thekarmicnomad A high-school girl - intent on attending a Halloween party hosted by the most popular boy in school- is forced to baby sit her adoringly troublesome younger brother whilst her mother undergoes a midlife crisis. An adventure ensues.This is a pretty disposable, teen flick with nothing particularly new - a kind of "Superbad - lite". But I think it has a lot going for it.The actors and characters are great and there is quite a lot going on under the bonnet. There are the normal teen themes of individualism, friendship and peer pressure. But there is also threads regarding loss and acceptance. It even looks at the mother who now finds her life at a loose end.But of course this movie is mostly about fun! It has its fair share of losers and jocks and cute little kids blowing things up with cherry bombs. etc. etc.This is hardly "Apocalypse Now" but for a afternoon NetFlix movie you could do an awful lot worse.

jfgibson73 This movie had such a strange tone to it. It resembles a teen comedy, but from the marketing, it's easy to mistake it as a family film. It somehow ends up being very chaste while pushing the limits of the PG-13 rating. The way the scenes play out have a very odd timing and delivery; I think that on paper, it would read as a pretty clever script, but often feels clunky and amateurish in execution. So the result was that there were a lot of times I was ready to laugh, but as a scene unfolded, ended up more confused by the unusual choices. The Nickelodeon brand adds to that confusion, being that parents expect to trust it for family entertainment. I think a strong director with a good sense of who the audience was for this movie could have made a little bit better film.

fedezucchi-rs This movie is hard to describes. There are sad and romantic moments put at the end of it and comic moments for the rest of the movie. The kind of comedy used in this movie is particular because we can find ''American Pie's sense of humor'' (as the chicken behind the car in the fast food scene) or humorists expression and actions made by little spider man (that are my favorites).In my opinion the movie had to cut of the sad part that is interesting itself but that loses its meaning in a fun movie. The fact that there are these 3 topics all together makes this movie ordinary as any other American movie of this kind. The character of the mother is really interesting! Those minutes in which she says more or less everything about her life during the Halloween party, when she sits in the living room, is so emotional because we can see how the revolutionary mum who goes to party and stuff...changes completely, and we see the reason of that attitude and is my opinion it was a really good moment to develop in a great way!

Steve Pulaski Nickelodeon Movies made a gamble with Fun Size which, while it wasn't as successful as I'm sure they wanted it to be, has nonetheless made the company seem like more risk-takers than, I believe, the public thought they were. Despite baring the name of a popular kids' TV channel, most of their projects have been uphill marketing battles attempting to acquaint the public with different plots and new characters that weren't introduced on their networks. There have been a number of films banking off their own characters, but Nickelodeon Movies doesn't play it safe when it comes to making family comedies or dramas. They stray from the nest and that's an honorable thing.However, one must expect when a company does what Nickelodeon Movies is doing, the result is all over the place. Fun Size, their second PG-13 film, attempting to usher in a more tween/teen fanbase (I suppose), is the company's latest film. It merges the likes of John Hughes-style teen comedies and Adventures in Babysitting schtick to create a relatively harmless (at least by the company's program-standards) but ultimately forgettable endeavor in the formula of misunderstandings and chaotic mishaps. This is, yes, another entry in the tired genre I call, "maximum antics, minimum laughter," a film that has so many different setups and quirky events that it forgets to make them funny and entertaining.Our story concerns unpopular high school teen Wren DeSantis (Victoria Justice - take one look at her and you know that in no American high school would she be unpopular), who lives with her irresponsible mother (Chelsea Handler) and her psychotic deviant of a brother named Albert (Jackson Nicoll) in a classic suburbia setting. It's Halloween, which is, of course, the holiday Wren's town goes crazy trying to celebrate, and her and her friend April (Jane Levy) are invited to Aaron Riley's (Thomas McDonell) Halloween party where he might, just might, sing a song in Wren's honor. She is lovestruck.Yet, the same night, Wren's mother is going out with her much younger boyfriend and leaves Wren in charge of Albert. Her and Wren reluctantly take Albert trick-or-treating, but not long after, he goes missing in the huge town of Cleveland, Ohio and this leaves the two friends confused and without a clue. That sweet-talk the hell out of their nerdy classmates Roosevelt (Thomas Mann) and Peng (Osric Chau) to give them a ride to help them look all over town to find the little tike and, as you imagine, trouble of unprecedented caliber ensues.Victoria Justice, who is gifted here as a conflicted teenager, has unfortunately been placed in the center of the mediocre teen-sitcom Victorious, which airs daily on Nickelodeon. The show is one of the many programs targeted towards kids that features smiley teen faces reciting poorly written lines that are foreign to the way high-schoolers truly behave. They treat emotional resonance as the lowest form of sympathy, human interest as an unheard-of concept, and humor as a non-existent device. One thing Fun Size capitalizes off of is cursing, which for a Nickelodeon-billed movie, is quite an accomplishment. It's definitely significant, and provides the film with a bit more realism with the way teenagers talk and communicate than shows like Victorious or movies like Prom willfully neglect. I'm not saying in order for a teen film to be realistic and be successful is to welcome cursing (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a wonderfully poetic and immensely successful film concerning the lives of three outcasts, worked well without swearing more than a few times), but when you see teenagers calling each other "nubs," "geeks," or use phrases like "nerd juice," do you see reality or an augmented version of it? While Justice's capabilities as an actress stand out, most of the film is on autopilot and most of the characters are remarkably unremarkable. Albert, who utters only two words in the entire runtime of the film for reasons never explained, is a brat; not a character to sympathize with at all, but one to unsympathetically put in an institution. His misbehaving acts, incredibly hyperactive attitude, and schematic tendencies do not show us likability in any way, shape, or form. Wren's friend April, another self-indulgent character, only upset about the fact that she is missing the party being thrown by the hottest kid in school, is not even remotely likable, either, and Roosevelt and Peng are simply love-interests and helpful nerds that come in the nick of time.This is director Josh Schwartz's first motion picture after quite a resume of primetime cable programs, none of which I've seen. There's a competence to his work, but it isn't significant enough to distinguish from the other films of similar style we've been bombarded with over the years. Writer Max Werner pleasantly evokes realism through dialog, yet relationships are shortchanged in the long run for continuous idiocy. The other big issue I can find with Fun Size is that it's demographically confused. It's a tad too adult for kids under ten and eleven, and those over fourteen are a little "too old" for this kind of material. Much like Prom, there's a strange lack of a demographic here, that always seems to young or too old.Fun Size, also, features one of the most immature, juvenile, and off-putting movie endings in quite sometime, which shows the darkside of Albert, as if his personality already wasn't dark enough. In the long run, like a "fun size" candy-bar, it's sweet, easy to swallow, but not memorable after, say, half an hour. It provides spry, quick-witted closure for those brave enough to seek it. There's not too much wrong with that.Starring: Victoria Justice, Jane Levy, Thomas Mann, Osric Chau, Thomas McDonell, and Chelsea Handler. Directed by: Josh Schwartz.