Score: 7 out of 10 I can't really say no when my sister offers a free movie and lunch. I really can't say no when I am unemployed. The catch is, I don't really have a say in what movie we watch or where we eat for that matter. As long as it's not something terrifying or something I'm dead set against watching, I'm game. So today's faire was handpicked by my nephew. And as a 10 year old, his call was "Diary of a Wimpy Kid". Now I have been out of the Barnes and Noble game for a while, so a young readers story like this is something I WOULD'VE known about. In the last 10 years, some of the very books I saw lining the best sellers for kids had been adapted into movies, but I was out of the game so long, I never even KNEW about this movie. It would of course make sense that this is what my nephew would want to see. He's well read, and he chose it over the overwhelmingly kid-magnetized 'How to train your dragon' or whatever it's called. Very well. The movie (according to my nephew) is pretty accurate to the book. Obviously parts had to be wended and twisted to fit the big screen style of storytelling in such a short amount of time, but characterization was apparently spot on for most characters, and the gags were stripped from the pages almost verbatim. (Mind you, this is on the judgement of a 10 year old, so if people have read it, and think there's glaring differences... oh well.) I found it liberally used words like 'Moron' and 'Idiot' and 'Stupid', which I personally have no problem with, but oddly enough my sister and brother both tend to frown upon both my nephews if it stumbles into their vocabulary from time to time. Yet here we are, watching a movie where those words are happily leeched from the book and into the script. Okay. There was a handful of potty jokes. Boogers gooshed on fingers. Golden Showers. Scantily Clad Racer Magazines. It was chock full of tweener boy humor. The main character is as absolutely selfish and turd-worthy as he was in the book, but oddly enough my nephew found him a relate-able character. When the moral was: "Be Yourself" And his (Greg's) moral was: "Be Popular" my nephew felt that he wasn't THAT bad, and had a string of bad luck befall him. I dunno, I thought he was a total douche, and it was only until the absolute very end of the movie did he step into the real moral of the story and reclaim his happy ending. It had kid-level gags that I could overlook. It had funny parts. It has the chick from Kick Ass that cusses a lot and murders people. And she was just the cute level-headed independent journalist girl that hid under the bleachers and called out the school for being posers. It has a real power bitch that somehow fights for women's rights while mocking it at the same time. Not sure how she was supposed to be reacted to. And lastly, it's a very unrealistic and exaggerated window into Middle School. It wasn't my Middle School (or High School) in fact. I'm not sure where people get their image of schooling, but apparently real school is either too depressing or too boring to put on film. They argue about getting into the yearbook, and sitting somewhere in lunch. But I just remember school lunches being 'which clique were you usually with' and the yearbook being a very expensive souvenir that you wanted tons of people to sign. Maybe I just had a boring school life. No, I'm pretty sure it was awesome.