Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 21, 1995 TAG: 9510220004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
See ``How to Make an American Quilt.''
``Now and Then'' will just make you nostalgic for the $5.75 you spent to see it.
It might also leave you with the vague sense of having been misled into thinking it starred Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Rita Wilson and Rosie O'Donnell. In fact, if you combined all of their lines, you could fit them into one of those long-winded Hallmark greeting cards.
Actually, that wouldn't be a bad place for them.
This movie, by first-time director Lesli Linka Glatter, is terribly sweet. It's about four little girls, born in about 1960, who grew up in a small town in Indiana where ``nothing ever happens.''
There's Roberta (Christina Ricci) the tomboy, Teeny (Thora Birch) the starlet wannabe, Chrissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore) the drag, and Samantha (Gaby Hoffmann) the bookworm. They all behave very much in character as they raise money for a treehouse, suffer through a divorce in the family, hold seances in the cemetery and experience a first kiss.
The occasion for this reminiscence is a meeting of the grown-up girls - Wilson, Moore, Griffith and O'Connell - at grown-up Chrissy's home, where she is awaiting the birth of her first child.
That leaves only the birth as a possible ending - and it is, complete with hysterical trip to the hospital, heavy breathing and profanity-laced delivery.
It's a fitting ending for a predictable movie that is apparently based on the mistaken premise that all childhoods have a lot in common. There may be some commonalities, but it's the differences that make them - and us - interesting.
Now and Then *
A New Line Cinema release showing at Salem Valley 8, 102 minutes. Rated PG-13 for bad language.
by CNB