This is gonna be a review I am not going to look forward to write because I was so disappointed in this film and pretty much disliked most everything about this amateurish movie.  Based on the previews and some other reviews I had read prior to seeing this movie, I was really looking forward to seeing a different and original film about small town romance.  Granted, it is not like your normal Hollywood movie about young people in a small town, but that by itself doesn't make it one to go see.

       The basic story centers around a group of guys in their twenties who have never been able to leave (or escape) their small town surroundings located somewhere in the mid-west.  Things start to become complicated when Paul and Noel start up a romance when she arrives home from boarding school.  It just so happens that Noel is the sister of Paul's best friend Tip, who knows first hand of Paul's history of having meaningless sex with any willing girl.  And Tip does not want Noel to become just another notch on Paul's belt and this causes tension between Tip and Paul as well as between the other band of friends.  The rest of the film deals with the budding relationship between Paul and Noel and the question on whether Paul can finally grow up and participate in a meaningful relationship.

      First of all, this is one of the slowest and most deliberate stories every told on film.  The film moves at a snail's pace which sometimes in a film like this is not necessarily a bad thing.  But with this film, it only succeeds in putting the audience into a coma.  Now, I do prefer character driven films to take their time to tell the story rather than use the standard Hollywood process of quick cuts and lots of flashy camera shots.  But unfortunately with this film, there is just no substance to interest the audience during the long drawn-out scenes.  Also, this film is filled with so much unnecessary scenery shots that instead of being moving and eye-catching, they just become boring and gratuitous.  I mean, the director tried to put in every moving clouds and blowing trees scenes that he had ever seen.  And for some reason, he actually put in some useless close-up scene of a dog without back legs going down the street.

      The acting in this film is very bad and amateurish.  Obviously Director Green is trying to make a film about real people acting normal.  However, the acting at times is laughable and the dialogue that is uttered by these characters is also often hilarious.  I didn't believe for a minute that these boring and uninteresting people would constantly talk the way they do, nor actually use the words coming out of their mouths.  I didn't care about any of these characters nor what happened to them. I will say that Zooey Deschanel as Noel has a charming on-screen appearance and I hope that she gets to show her talent in future films which are much better than this one.  And unfortunately, the usually marvelous Patricia Clarkson is pretty much wasted here.

      There are many really good independent films about small town living with interesting stories and characters.  "All The Real Girls" just ain't one of them.  A much better film about this genre which I recently reviewed here is "Tully".