"Tadpole" is a joy to watch. It's low-budget and not a long film, but shortly after it began I found myself smiling through every one of its 80 minutes. Okay, perhaps it is not realistic for a 15 year old boy to be smitten by a 40 year old woman, or for a 40 year old woman to brag openly to her friends about her seduction of him, but it's just fun to watch. (However, 9 years after the film release a 40 year old school teacher, who was arrested due to her affair with a 15 year-old student of hers, had the charges dropped after the two married in 2010.)
"Tadpole" is a nickname that 15 year old Oscar (played perfectly by then 24 year old Aaron Stanford) thinks he's outgrown. "Nobody calls me that anymore," he tells the doorman at his father's New York swank apartment building. But it is also a metaphor for how he appears to a coterie of 40+ women who he intrigues.
Oscar's divorced mother is French so he is fluent in French as well as English. He prefers the pleasure of reading Voltaire, both for Voltairs's wisdom and his satire, rather than to listen to pop music or other interests of the average teenager. Oscar is bright, sophisticated beyond his years, and finds girls at his boarding school (who are attracted to him like moths to a flame) to be vapid and boring. Instead he is infatuated with Eve (Sigourney Weaver, who at 51 in 2000, looked a bit old for the part) his 40 something stepmother. Not to give away too much, but Eve's friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) has a major part of the action. Neuwirth won awards for her performance in this film.
"Tadpole" deserves to be seen by more people. It's rating in TV movie reviews is too low.
"Tadpole" is a nickname that 15 year old Oscar (played perfectly by then 24 year old Aaron Stanford) thinks he's outgrown. "Nobody calls me that anymore," he tells the doorman at his father's New York swank apartment building. But it is also a metaphor for how he appears to a coterie of 40+ women who he intrigues.
Oscar's divorced mother is French so he is fluent in French as well as English. He prefers the pleasure of reading Voltaire, both for Voltairs's wisdom and his satire, rather than to listen to pop music or other interests of the average teenager. Oscar is bright, sophisticated beyond his years, and finds girls at his boarding school (who are attracted to him like moths to a flame) to be vapid and boring. Instead he is infatuated with Eve (Sigourney Weaver, who at 51 in 2000, looked a bit old for the part) his 40 something stepmother. Not to give away too much, but Eve's friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth) has a major part of the action. Neuwirth won awards for her performance in this film.
"Tadpole" deserves to be seen by more people. It's rating in TV movie reviews is too low.