showtrmp
I confess I did not make it through this film. The Truman Capote short story is a perfect little blend of cruel satire and genuine nostalgia; this movie only gets the "nostalgia" part, and does it in ways we've all seen before. Everything is shot in deep, super-saturated color and you can predict everyone's lines a couple of seconds before they emerge from the actors' mouths. After a very few minutes, I realized that the adapter/director Mark Medoff intended to convert all that was good in the story into "inspirational" treacle for the family-film trade (complete with one of the most maudlin movie scores ever) and I skipped to the end to see if, at any rate, the movie would have the courage to honor the short story's pitiless conclusion (without which it has no point at all). Of course, it didn't. Lily-Jane's final "wistful" closeup (as the bus doors shut on her face) might kindly be called nauseating.
Steven Plane
If you love Capote, and if you love his whimsical, dark, comic short story "Children on Their Birthdays", DO NOT WATCH this unfaithful and insulting adaptation. The writers and producers have turned Mr. C's insightful piece on the role of the artist in society into melodramatic slop touching on a wishy-washy childhood crush and a stale, lukewarm statement on prejudice and race. Gone are the biting satire, insight, clever language, and punch-in-the-gut beginning and ending sentences of the original piece replaced by a made-for-TV generic script and story that bare little if any resemblance to the source material.Capote when he died asked to be cremated, half his ashes interned on the west coast and half on the east so that he could be throughout eternity be bi-coastal. Though he can't roll in his grave, his ashes are surely undulating in their urns in California and New York after this disgrace bearing the name of one his most wonderful and cherished short stories.
ihouri0000
This movie was shallow and cotton-candy like. I agree with the reviewer who wrote a review in another website who said that he has a "fantasy that every copy of this movie will magically disappear." I have that same wish. Many other films are more worthwhile to see than this film, which was focused on an extremely pompous and obnoxiously showy teenage girl.This nuisance(the actress who played Lily Jane Bobbit) did a lousy job in this movie, she did such a terrible job faking a southern accent. The movie was overall corny but she was even worse. She tried to cover up her lack of acting talent in this movie with pretentiousness and a pompous display. This girl is very pretentious and shallow and conceited! I think all she wants to do on-screen is show-off. Save room on TV and film for real, genuine people talented in acting please!(instead of her)
rybonucleic
`Children on their Birthdays' is not meant to tax your cranium or exercise your sense of adventure; rather, to take you on a gentle stroll through the (not quite) coming of age of four thirteen-year-olds in 1940's Alabama. Joe Pichler and Jesse Plemmons demonstrate some real versatility in portraying the two young friends/rivals and Tania Raymonde delivers a dose of the same smarts and mystery she's done on TV in "Malcolm in the Middle". You can take your young kids to this one. It supplies plenty of tenderness and a little slapstick as the kids and the town get mixed around with romance, snake oil, some amazingly hardy roses and a really fine old red tow truck.
AD
