Girl, Interrupted A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - R It's 2:07 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

It's the 60's life is weird, and Susanne needs a break. Sure, she's got her troubles, and nobody understands her, and eventually she ends up in the loony bin, alright, I'll be politically correct and call it a mental hospital, after she tries to kill herself, or maybe just get rid of a bad headache. While there we are introduced to an interesting cast of characters with a variety of disorders, with the leader of the pack being Lisa (Jolie), a regular in the mental hospital, always getting caught after she escapes, and always the enforcer whom the women fear yet can't live without. Susanne, while there, writes a journal which becomes the basis for the movie based on a book, or something like that, and we get a nice look at the craziness in the crazy ward. It's not funny, it's not sad, it's just a picture of life we try to ignore but know is around us.

So I haven't said what I thought was wrong with the movie. I guess the basic problem I had was that it didn't know which direction it really wanted to take - comedy or drama, and in both it had shoes to fill because once you say a movie revolving around life in a mental institution the easy comparison become "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." You expect a comical and twisted look at life in the crazy house. But "Girl, Interrupted" isn't this, though at times it seems it tries to be, and that's where it probably goes wrong. It's a tough line to straddle the humor and drama in a mental institution, and if your story isn't supposed to do this don't even try, and I think "Girl, Interrupted" shouldn't have tried. As a drama it had a great story - a girl, still a girl, interrupted being a girl by trying to be forced to be a woman. She wasn't ready for that and the world was trying to force her to be that, but sometimes a girl is just a girl, and that's all she wants to be. (How's that for a deep thought into the movie. I might be wrong, but that's where I say it was trying to go. Anyway…). But, in relating that story it tried to hit the "funny from the outside" view of a mental hospital and it sometimes worked, just not most of the time, and that's where I lost interest.

Alright, I'm rambling. Angelina was fantastic as Lisa. Wynona was great as Suzanne. And even the supporting characters played their roles to the believable. I just didn't know where to go with the story, either the funny or the sad, and maybe because of that I became bored. God, I'm so fickle, but because of that I can't rate the movie high because most of the time it dragged. It tried to teeter between a comical look and a dramatic look and it just didn't work. So, sadly, with that, I'm giving "Girl, Interrupted" one star for Angelina Jolie, one star for Winona Ryder, and a half star for the supporting cast. The end problem was the relating of the story. 2 ½ stars out of 5, and that's my final rating.

That's it for this one! I'm The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!