I only wish this film had more conviction about its sharper insights. There was no “edgy” humor (Booyah! Talk to the hand!), no product placements, it wasn’t hyperactive, no fart/poop jokes (the lowest denominator), the soundtrack wasn’t packed with ready-to-buy awful singles, gross-out jokes were spare, small roles were filled with real actors and not C-list has-beens bringing out their moldly old schtick. ![]() It was smart, plenty funny, even intelligently so, and had actual insights. I couldn’t tell you if this is anything like the popular book series it’s adapted from, but I liked a lot of this film. In the end, in front of everybody, Greg gets to redeem himself with a single act of selflessness. Payback involves a piece of cheese that has been rotting on the ground since time immemorial. In the end, some bullies Greg and Rowley encountered over Halloween return. He joins the school play, which goes badly (though he does have an excellent singing voice). Now, Greg is motivated solely out of pettiness. When he finally confesses, Rowley, wounded, lays it out. And Rowley wins the gig! Amid this growing success, Greg allows Rowley to be wrongfully indicted for something that happened on safety patrol. When an opportunity opens up for a cartoonist at the school paper, Greg hurtfully insults Rowley’s idea. ![]() More so, he’s bitter that suddenly girls and everyone else have discovered Rowley and like him for who he is: funny, nice, innocent, sincere. Over winter, Greg accidentally breaks Rowley’s hand and is fairly unapologetic. Like everyone who asserts that everyone else is a moron (baristas, for example), Greg is inherently uncool and he’s discovering it! But at some point, marvelously, it becomes clear that this is exactly what the film is about! Greg is supposed to be this little jerk, whose motivations are disgusting and who increasingly becomes contemptable. This all felt like I was watching just another kids film where our cool hero is just a self-entitled jerk who hangs out with a sideshow of comic relief. After Rowley is forced change his image and wardrobe to meet Greg’s sense of acceptable, the two friends join safety patrol. This fails when Rowley decided to match him. Greg next tries to be popular by simply dressing with style. “I can’t wrestle a girl,” he says, but she envokes Title-IX and ably defeats him. He tries wrestling, and is paired against fierce Patty (Laine MacNeil), who hates Greg. Greg hopes to achieve easy popularity and success without doing any real work, because he’s so inherently great, by joining a club. Shirts hunt the skins in a cruel (but funny) game called “Gladiator.” Escaping this, Greg and Rowley meet seventh grader Angie (Chloe “Hit Girl” Moretz), school reporter. ![]() In gym, kids are divided into attractive (shirts) and less-so (skins), for instance. Greg labels his peers as morons or idiots, and holds the social strata in equal regard. ![]() Adorable weirdo Fregley (Grayson Russell, the new Todd Bosley) ranks below the bottom at 201. He ranks his sweetly naive friend Rowley (Robert Capron) in the pitiful 170s. Despite the advice of his tormenting older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick) to lay low and never do or say anything, Greg already imagines he ranks at a high 19 in popularity out of all the students. He is determined to be a “class favorite” in the yearbook. Greg (Zachary Gordon) is stoked to be starting sixth grade, middle school, leaving behind childhood and entering into the more mature, more socially complex world of adolescence. Greg must deal with the world of middle school, and things don’t turn out like he expected.
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