Movie Review: Angus, Thongs, & Perfect Snogging

Categories: Foreign, Movies | one response

Layout 1 (Page 1) I have a ton of movies. More than I will probably ever watch. So, every now & then I will watch something that is just a bit out of the ordinary for me or it might be something old that everyone has seen many times & I just didn’t get around to watching it. This one falls into the former category. This is a British teen film that carries the the Nickelodeon logo right from the start. From the beginning, I had an initial impression on what this one was going to be about just from the brief synopsis I read. Turned out I was spot on.

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging was directed by Gurinder Chadha & released in the UK on July 25th, 2008. I don’t believe it has received a domestic release here in the US. It stars Georgia Groom, Eleanor Tomlinson, & Aaron Johnson. Basically it is about a 14-year old girl & her troubles growing up. Her parents don’t understand her. She is boy crazy, yet the boys are not crazy about her & she feels her nose is too big. Even though this is a British film, it still follows the predictable run of other films of this type. Girl wants to be more than she is. Girl does the wrong things to get there only to realize that a) she is just fine the way she is & b) she has messed everything up trying to be something else. Of course everyone gets their happy ending & the bad girl in the film gets what’s coming to her. Basically a British version of the Babysitter’s Club kind of films that the US churns out every so often. What made this film cute for me was seeing this type of film done completely British. It was the same as here in the US & yet different at the same time. You can see the cultural differences right off the top. I can think of many parents who would be horrified if their 14-year old daughter was referring to a boy she liked as her ’sex god’. Being that this film was made for the English teen set, it just shows how vast the differences are between Europe & the US in regards to sex. In the end, I found it an interesting film mainly due to the cultural differences. Even as a fairly liberal parent, I doubt I would let my girls watch it until they were too old to enjoy films like this. I think it may require a level of maturity that we as a country don’t nourish in our tweens/teens & I can with all certainty say my girls don’t have.