It’s been almost 25 years since director Rob Reiner mined nostalgia to poignant and sometimes devastating effect in Stand By Me, and while he returns to the same basic time period (the late 1950s/early 1960s) for his new teen romance Flipped, he’s traded complex feelings for simplistic ones. Flipped sees everything, not just its setting, through rose-colored glasses, and the change in time periods (the 2001 novel the film is based on was set in the present) serves only to glorify a sanitized past that doesn’t really exist.

The Details

Flipped

Callan McAuliffe, Madeline Carroll, John Mahoney

Directed by Rob Reiner

Rated PG. Opens Friday.

Beyond the Weekly

Official movie site

IMDb: Flipped

Rotten Tomatoes: Flipped

That’s only part of the problem with the cloying story of the romance between neighbors Bryce (Callan McAuliffe) and Juli (Madeline Carroll), told alternately from each of their perspectives. Juli is smitten with Bryce as soon as his family moves in, but he finds her annoying until eventually, over a few years’ time, he comes around to her charms. The dual-perspective format might work great for a novel, but in a movie it means nonstop narration, and Bryce and Juli are constantly explaining their feelings, making the dialogue and action seem almost superfluous.

Reiner also stumbles with his painfully broad depiction of Juli’s mentally challenged uncle and some pat life lessons from Bryce’s grandfather (John Mahoney, doing his best). There are a few too many details that seem out of place for the time period, and the movie has a pervasive sense of self-satisfcation that just gets more and more grating. McAuliffe and Carroll are endearing, but they aren’t given any real range of emotions to play. Rather than providing insight into childhood and the past, Flipped merely panders to those who want to idealize them.