SnoopyStyle Franny Philips (Trini Alvarado) is a 12 year old from a well-off Upper East Side home. She's struggling to grow up with suspicions of her parents splitting up. She keeps track of her father Paul (John Lithgow) sneaking into the house in early mornings to pretend to sleep at home. Her parents are constantly fighting. New kid Jamie Harris (Jeremy Levy) is her best friend. His parents are divorced and he teaches her the ways of the broken home. His mother is new-agey while his father has a fast car and a trophy girlfriend.The normalization of divorce is still new at this point. Trini is amazing. It doesn't need so much of her parents when she's not in the scene. It's her story after all. The boy is good although he could be sweeter. The puppy love is cute. It's a good small movie of a certain time.

huh_oh_i_c Okay, so the title is ... wrong. It's not about rich kids at all, this movie is about kids dealing with their parents' divorce. And, a little with budding love, age 12.Franny is a 12 year old girl, an only child from an upper middle class, two-income family in New York City, who knows that her parents' marriage is about to fall apart. She's guided by a classmate whose parents already are divorced 3 years earlier, he's new kid at her school. She's mildly precocious, she reads "The Joy of Sex", the illustrated edition, no less, but she's also a topographical nitwit.The two best things about this film are Trini Alvarado's acting and the scenes of New York which depict a dreamy era. It wasn't so innocent a time, Iran hostage crisis, Reaganomics, and a time when police brutality against minorities was worse than now, but we didn't know about it then. But still. This offers a peek into a somewhat magical New York where 12 year olds demand to walk to school alone, because they're well...12 and not babies, where a class of 25-30 pupils goes to do PE with just ONE teacher in Central Park and where kids walk their dogs solo. (To be sure, this is the 'good' part of town, and 2016 crime is actually half now of what it was in the 80s New York City. Of course this is not what it FEELS like these days. There's the socio-economic paradox of 'the less crime there actually is, the unsafer 'people' - read: whites - .... FEEL'........I digress.)The movie is dated in the displayed attitudes towards women, Jamies mother doesn't care if her 12 year old SON "screws the brains out" of a 12 year old girl (!), which points to severe unbalance: boys can do what they want, but girls are floozies. Also, there's like 5 gratitutous (and unflattering) shots of Alvarado's butt. That seems a bit unfriendly. The dated attitude towards gays which we see in the vehement denial of Franny that her father might be gay. Nowadays it would come with an obligatory addition of "It would be okay if he was, of course". Not so much in 1979.8 oth 10, The Melancholic Alcoholic.

Sebastian (sts-26) Rich Kids is a wonderful movie, in so many ways. It depicts a time (the late 70's), a class, New York City, and divorce (which was then becoming a social phenomena) perfectly. However, the main reason to watch this film may very well be to see the then adolescent Trini Alvarado at her best.The Cast is full of great actors, including John Lithgow and Canada's own Roberta Maxwell, but the standout is Alvarado. Her guileless and tender performance is so brilliant that one is almost hypnotized. Alvarado plays Franny as your typical adolescent girl - curious, too smart for her own good, a little daring - but lets her own qualities poke through, and makes her Franny seem somewhat frail, potentially tragic.There is always a sense that Franny will crumble under the weight of bad news (like the announcement of her parents divorce), and in some scenes this sense fills the room. The other actors are electrified by this, and give wonderful performances. The scene in the Chinese restaurant - when Franny's parents finally break the news - is heart-breaking...and a little funny.This is one of two Alvarado movies that are absolute Must See's. The other is Times Square, in which Alvarado once again plays a variation of the seemingly-emotionally-frail poor little rich girl. Once one sees both these movies, one realizes what a rare quality Alvarado had at the time. The only actress to compare is a young Sarah Jessica Parker, but by the time Parker was an adolescent she was too much of a board-trodding, song-belting, Broadway-trouper type to be able to let go and open herself up the way Alvarado could.Watch Rich Kids with this in mind: you are watching a brilliant, unencumbered, child actor at work. Pure acting from an adult is rare enough, but from a child actor, it is priceless.

Havan_IronOak They know their IQ's are near genius. They know that the capital of Kansas is Wichita. They know where Mom hides `The Joy of Sex'. But they don't know why their parents have all split up.This modern look at adolescence rings sad but true. The `Rich Kids' of the title are smart in all of the commonly accepted ways and they are smart enough to realize that there is more to love than what they can see in their parent's sad relationships. In many ways it's the kids in this film that are acting like adults. Perhaps that's the point. Perhaps the `Rich Kids' of the title are not the two adolescents at all, but the adults that are complicating their lives.