All the Real Girls

All the Real Girls
DVD cover
Directed by	David Gordon Green
Screenplay by	David Gordon Green
Story by	David Gordon Green Paul Schneider
Produced by	Jean Doumanian Lisa Muskat
Starring	Patricia Clarkson Zooey Deschanel Paul Schneider
Cinematography	Tim Orr
Edited by	Zene Baker Steven Gonzales
Music by	Michael Linnen David Wingo
Distributed by	Sony Pictures Classics
Release dates	January 19, 2003 (2003-01-19) (Sundance) February 14, 2003 (2003-02-14) (United States, limited)
Running time	108 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$2.5 million
Box office	$548,712

All the Real Girls is a 2003 American romantic drama film written and directed by David Gordon Green and starring Paul Schneider, Zooey Deschanel, Shea Whigham and Patricia Clarkson. It is about the romance between a young, small-town womanizer and his best friend’s sexually inexperienced younger sister. The film was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2003. While the film fared poorly at the box office, it was generally well received by critics and was nominated for several awards when it was shown at film festivals.

Plot

Paul is a young womanizer living in a small Southern town, where he earns a living fixing cars for his uncle. Paul still lives with his mother, Elvira, who works as a clown cheering up children at the local hospital. He spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend and self-proclaimed partner-in-crime, Tip, and their friends Bo and Bust-Ass. Among his friends, Paul has a reputation as a ladies' man, but he is not at all known for being involved with long-term relationships; most of Paul's romances last only a few weeks, and he's slept with nearly every girl in town. Paul is beginning to reach a point where he would like to lead a different life, and that feeling becomes all the more clear when he meets Noel, Tip's teenage sister who returns home after attending a boarding school. Noel is more thoughtful and mature than the girls Paul is used to. Paul and Noel soon fall in love, but for Paul this is a different sort of relationship than he's accustomed to — Noel is still a virgin, and her contemplative nature gives him a desire to be a better, stronger person, but Tip does not approve of Paul dating his younger sister, which leads to a rift between these longtime friends.

Cast

Actor	Role
Paul Schneider	Paul
Zooey Deschanel	Noel
Shea Whigham	Tip
Danny McBride	Bust-Ass
Patricia Clarkson	Elvira
Benjamin Mouton	Uncle Leland
Maurice Compte	Bo
Heather McComb	Mary-Margaret
Matthew Chapman	Strong Bad

Reception

The film got mostly positive reviews when it was initially released in 2003; it currently holds a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 71 out of 100 metascore on Metacritic. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times said “Green is 27, old enough to be jaded, but he has the soul of a romantic poet. Wordsworth, after all, was 36 when he published, ‘The Rainbow comes and goes and lovely as the Rose.’ How many guys that age would have that kind of nerve today?” He gave the film a four out of four star rating.

All the Real Girls was a financial failure at the box office. The film was released on February 14, 2003 and played in six theaters, bringing in $39,714 in its opening weekend. By the time it ended its theatrical run on July 10, 2003 it had made back $549,666 of its $2,500,000 budget. The film was nominated for awards at several different film festivals globally. Green was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize but won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival along with Clarkson for her role in the film. Deschanel was nominated for Best Female Lead at the 2004 Independent Spirit Awards and Best Actress at the 2004 Mar del Plata Film Festival.

External links

• All the Real Girls
• All the Real Girls at AllMovie
• All the Real Girls at IMDb