his Thanksgiving toast with an apology to Native Americans) won't confront them, and Step-Mama reacts with some half-hearted "I'm shocked" retorts. As others have noted, a crime was committed, but only in the movies can a 15 year old boy be served at a bar without getting carded, bed an older woman, have other older women swoon over him, and French kiss Step-Mama, who tells him: "You're old enough to make your own decisions!" Oy! No wonder Sundance ate it up, critics compared it to Woody Allen, and Miramax picked it up for a whopping $6 million! That whirring sound you hear is Voltaire spinning in his grave!