'Tadpole' has been pretty beat up by many critics, which is too bad - it's an enjoyable movie with a lot of humor. The young main character Oscar is not all that different from a lot of overly confident and unkowingly naive young men - he has plenty of education, but hides behind academia to remain aloof, beyond the realities that eveyone must face.
His infatuation with his father's new wife is one of the ways Oscar fantasizes his specialness, how the rules of society somehow just don't apply to him.
Of course, they do, and young Oscar does come crashing down to earth, not a hard, overblown crash, just a good solid thud! Having Oscar be of mixed French & American background allowed a for a (mercifully) few clichés about the 'otherness' of 'French' relations in love, or at least as silly Hollywood writers have generally conceived such relations.
The low-budget movie isn't overly "Dogme" in it's style, and the production values were very acceptable - in other words, the camerawork or the sound didn't draw attention to themselves, it wasn't part of the moviemaker's intent to point out 'hey we're making a DV-based movie!'.
Sigourney Weaver's acting was much above-average for her, and John Ritter was very well-cast too. Good acting all around, really.
It's worth seeing this move, like all movies, in a movie theater - take the money you'd be spending on junk food, and see this on a actual movie screen!
