I've just seen "Tadpole" for the second time and I'm astonished at some of the dismissive comments about it on this site. Maybe I'm a bit biased when I was the protagonist's age I was almost as impossibly pretentious a pseudo-intellectual as he is but though I don't consider this a great film, I was engaged by it all the way and loved everything about it: the story, the acting, the genuinely witty writing, director Gary Winick's knack for presenting some pretty outrageous situations as if they were perfectly normal and the upper-class New York ambiance in which the whole film was framed. The first time I saw it I called it "sort of a combination of Shaw's 'Candida,' the Phaedra legend and 'Lolita' with the genders reversed," and I stand by that. This time around it was nice to be reminded of how exciting and sensual an actress Bebe Neuwirth could be when all I'm seeing of her these days is the hard-as-nails prosecutor in "Law and Order: Trial by Jury," and John Ritter's performance is one of the ones he should be remembered by even though his presence makes one wonder why the movie wasn't called "Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Son." (Actually Ritter's best big-screen performance ever was as the President of the United States in the woefully underrated satire "Americathon," one movie I'd dearly love to see reissued on DVD.) Just two elements of "Tadpole" that bothered me: how did someone who looked so young get into that bar (I suspect the real Aaron Stanford gets carded all the time!); and why did a pretentious intellectual kid who prided himself on his fluency in French read Voltaire in translation instead of the original?
