Little Girls in Pretty Boxes (TV Movie 1997) Poster

(1997 TV Movie)

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7/10
Frightening
alliesmom9725 February 2006
Good movie, with good acting, but a very scary look at how coaches are allowed to treat the children under their care by the irresponsible "stage parents" who care more about their kids "making it" than they do about the kids themselves.

Swoozie Kurtz was wonderful, as usual! Great acting, going from a truly caring mom, to a pushy shrew, and finally back to a loving, responsible parent. Phillip Casnoff truly made you hate him! And Courtney Peldon is a very good young actress! And I can't say enough about young Aimee Walker...THAT girl is a REAL inspiration...not just a cute little girl looking pretty and turning flips, but a wonderfully strong human being! I agree with the reviewer who said that a better ending would have been for the mom who finally came to her senses and got her kid away from that maniac coach. And as to the reviewer who thinks "the ends justifies the means" (treatment that bordered on verbal abuse and a lack of regard for the health and safety of his athletes), I can only hope that he never has children....
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7/10
Of Pots and Kettles
khaosjr17 November 2005
Warning: Spoilers
Teddy Roosevelt once said, "Far better it is to dare mighty things, than to take rank with those poor and timid spirits who know neither victory nor defeat." This movie, on the other hand, seems to preach the opposite notion: that it's better to chicken out, stifle your Heaven-sent talent, and go nowhere in life...than it is to take some kind of risk, like we all must do anyway.

In the end, that's what undoes "Little Girls In Pretty Boxes": the mother, for all intensive purposes, becomes just like the hated Coach Radkin; she simply pulls harder in one direction than he pushes in another. To put it another way, the movie "steps out of its landing" (so to speak) because the main characters EVADE--instead of CONFRONTING--their nemesis, and the conflict at hand.

Given the nature of the source material, in particular, wouldn't it have been better for all involved if Mom had gone to the Olympic Commission (and/or Sports Illustrated) with what she knew about Coach Radkin...and let THEM decide who was right about whom? Yet, instead of convincing her daughter what a monster Coach Radkin really is, Mom turns into a kind of monster herself: by simply yanking Katie away from him...and also from any chance of the girl's making it as a competitive gymnast.

"Little Girls in Pretty Boxes" leaves us with two burning questions:

1. Whatever happened to the other girls, who stayed in Coach Radkin's grueling training regimen--apparently with none of the problems which befell Katie, and the gymnast who gets paralyzed?

2. What kind of life will Katie have, in or out of gymnastics, with "another Greg Radkin" for a mother...and with a female coach whose training program was lackadaisical at best? Our young ex-gymnast seems doomed to wander from one career to another, with her dad and (especially) mom ripping her out of each one, as soon as perseverance is called for.

Was any of this intentional? Was it the point of that best-selling book on which "LGIPB" is based?
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10/10
A solid docudrama of dedicated gymnasts, and deadly coaches
Castor-1110 October 2000
This was meant to be a critique of a certain kind of gymnastic coaching -"put the pressure on your players, so that they can better stand up to the greater pressures to come in performing before large audiences", but the movie was so fairly presented,that when I viewed the final result - a glorious display of energy, fitness, and sheer athleticism, by these young girls, I certainly thought that the means justified the ends.

That end result being one young girl attaining her dream of athletic perfection, by dint of sacrifice, hard work, and enduring a harsh regime applied by a demanding coach,another girl sustaining a nasty injury, due to his insistence, with yet another youngster being removed from a tough program, very much against her wishes through her parents getting cold feet - if all soccer moms, hockey dads, and other responsible elders of sports-playing had this same attitude toward this coaching philosophy of being "As good as you can be", I would fear that our youth would grow to be not very good.

The cast was professional enough to make one hate the pushy coach - even though he was right - and identify with the guilt-stricken parents, as dead-wrong as I deem them. Altogether, a thought-provoking well-made absorbing film
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8/10
I'd love to see that again starring Amy Jo Johnson ...
IMDBmurphy28 June 2004
Rated this one 8/10, which for me is absolutely exceptionally as a TV movie rating, but it was well written (consequent ending), well directed (not too pathetic, as otherwise usual) and played more serious and substantial than the mainstream TV stuff.

I liked Swoosie Kurtz and especially John Ashton as the parents, showing how perceptions can change during the development of a storyline surely being found like this in many, many average family environments.

Courtney Peldon did a good job as well – but as I said above, I wonder what the marvelous Amy Jo Johnson has made out of it in Perfect Body (1997) (TV).
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