All Over Me (1997)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Beautiful, moving film.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Claude (Alison Folland) and Ellen (Tara Subkoff) are best friends in New York. Claude is struggling with her sexuality. Luke is a gay musician who moves into Claude's building. Jesse (Wilson Cruz) is a local gay teen. Ellen spends time with volatile boyfriend Mark (Cole Hauser). His friend Gus (Shawn Hatosy) keeps hitting on Claude. Luke gets into an argument with Mark and then Luke is later found murdered. Claude falls for indie musician Lucy (Leisha Hailey). Mark pushes Ellen into drugs as her friendship with Claude cracks under the pressure.It's a coming-of-age drama with a bit of bite. Folland's performance is naturalistic. Hauser and Subkoff show their acting skills. The filmmaking is raw for newcomer Sichel sisters. It is amateurish at times but the story and the actors are compelling enough to maintain focus. This deals with many edgy subject matters but it keeps it within Claude's struggle for love. That makes this a more touching exercise than other tougher contemporary indies.

I have to admit the actors were grand, it's just the story around the film didn't make any sense to me. Like if you look at the movie poster, you would think the two girls Claude and Ellen are a couple but it doesn't seem to be like that at all, it's more based on Ellen going out with a gang leader and taking too many drugs in order to still be with him.Although I just couldn't understand why the girls had a one night stand? Were they real into each other or was Ellen using her just because she was her best friend? Well either way, it seems Claude had moved on and got herself a hot chick called Lucy, who she met at the nightclub. I honestly thought that was the only I liked in this movie, their relationship!The rest to be honest wasn't that great to see as none of it just lacked interest to me!

Alison Folland is a young woman in a shabby section of New York who, after a tempestuous friendship with blond, impatient Tara Subkoff, and the murder of her gay buddy Luke, comes to terms with her own lesbianism and finds a happy and accommodating partner in Lucy, a band leader in a place that looks like the Swing Rendezvous in the Village used to look.Maybe that makes it sound more complicated than it is. It's really a rather simple movie, a little pedantic, a delicate character study rather than a mystery or action movie. Roughly speaking, all the gays are good and all the straight people are messed up. That's not too hard to follow, is it? Well, there are a couple of exceptions, but not many. Don, the Italian owner of the pizza restaurant where Alison and a gay guy both work, is straight but sympathetic. He's briefly in about four scenes. But it's hard to care about Don's character one way or the other because he serves up these GREAT pizzas (we only get a glimpse but can practically smell it) that make Domino's and Pizza Hut look like impostors. Try to get a pizza like that at four in the morning in northern Scotland! The rest of the straight guys are represented by the boyfriend of Alison's mother, who, in the absence of the mother, begins dangling his insinuations in front of the girl herself, who looks about 16. The straight adolescent goons who ball Subkoff when they feel like it and throw her out when they're bored with her are little more than perambulating pustules.Folland plays a dumpy adolescent who is shy but sensitive. In fact, however, she has a splendid face with modelesque features, fey and pixie-like. Her bone structure is pretty big though and, alas, the configuration of her weight suggests a strong genetic component. There won't be much she'll be able to do about it. It shouldn't matter, but it always does.Subkoff, her inconstant adolescent friend, has a more conventional and rather skinny figure but her voice, features, and demeanor are coarser than Folland's. She looks like Buffy the Vampire Slayer if Buffy were the vampire instead of the slayer. She has probably the most demanding role in the film and brings it off marvelously, a complex character very nicely rendered.The photography and location shooting are just fine. And the movie does middle-class urban dwellers a big favor. You know those young chicks you see on the streets? The ones with violently pink hair done up in a fashion resembling a tangled mop? The ones with maybe a jail-house tat around their biceps? With their clothes half drooping off and that silver ring dangling from their pipiks? Well, only some of them are dangerous stoners. Many of them are just playing with their appearance, as adolescents are want to do in all cultures, and they may be a little thoughtless but fundamentally decent people. I'd watch out for the guys though, especially if they're straight. They have a slight tendency to murder people they find offensive. At least that's what the film suggests.

A story about two friends who grow apart as they grow up, this is an accurate portrayal of a part of life we can all relate to. We are all constantly faced with change, and here Claude and Ellen are dealing with just that. I believe it is true, that sometimes you just get stuck in the wrong crowd. Ellen turned down the wrong lane when she continued to see her drug user/loser/violent boyfriend, Mark. It is only too sad that she did not see the concern coming from her dear friend Claude, as well as all the other RED flags along the way that she is SCREWING UP! Alison Folland (Claude) did an excellent work of communicating her confusion and pain over her selfish (& stupid) friend, Ellen, and other losses she faces. Claude has to deal with the fact that she is in love with Ellen, even though she is not fully reciprocating...so this complicates matters even more for her - having to identify her sexuality and learn to deal with it. This is a great story of change - not predictible - you feel sad for Ellen, but glad that Claude finds in herself the strength to move on from her dependence on her friend and love, who only became a stranger. Anything like that ever happen to you? You'll like this.