I’m going to be honest here: the only reason I was remotely interested in seeing this week’s flick — which was advertised essentially as a remake of a film I consider to be a minor classic, namely Penny Marshall’s directorial debut, Big — is because the film’s star, Jennifer Garner, is so damn adorable. Don’t laugh; a lot of people base their viewing choices on the attractiveness of the cast. At least I’m honest about occasionally suffering through a less-than-impressive movie because I think the female lead is cute. Even some of the professional critics are prone to this behavior. For example, hop on over to Roger Ebert’s site and run a search for Neve Campbell. You’ll soon see that ol’ Rog has a crush on the Scream cutie and he’s not shy about admitting it.

Anyhow, getting back to my point, I went to see 13 Going on 30 because Jennifer Garner is cute, and because my usual viewing companion wanted to see it and I figured that I owed her after exposing her to the 70s cheesefest that is Battlestar Galactica the other night (yeah, I know it was an awful show, but I love the silly thing; at least I’m not into WWF. And if you’re curious for some depraved reason of your own, the episode Anne and I watched together was “Lost Planet of the Gods”). To my great surprise, the movie was neither a rip-off of Big — at least not much of one — nor was it a bad film. I quite liked it actually. But it is definitely a case of something that’s becoming all-too-common these days: the disconnect between how a movie is marketed and what it actually is.

More on that in a moment. First the obligatory plot summary: the movie opens in the halcyon year 1987 (the same year I graduated from high school). Thirteen-year-old Jenna is a pretty typical example of her age-group. She wears braces, loves bubblegummy pop music, and is much cuter than she thinks she is. She desperately wants to be a “six chick,” one of her school’s cadre of popular (and bitchy) blond girls, but she’s not cool enough to attract anything but their scorn. After an embarassing scene at her birthday party that she takes out on her best friend Matt, she wishes she could skip all this teenage angst crap and be “thirty and flirty.” Faster than you can say “Zoltan,” she’s waking up in the bodacious body of her grown-up self, her teenie-bopper mind still intact in all its naive glory. Sounds like Big so far, right? As you may recall, that film featured a young male protagonist who made a similar wish and woke up as Tom Hanks. Well, it is and it isn’t.

In the Hanks movie, our hero Josh changes physically, but otherwise everything else is the same. The year remains 1987, or whenever that movie was released, and everyone Josh knows remains their respective ages. In the Garner movie, Jenna actually skips over the intervening 17 years and awakens in 2004. It’s not time travel or anything like that. It’s more like she suffers from some variety of amnesia. The last 17 years have happened, Jenna has grown up and forged a life for herself, as have Matt and the six chicks and everyone else that she used to know. It’s just that she can’t remember any of it past her thirteenth birthday party. A small difference, to be sure, but it’s enough of one to give 13 Going on 30 its own flavor, and what I would argue is a radically different tone and theme from the earlier film. While Big is fueled by the bittersweet feelings that surround one’s loss of innocence, 13 Going on 30 is more interested in the question of how we get to a certain point in our lives, what choices we made that turned us into a particular kind of person, and more importantly, whether it’s possible to turn away from the road that you chose a long, long time ago.

Jennifer Garner, best known as the miniskirted superspy Sydney Bristow on TV’s Alias, is absolutely delightful as the grown-up-but-still-a-child-inside Jenna. She displays the same giddy warmth, that inherent likability that is equal parts vulnerability and sex appeal, that made Julia Roberts a star in Pretty Woman, but she also turns in a fine performance from a technical standpoint. The viewer never doubts for a moment that this is an adult woman with the mind of a teenage girl. She’s giggly when her grown-up self’s boyfriend tries to seduce her, she’s terrified when she first realizes that she’s not in her familiar surroundings (or body), and she grows gradually more self-confident throughout the film — at least until she finally discovers exactly what sort of woman she apparently grew into during the years she doesn’t remember. Have you ever wondered what your teenage self would think of your grown-up life? Jenna gets to answer that question in this movie, and it’s not pretty.

I’d like to discuss that final point a little bit, if you don’t mind me veering off on a tangent. You see, I think this movie, which has been denounced by the Salt Lake Trib‘s critic Sean Means because it carried an unexpected darkside, is illustrative of a big problem that the entertainment industry in general suffers from right now. You see, this movie isn’t a comedy, and it isn’t really a kid’s show, but it’s being marketed as both. It is very funny in places — the scene where Jenna livens up a dead New York party by putting on “Thriller” and showing off her Michael Jackson moves is great, especially as it reminds us of the time when MJ was actually entertaining, before he became a total freak show — but overall the film is more heartbreaking than humorous. And it’s not inappropriate for the teenage girls that the trailers are pitched toward, but I have to wonder if they really get a lot of the jokes, which are based on cultural touchstones that only actual 30-somethings like me and Anne are going to recognize, or indeed the whole point of the movie, which revolves around the sorts of regrets that only adults can grasp. Nevertheless, the advertising for this movie is being targeted towards actual thirteen-year-olds. I think it’s significant that the last trailer to run before the start of the film was for the new movie starring Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson, the presumptive heroines of the same demographic that 13 Going on 30 is aimed at. And why? Because the movie studios believe that teenagers are the ones who go to the movies, so every movie should be either made for them or at least marketed to them. I could probably spew a couple thousand words on how screwed-up I find this thinking to be, but for now, I will leave it at this point: the commercials for this movie make it look like something it’s not, so a lot of people who go to it expecting a particular thing will probably not respond to it, and a lot of people who would respond very positively to it probably won’t go. It’s a trend that I see more and more often, and it’s tragically stupid.

I hope you’ll bear with me on one more tangent, please, because I’d also like to say something about those cultural touchstones I mentioned. I’m mostly thinking of the film’s musical cues such as “Thriller” and one of my all-time personal favorite songs, Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.” As great as it was to hear these songs in a movie, I couldn’t help but think that the writer or the director or someone had their Wayback Machine misprogrammed. You see, those cultural landmarks are from the early 80s. “Thriller” was released in ’83 or ’84, “Jessie’s Girl” a couple of years before that. Granted, there’s only a couple of years between those songs and the beginning of the movie, but in pop-cultural terms, especially to a teenager, a handful of years may as well be an ice-age. Jenna, being thirteen in 1987, would most likely have been into Debbie Gibson or New Kids on the Block, not Rick Springfield. This anachronism leads me to suspect one of two things: either this script sat around for a couple of years before its production and the dates had to be tampered with to make it work, or our cultural touchstones for the 80s, the things that scream “Decade of Big Hair” to us when we see them, are largely relics of the first half of that decade. (This isn’t unprecedented; everyone thinks of the 70s as the Disco Age, but the truth is that disco only lasted for about eighteen months towards the very end of the decade. I would say that a more consistent musical sound throughout the entire decade was country-pop like The Eagles, but by and large people don’t associate that sound with that particular time, maybe in part because the classic rock stations still play “Hotel California” every five minutes.)

In any event, 13 Going on 30 probably won’t produce the enduring goodwill that Big did, but it is a good little movie on its own merits. It’s heartfelt and unironic and it tries (although it doesn’t entirely succeed due to a predictable ending) to address one of life’s less pleasant realities. I don’t know what my thirteen-year-old self would think of the me I became — he’d probably wonder why I wear socks and don’t own a Ferrari — but I had a lot of fun seeing how Jenna dealt with it.

Oh, a couple of additional notes about casting: whoever cast the young girl who plays Jenna at thirteen deserves an award. That kid is perfect, practically a dead ringer for Jennifer Garner, right down to the weird (but not displeasing) way the skin around Garner’s upper lip kind of bulges out sometimes. Also, Andy “Gollum” Serkis turns up in a small supporting role, minus his Lord of the Rings “gimp suit,” and he’s wonderful. Hope to see him do more roles in his own face.