Watch My Girl

A true coming-of-age movie, "My Girl" explores the emotional highs and lows that a young girl experiences over the length of a summer. The story follows an 11-year old girl named Vada who lives with her father and senile grandmother. Her father is a funeral director and they live above the funeral parlor. Vada, who is a bit of a hypochondriac, has an obsession with the dead, going so far as to believe that she killed her own mother in childbirth. Vada is a tomboy, often teased by the other girls, and whose only friend is a boy named Thomas J. Vada eventually befriends Shelly the new make-up artist her father has hired. Shelly is able to connect with Vada in a way that her distant father is unable to and offers some much needed guidance to Vada as she transitions from a child into a young woman. Vada also experiences the pains of a first love and the loss of a dear friend. Through the loss of her friend and her attempts to deal with the grief, Vada and her father are able to reconnect in the end and resolve many of the issues that Vada has been dealing with on her own.