My Girl

Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) is an eleven-year-old girl in a small Pennsylvania town in the early 1970s, at the beginning of life even as she lives with the constant reminder of death; her father (Dan Ackroyd) is a mortician who runs his business out of the family home, and her mother died during childbirth complications. The father and daughter also live with Vada's grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimers and whose only vocalizations are belted-out showtunes from her youth. This life story, paired with Ada's precocious and imaginative mind, makes for some highly entertaining and eminently human eccentricities; a hypochondriac, Vada is a regular patron of her family doctor, constantly convinced that she is suffering from some obscure and fatal illness. Her best friend is Thomas J. (Mackaulay Culkin), a wide-eyed naif to whom she tells all her thoughts, fears, and dreams. These include her romantic interest in her English teacher (Griffin Dunne), and her reservations regarding Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis), her father's newly-employed makeup artist and love interest. Vada's world is eventually turned upside down when tragedy strikes, and she is forced to do some growing up along the way.