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Title: Little Secrets (2001)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
| Evan Rachel Wood | ... | Emily Lindstrom | |
| Michael Angarano | ... | Philip | |
| David Gallagher | ... | David | |
| Vivica A. Fox | ... | Pauline | |
| Jan Broberg | ... | Caroline Lindstrom (as Jan Broberg Felt) | |
| Rick Macy | ... | Eddie | |
| Paul Kiernan | ... | Don | |
 |
Tayva Patch | ... | Elaine |
| Danielle C. Ryan | ... | Lea (as Danielle Chuchran) | |
| Caitlin E.J. Meyer | ... | Isabelle (as Caitlin Meyer) | |
|
|
Micah Schow | ... | Gregory |
|
|
Landon Kunzelman | ... | Mikey |
| RuDee Sade | ... | Laurel (as RuDee Lipscomb) | |
|
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Haley McCormick | ... | Jenny |
|
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Wayne Brennan | ... | Gump's Salesman |
Emily Lindstrom, 14, is an aspiring concert violinist; she's spending the summer practicing for a big audition while her girlfriends are at camp. She's also got a thriving neighborhood business: for 50 cents, she'll keep your secret. Her mother is very pregnant, and her parents seem more concerned about the new baby than anything Emily cares about. A new family moves in next door; their son, Philip, 12, becomes Emily's friend. Eventually, the weight of Emily's secrets - her own, the ones she's keeping professionally, and a secret Philip tells her, send her life temporarily crashing down. Written by Jon Reeves <jreeves@imdb.com>
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David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" starts with some great images: ideal suburbia - kids crossing the street, firemen waving as they go down the road on their truck, and a man watering his garden. Then the guy has a stroke and collapses. We are then treated to the best shot of the film: his dog playfully jumping around the squirting hose he continues to hold as a toddler ambles toward him. Then the camera moves down for a macro shot of the insect world in his lawn, introducing the film's theme that there is a secret and much nastier world just below the surface of "Norman Rockwell" suburbia.
In "Little Secrets", Emily runs a business which keeps all the neighborhood secrets in a safe place for a fee. It takes Lynch's dark theme and turns it into a lesson about friendship and trust. Apparently this thematic content is the reason the film was given a PG rating, although it is hard to imagine that anyone would think this film required "parental guidance".
The film features a decent performance from Evan Rachel Wood (Emily), although there is nothing here that would lead anyone to think she was capable of her breakout performance in "Thirteen". Michael Angarano (Phillip) is fantastic opposite Wood and they have a nice chemistry. David Gallagher does a good job in a small role that is unnecessarily tacked onto the story, presumably to capitalize on his "7th Heaven" popularly. Blair Treu, the film's director, should have recognized in mid-production that a better resolution would have been the pairing of Emily and Phillip rather than Emily and David. It was an easy fix, minor rewrites and re-shooting a couple scenes to make Phillip the same age as Emily, they certainly look the same age. Gallagher's drawing power did not save the production commercially (it tanked big time at the box office) so they ruined the ending for nothing.
The director of photography used a lot of great crane shots and creative camera angles but overall the the shots should have been tighter (i.e. closer shots of the faces and eyes). One exception was Caitlin E. J. Meyer (Isabelle) who the camera loves and who steals her scenes as the nine-year old younger sister of Emily's best friend. Isabelle has the movie's best line "Life is complicated when you look like Claudia Schiffer".
This is a very original premise, a well-conceived and rather profound story. It has one especially great scene when the web of secrets starts to crumble. First Emily is angry at David because he was caught drinking which was his secret, making David angry at Phillip for telling Emily his secret, which makes Phillip angry at Emily for telling David that he had told her David's secret.