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I wanted to but couldn't!

Expected more

Brilliant and touching

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

There are some cute moments here and a talented group of actors giving their all to stretch those moments into something more. Working against that is a terribly contrived story and a director who overindulges in one of the worst modern movie clichés. The result is a film that's equal parts endearing and eye-rollingly frustrating. If I had to do a commentary track for All I Want, it would be nothing but alternating expressions of "Well, that was nice" and "Oh, come on!"Jones Dillon (Elijah Wood) is a 17 year old college freshman who arrives on campus dragging a huge trunk behind him. After a few bad experiences on his first day, Jones drops out and uses his grandfather's money to rent a room in a boarding house. Once there, he's befriended by the wise gay guy who lives downstairs (Aaron Pearl) and bounces between the two women who live upstairs (Franka Portente and Mandy Moore), all the while having phone conversations with his mother in Texas (Elizabeth Perkins) that range from studied indifference to anger that she won't tell Jones the identity of his father.This is a coming of age tale where Jones' experiences on his own transform him from aimless and silently needy virgin to…well, I'm not exactly sure what he's supposed to be at the end, other than no longer a virgin. Along the way, there are some interesting scenes watching Jones interact with Franka Portente's closed off and difficult break-up victim and Mandy Moore's self-centered and manipulative but more available aspiring actress. The script also has a neat undercurrent of the geographic and interpersonal realities of life in a boarding house. There's enough of that stuff sprinkled through the movie that I was never entirely ready to give up on it.I came close, though, on several occasions. Jones is not a real person. He's a couple of well worn quirks and a general projection of passive cluelessness. That this 17 year with no job, no prospects, no ambition and nothing to offer would be like catnip to the two older women of the house was one of the first eye-rolling elements to All I Want. Jones' estrangement from his mother and yearning for his father feels prefabricated and inserted into the story, like a mobile home plopped into a vacant lot. Jones also has the recurring fantasies about beautiful women and at the end of the film, he shuts the door on that sort of daydreaming. The problem is that all of the fantasies but one are nothing but sight gags. They have no significance to anything else and the only meaning they could have is Oedipal, because he usually fantasizes about the women when he's on the phone with his mother. When and how he finally gives up these daydreams, however, doesn't really make sense in any oedipal fashion. It's like the fantasies where nothing but filler and then the filmmakers forgot that and thought this particular plot thread needed some resolution. It didn't.The most irritating thing about this movie is director Jeffrey Porter's far too frequent use of a beyond tired storytelling trick. It's the one where there's a segue between scenes or a mini-montage supposed to indicate the emotions a character is going through and the soundtrack wells up with this pop or alt-rock song, depending on the genre of the movie. I'm not sure when this technique came into vogue but it was a long time ago. Like all clichés, it retains some of its original effectiveness so I can tolerate a filmmaker resorting to it once. Maybe twice. Porter does it repeatedly and it gets more annoying every time.I liked Portente's and Moore's performances and putting them into a love triangle with a guy more believable and energetic than Jones Dillon would have produced a much better motion picture. As it is, All I want is never better than okay. You can do worse than watch this thing but you can also do better. It depends on how hard you're willing to look.

This movie is, at its heart, a great movie. The only problems that I could see with the movie were that its 2 big names, Mandy Moore and Elijah wood, gave less than stellar performances. The star here is Franka Potente. Her performance is what carries this film forward.Everything else about this film is quite solid. It was properly produced, the script and dialog was very well realized. The camera-work was very well done.If you've already seen this movie and blasted it in the forums, give it another shot by focusing more on how the camera moves and the words that are actually spoken, not *how* they are spoken(which is where the actor's shortcomings come in to play). You might find a different(and better) film if you can just look past Elijah and Mandy.

I haven't said there are spoilers, because there is absolutely nothing you could call a twist. But if you haven't seen it, read this then DO! I think this is one of the best coming-of-age comedies there will ever be. Not because it was completely hilarious, but just because the content was honest, realistic and held many excellent performances. It starts with the very dreamy (in the out-of-it sense, though he is pretty fit) Elijah Wood (Jones Dillon, DON'T call him Frodo =D) turning up at collage and promptly deciding, 'f*** this, I'm out.' and simply leaving. It sounds ridiculous, but for some reason it just made sense. No-one noticed, especially not his parents, but we don't know that yet. He shacks up at this rather insane little building of flats, handing over $12,000 without a second thought and buying a load of furniture. I know some people are thoroughly annoyed by films that have no direction, and my fellow watcher said they were waiting for something to happen. But I think this movie just had so many perfect little events and witticisms that it did not matter in the slightest. My favourite scene is probably when the highly unpleasant sons of his over-flirtatious furniture-seller turn up and, instead of delivering his furniture begin to chuck it onto the sidewalk. Then, his gay (as yet unbeknown to us) cowboy downstairs-neighbour comes out with a huge gun as tells them in so many words that if they don't put down the furniture and p**s off, he'll blow off their man-hoods.All in all, there is drama without soap-opera, comedy without smut and one of the most unplaceable accents in the history of cinema. It is sweet and adult at the same time, with enough angst not to be, you know, teen-angsty and the most corn-free family issues you could wish for. Also, his imagination plays part from time to time, delivering nude art teachers, bagel-delivering belly dancers and a bazooka for blowing away people who p**s him off. His character is very edgy, one second he's this adorably vulnerable little thing, the next he's a smoking, gun-toting revenge-wrecker. (Not to be taken utterly literally). You couldn't predict a single word his character is going to say, it's really strange. He arches from miserable little-boy-lost to independent risk-taker, it's a joy to see. Rigt at the end, I was so sure the movie would be unique in, the girl of his dreams gets away, and DOESN'T come to her senses. I really did, and I thought it was great. But it didn't matter. I failed to understand why she went back to the guitar-player, leather clad love-rat anyway. I really went off her, she sleeps with him when he's driving her up to the city (to her love-rat) as she's broken her leg, then acts like he's being the one in the wrong when he tells her it wasn't nothing and she shouldn't be doing this. DUH! How stupid are some women?! Ah well, it's all good in the end.I have just one qualm, during the photo-shoot scene when she's telling him about herself and vice-versa, I swear her shirt changes! One minute, it's a black vest with a long sleeved net thing under it, then it's not netting, its see-through shiny stuff. The it changes back. It's not the light, thank you! I swear it isn't. Any thoughts, anyone? Anyway, 10/10!! Loved it a lot, and Elijah Wood is really hot! Never noticed before!

This is a very sensitive and original `coming of age' film, centered around a seventeen-year-old boy seeking to find meaning in his life. His mom had been, in her youth, a self-absorbed, dope-smoking and thrill-seeking Bohemian, who fell for an equally superficial and pretentious pseudo-intellectual of the writer variety, and by the time he went out for a pack of cigarettes never to return, she had found herself pregnant. That would have been the end of her story had mom been a pauper, but her family had money, so by the time the story opens the son had been shuttled around through every prep-school in the country. He never knew his father, and what he knew about his mother was that she never grew up.What little his mother would say about his father were myths, which he clings to desperately in this story. Had his father `really' been a writer? All he has for proof is an old typewriter, on which he tries to write letters to his father that are never mailed. The whereabouts of the father are not known. Estranged and alienated from his parents, he ends up in an apartment where he can begin to find himself through associations with others who have complicated stories of their own to share. Not surprisingly, he falls in love with an older woman who is much like his mother: self-absorbed and addicted to dysfunctional relationships. Almost as though to redeem his mother through the woman, he tries to prove himself the better man to her, in contrast to the slick and quick former boyfriend, with his leather clothes and hot guitar. He is a nice guy that wants to finish better, not last. It is a very mature and well-crafted story.