LITTLE MANHATTAN
Staring Josh Hutcherson, Cynthia Nixon, Charlie Ray
Director Mark Levin
Production house Twentieth Century Fox
Released date August 7, 2005 USA
Duration 90 minutes
Rating PG-13
PG-13 rated movie about a boy first love and its complication. First love is the sweetest and most tormenting moment in normal teenagers life. They say, first love won’t fade away, even there are many couples that ended up marrying their first love after spending some love adventure. They say it was unforgettable happiness and pain altogether. It was a fragile love, immature and won’t last long yet it offers so much wonder and thrill for most teenagers.
Gabriel ‘Gabe’ was just a normal ten years old boy who lives on Brooklyn. He loved to drive his scooter around his ‘territory’. And like any other boy in his age, he hates girl. Her father was a sport counselor and used to spend his spare time practicing football with his son. Gabe’s parents were in the middle of divorce and according to rule, they had to stay in the same roof until the process completed.
One day, Gabe decided to take karate lesson. There he met with Rosemary Telesco. An eleven years girl that used to be go to the same kindergarten with him.
But, somehow during the practice, he noticed Rosemary as a girl and attracted to her. Suddenly, his world wasn’t about himself, Rosemary was. He experienced what he thought of love. Gabe felt happiness that seemed alien to him.
And like a dimwitted boy with their crush, he spent much time riding around Rosemary apartment and spent more time with his karate lesson, so he could be around her, and he even managed to come to her room. He dressed neatly and even started to like everything that Rosemary did.
And then the pain comes.
It started when Rosemary got her yellow belt and assigned with a new sparring partner. One day, she informed him that she would spend 3 weeks in a summer camp and then off to private school. Before that, she had to attend his mother’s sister wedding as a bridesmaid.
He got jealous. He accused her to be selfish and cold, though he kept it to himself. And to top of that, he tried his yellow belt test that drove him straight to the hospital with a fractured bone. In the end, he made a phone call and released his jealously. And in the end, after hated each other, he said his ‘goodbye’.
Broken up, he cried. He hated her for intruding his peaceful mind. His parents tried to help their son, but realized that they also went through the same thing, broke up. Gabe promised that he wouldn’t spare any room for other woman in her heart.
The next day, Gabe and his father went out and asked why love had to come to end. His father then told Gabe a story about he and his mother. They used to love each other. As the time went, a lot of things happened. Little things that left unsaid. So much of it and it started to piled up, like a stack of who-knows-what in the storage room. And as days went on, there was nothing to be said at all.
After a little comment from Gabe, both of them then realized something that they seek. Gabe for one thing, wanted to say a proper goodbye to Rosemary. He went to the wedding party where Rosemary attended as a bridesmaid. There he expressed his love, and got rejected since Rosemary wasn’t ready for that kind of thing, and confessed that he lied when he said that he hated her. They settled their feelings and then danced together. Gabe knew that love is something that had to be spoken instead of hidden. He also realized that love had to end someday, someway, and if that would happen he had to let it go. For Gabe father, he went to solve his problem with his wife and fix his family. The story end with Gabe monologue that stated he would always remember his first love and no one would be able to replace it because it was Rosemary’s.
The basic idea of this story is first love and how a young boy discovers and exploring that feeling? And what he learn after experiencing it, in hard and cruel way?
Gabe, like most of teenagers, was absolutely thrilled by his first love. But, while he was enjoying that precious moment, he had to live with his broken family. Everything always comes to an end, love included. Experiencing the happy beginning and painful end of love is not easy, especially for a first lover.
Imagine about someone build a house. They try to discover how the best way to create a single floor house. Then, they see something, a two stories house. Before they finished the first floor, intrigued by others house, they start to install second floor. That is first love. In the middle of collecting your identity, you cross path with attraction for opposite sex. Naturally, human instinct of curious would force us to explore it. Sometimes, it would drive us to the point of forgetting ourselves, puberty be damned.
All of sudden, our world would be centered on our object of attraction. Foundation be damned, what matter most is the second floor.
And of course, without proper foot, everything would crumble. Including first love. But, being broken and then ripped from our subject of love for the first time and while we are fragile, would enough to wish we could die.
Most teenagers, and human, choose to lock this pain deep in their heart. It’s the nature of human to push away the pain, blocking them from our consciousness. When we deal a trouble the easiest way to finish it is runaway. However, it’s not healthy, suicidal almost. Trouble always come and will always come again. If we choose to lock that up or run away without settle them, eventually we would crack.
And with love, when it breaks, there’s only one-way to settle it. That is gather enough courage to say a proper goodbye, not good bye as in ‘this is it, I don’t want to see you again’ but as in ‘let’s be friend, what we had was important but we won’t love each other the same ways as before, but what about love as friend.’
First love is about courage. Courage to acknowledge it and show it and realize it that it had to be over, to come open without secret between each other and understanding each other. Love is about going through it with all of the pains that stands in our way and hopefully reach the happy end, even if that end is not ‘Romeo Juliet everlasting love’.
Life goes on. Every second in our life is worth of memories full of event. Each moment deserve every bit of our attention. But each second ticked, we have to let go the moment and move on. Everything would end, but sometimes, we need an end to start a new moment. They might not all a happy memories that left, but that memory is our life.
Most of the actors and the actresses don’t have quite name. But they play quite well, especially performing the innocence of teenagers. And with the help of narration that filled half of the play, we could easily ‘feel’ how the protagonist went through. The timeline was clear enough, the director easily creates 2 and a half week time into a good and smooth plot. The set for Brooklyn is nice, not too much crowd control.
About the scene, there are some kissing scenes, but not too gross, since it was a realistic first love story. Rest assured, there are no sexual or violence scene, at least not physically for the later, mentally, well suit yourself about that love review above. Oh, I almost forgot, if you’re not fond of some gross stuffs, there’s scene that shows you vomit.
While the story is indeed sweet, it’s not too unrealistic sweet. You could see clearly that love could bring pain and it indeed is showed in the film. Although it rated for PG-13, I’m not recommending this one for a Disney’s happily ever after love story fan, including some low intelligent and insensitive people. I highly recommend this for some growing up teenagers and want to learn first love the hard way. But my word will be EIGHT out of ten.
Love is an ugly, terrible business practiced by fools
It will trample your heart and leave you bleeding in the floor
And what does it really get you in the end?
Nothing but a few incredible memories that you can’t ever shakes
The truth is, there’s gonna be other girls out there
But I’m never gonna get another first love
That’s one always gonna be her
PS: Not once in my life, puberty included, I never cross with this trivial thing. My position is relatively close to the protagonist of this story, except that I never met someone who could attract me and change my world, and definitely I didn’t have the same ending with him. I read a lot of novels, most of them always have romance theme, and I do studying the word ‘love’ based on some literature. And I’ve gone to extensive manner to find the true meaning of love, only to find a dead end. There’s no way to describe love, so instead, I made a hypothesis by combining all the meaning together. And after comparing my hypothesis and my life so far, well, I’m very sure as hell that I never experience love. Well, not in person, at least. For a bad addicted bookworm, when you’re read a book, you would feel whatever stories inside it as if that was reality. Maybe I was late in my maturing or any other reasons I don’t know yet, whatever.
PSS: This movie was really good, I got carried for a while when I was watching it. For you who want to watch it, it owned by GlobalTV and the last time I watched it on Holiday week, I forgot the date but I’m pretty sure it was pre-semester holiday between 2009 - 2010 school year.
PSSS: This one really eats me out. 3 pages long for a PG-13 movie, God.
