Perfect cast and a good story

A Disappointing Continuation

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

D.J. Caruso's Standing Up was a movie I thought was going to be horrible from the very beginning. It takes place at night one mile off of a campsite where a girl named Grace (played by Annalise Basso) and a boy named Howie (played by chandler Canterbury) get forced to be naked by a few camp mates who actually took their clothes off ( perfect for a bad beginning) and go inside to a sort of abandoned building in order to seek shelter and are on a worthless survival adventure when Grace's mom (played by Radha Mitchell) is on a wild goose chase just trying to find her daughter and her fellow companion. Everything about this movie is totally stupid, The performances are weak, the dialogue is unnecessary as well as unintentionally hilarious in one scene, the screenplay tries so hard to demonstrate itself when it acts as if it can't and it is too lazy to do so, the directing is floppy, and the one person who gives the stupidest performance throughout the entire movie was unfortunately Val Kilmer who just played a drunken cop in which the 2 stranded nerds thought was going to bring them to the worried mother, but then refers to the goat smell in the back of his SUV, and stops at his house by the excuse of that he id going to get something when he is really calling his boss to get them reported. As Elizabeth Taylor said in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? "It's a flop, a great big flop" which is exactly what this film really was.

This movie left me wondering if the author and/or director are pedophiles. I thought this was a family movie but was horrified to watch it with my children. The sexual tension between these 12 year old kids throughout the movie was just plain creepy. They start out being left naked on an island. the girl wakes up the next morning on the shore of a river, having been covered by the boy with a blanket. They steal clothes to wear and the girl pulls her pants down far enough to prove to the boy that she is not wearing panties. There is a sexually charged scene where preteens are slow-dancing at a summer camp, groping each other and making out. The boy and girl wind up spending the night together in a motel room in the same bed (no implication that anything happens). There is a shot of the girl in the shower. Any positive anti-bullying message was completely overshadowed by the inappropriateness of depicting children as sexual beings. This movie was just plain sick and should be viewed by no one.

This movie may be OK for children as they don't have sense enough to realize how ridiculous most of this movie is. These two kids would have had to be amazingly stupid to make the decisions they made and anyone watching this without realizing this the whole time is living in fantasy land. So this girl calls her mom after being victimized with another boy in a crime. She doesn't tell her mother she was the victim of a crime. She merely whines like a kid who doesn't want to be at camp so that we can move the movie along rather than ending it there with the cops rescuing them and arresting the criminals at the camp.Her mom gets a call from the camp that her daughter is missing, she goes to the camp and finds out part of the story (they leave out the naked part) and tells the camp a crime has been committed. For the rest of the movie she does nothing about this crime. She is a lawyer and she knows the camp has been privy to this type of criminal activity for years, (which makes the camp criminally negligent) yet she doesn't do anything about it.This kid runs around the whole movie scared her mom's gonna beat her because she was the victim of a crime. Who teaches that to their kids? And who doesn't get angry when watching the kid do it?These two kids never once think to call the cops to get rescued, instead they start committing a series of unnecessary crimes to further the idiotic plot of this movie.Who in their right mind can sit through 90 minutes of incongruity without yelling at these two idiots to tell someone what happened to them?

Based on Brock Cole's "The Goats", Standing up is the story of two geeky kids, a girl and a boy, who are the victims of a mean holiday camp prank. Stripped naked and left marooned on an island, the boy and girl are left to their own devices and decide to leave the camp and embark on an adventure on their own.I like that the main characters are geeks and outsiders, and they are ably played by Chandler Canderbury and Annalise Basso. They are experienced TV actors despite their young age, and the chemistry between them is good. I certainly could identify with the awkward feeling of being a lonely young outsider searching for yourself and for companionship.I like the general theme of the film, that you can learn from all your experiences, good and bad, and discover yourself as a result. I think this is a good message, especially for young adults. However, the world view is a bit too optimistic, the kids never really are in real danger despite their dangerous decision to live on their own for a few days, and the lack of any real antagonist means the film lacks an exciting edge.Nevertheless, it is a good-natured film without nudity or swearing, and works well as family entertainment. Personally, when it comes to coming-of-age movies, I prefer Stand By Me.