Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008) and Beaches (1988).

Georgia is a 14 year old schoolgirl that hasn’t done it-yet. She’s never kissed a boy or had a boyfriend. It’s all very trying. She has a mum that doesn’t understand her and a dad that’s going to New Zealand to work and possibly forever, which means she might be able to talk her mum around, and into having a fabulous birthday bash. Angus the cat has a cameo role, usually doing cute things with Georgia’s little sister. The Thong belongs to her big love rival in ‘the Robbie situation’. That’s the boy she wants to snog, the boy she wants to be with, forever. One of her best friends, Jas, is dating the other brother, and she’s already done it, in fact is always going at it, mouth to mouth, like a washing machine; snog that is. It’s a very prettily painted Jane Austenish world were nothing bad really happens and nothing goes unpunished or unnoticed. Predictably her mum’s flirting with the interior decorator is turned around when he’s shown to be gay. Similarly, when Georgia gets her man and Robbie eventually kisses her in the swimming pool, it’s nice. From my experience of not kissing a girl at 15, that is semi naked, would, however, mean I’d poke her eye out with my penis and would never have been able to leave the pool. I’d still be there now, 30 years later.

Beaches(1988)
I’ve seen this before. Of course I have. I must have been about, ahem, 15. Like Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging it’s based on a novel. But I’d imagine this one to be a weighty tome. It’s a story of opposites. Bette Midler plays herself as CC Bloom and she is wonderful, but little Bette Midler, the kid that plays a young CC Bloom (aka Bette Midler) steals the show. This is 1988, before Dolly the sheep was cloned and I don’t know how they did it. Her opposite number Hilary Whitney Essex is everything CC is not. She is upper class blue blood and all they had to do was pour Barbara Heshey into a dress and put her beside brash red haired Bette to show this. Hilary/Barbara looks good enough to eat. Bette is something you’d spit out on the sidewalk. But hey, this is Hollywood. They both fall for the same man. Talent trumps beauty. Wind beneath my Wings means, of course, one of them is going to die. But you can never kill off a Bette. Heshey takes the fall like a clotheshorse and leaves her precious blue blood daughter to the cranky but caring friend. Wind beneath my Wings kills everybody off in the end.