Plot
The story takes place in 1974, two years after the first film. It involves the main character, Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky), going to Los Angeles, California, for the spring break to learn more about her deceased biological mother. First she was a spunky, hypochondriac 11-year-old "with a chicken bone lodged in her throat"; now she is a lively yet more serious 13-year-old, "ready for her own apartment." By this time, her father Harry (Dan Aykroyd) is married to Shelly DeVoto (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is now pregnant, her Uncle Phil (Richard Masur) now lives in Los Angeles, and her grandmother has died. She still wears the mood ring retrieved for her by her late best friend Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin), who died in the previous film.
Vada has her spring break coming up and her school assignment is to do an essay on someone she admires but has never met. She decides that she wants to do it on her mother but quickly realizes she knows very little about her. She manages to get her father to agree to let her go to L.A. to stay with her Uncle Phil and do some research on her mother. Once there, she finds herself under the protection of Nick (Austin O'Brien), Phil's girlfriend's (Christine Ebersole) son, who at first is very annoyed at losing his own spring break to escort a "hick girl" around town. However, he soon becomes more involved in the difficult search. The relationship between them, which originally starts out as a reluctant one, slowly turns into something much stronger as she learns more about her mother. The two start supporting each other and experience first love along the way.
The movie includes an a cappella performance of the Chaplin song "Smile" by Angeline Ball, who plays Vada's mother.
Read more about this topic: My Girl 2
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)