The Perfect Daughter (2016)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

If you just want to relax and take a break from worries, than this is the "perfect" choice for you. It is so peaceful (well, up to a point, where things get spicy), but, nevertheless, something makes you disconnect from the real world and urges you to jump through the screen and feel the story & not just stare at it. With glimpses of heavenly scenes, you'll shift your focus aside from everyday tasks. It could have had music mixed with the more interesting parts, I can say, but it is good, after all. Watch and share it with friends, and most importantly, enjoy it!

Carpenter and single dad Brady Smith (as Martin Parish) is happy when daughter Sadie Calvano (as Natalie Parish) wins an election for student council treasurer. This could help the cute and increasingly popular Ms. Calvano win a college scholarship. Being a straight "A" student will help, too. Calvano also wins the attention of her high school's star ice hockey jock Reiley McClendon (as Samuel "Sam" Cahill). Very quickly, father and daughter have to face issues like teenage drinking and sex. "The Perfect Daughter" may not be so perfect, after all...This drama focuses more on how father Smith deals with his daughter's problems. There is some background involving the missing mother, who wasn't perfect, either. She had a boyfriend and was willing to leave her family and shack up at a "Pink Motel" somewhere. The missing mother's perfectly trimmed, model-like brother Johann Urb (as Nicky Barnes) works for Smith. The younger man is introduced after having a sexual liaison with a married blonde. So, there is a hint the Barnes "side of the family" is slutty. In contrast, father Smith appears chaste...Also in the cast is former 1970s TV "Hardy Boy" Parker Stevenson. He is both Smith's boss and the hockey player's father. Director Brian Herzlinger and writer Brian McAuley do their best in scenes with Smith and Calvano, showing both their increasing distance and strong bond. The father-daughter relationship seems real. Scenes in the school setting are more routine. At one point, an accusation of rape is made; to accuse falsely, if that is the case, should be treated more seriously. And, the ending refuses to explicitly state a decision made by Calvano...Finally, it must be declared that the "neatly trimmed beard" look is now in vogue for TV movie men. You see it on leading man Brady Smith along with supporting actors Parker Stevenson and Johann Urb. You also see the "neatly trimmed beard" on men in commercials. Understandably, this does not apply to high schoolers; shaving is necessary to play the younger age. This is great news because the "perfectly plucked eyebrows" look is (and was) very distracting. They may still pluck the eyebrows, but the "neatly trimmed beard" helps off-set the eye brows.***** The Perfect Daughter (3/26/2016) Brian Herzlinger ~ Brady Smith, Sadie Calvano, Reiley McClendon, Parker Stevenson

A totally benign story and I expected that with a typical Life-Time film, there would be a series of murders with victims such as the girl who lost the high school treasurer election to our heroine.Instead, the story concentrated on the relationship between the widowed father and his daughter. There seems to be quite a lot of symbiosis here. The guy's friend is his lawyer whose son gets his daughter in trouble during a drunken spree. The lawyer had gotten the father a job to construct something for someone. In addition, the lawyer's wife was once the girlfriend of the father before he married what turned out to be a wayward woman who was about to abandon him and her daughter when bone cancer intervened.There is too much of everyone literally feeding off one another. Even the widower's worker is his former brother-in-law, a simpleton with an eye for the ladies.By the end, the whole thing boils down to whether or not the girl shall take the pill to terminate her pregnancy. Does she or doesn't she?

The "world premiere" Lifetime movie last night was "The Perfect Daughter," a title which led me to assume Christine Conradt wrote it and it was another in her series of "The Perfect _____" movies (as opposed to her "_____ at 17" movies and her "The _____ S/he Met Online" movies). Wrong on both counts: it was directed by Brian Herzlinger from a script by Brian McAuley, and was originally shot as "The Carpenter's Daughter" until someone at Marvista Entertainment or Lifetime itself decided to give it a moniker that would include the word "Perfect" to fit it into their long-running occasional series. The first 40 minutes or so were pretty disappointing, as we get to meet good little high-school senior Natalie Parish (Sadie Calvano) and her dad Martin Parish (Brady Smith, a better-looking man than usually plays a teenager's parent in a Lifetime movie). Martin has a two-person building contractor business with his former brother-in-law, Nick Barnes (Johann Urb, who despite some formidable competition struck me as the sexiest man in the film), and he's also been raising his daughter as a single parent since the death of his wife Sarah years earlier — long enough ago that Natalie has no living memory of her mom and the only evidence we see of her is a framed photo of the three of them taken while Natalie was still an infant. At the start of the film Natalie is running for student body treasurer against the ultra-popular Kalie (Lorynn York) and she fully expects to lose — only she wins (oddly, Herzlinger and McAuley depict Kalie's class speech but not Natalie's, keeping us in suspense for an act or two as to how the election turned out), and as a result Sam Cahill, Kalie's boyfriend, dumps her and invites Natalie to the school hockey game that night (he's the school's star hockey player) and to a party at his place right after. Complicating things is that Sam's father, attorney Brian Cahill (Parker Stevenson, who 40 years ago was Shaun Cassidy's sidekick on the "Hardy Boys" show), just arranged for Martin and Nick to get a major remodeling job. Alas, the next time Martin sees his daughter she's in the middle of the road, clearly pretty much out of it, and she admits she drank too much at the party. Dad gets her into his truck and takes her to the emergency room, where she's admitted, diagnosed with alcohol poisoning and also discovered to have had sex. She insists that she consented and that Sam Cahill was her partner — the party ended abruptly when the other guests caught them at it and left — but Dad is convinced she was raped and demands that police detective Schaffer (Drew Rausch) investigate the case as a rape.For the first hour or so "The Perfect Daughter" is the sort of movie that makes you wonder why you're bothering to watch it — if you stick with it you'll get angrier and angrier at Martin and think he, not his daughter, is the irresponsible one — but about midway through this film clicks into high gear. It becomes obvious that Herzlinger and McAuley want you to think of Martin as the villain — indeed, aside from Julie Cahill, virtually all the adults in the movie act irresponsibly and crazily and it's Sam and Natalie who, having made their one big mistake (getting plastered at that party and having sex without "protection"), are far more responsible than the grownups in dealing with the aftermath and making competent, sensible decisions instead of letting their emotions run away with them — down to Natalie's cold-blooded calculation that she and Sam (who have to work together anyway since she's the student body treasurer and he's the president) should indulge in as many public displays of affection as possible so her classmates will realize she wanted to have sex with him and he was not a rapist. A movie that seemed unbearably larded-on in the first half suddenly acquires real emotional heft and power, as McAuley's writing improves and his characters take on multiple dimensions and become believable as human beings instead of stick figures in a Lifetime melodrama. For the first half of this film you might be tempted to turn it off or change the channel in mid-stream, but stay with "The Perfect Daughter" and it will provide you a wrenching emotional experience, hammered home not only by the subtlety of McAuley's writing (for once a Lifetime movie does not come to a pat, easy conclusion; also, for once in a Lifetime movie, the characters grow, change and learn something about themselves over the film's running time, especially when daddy Martin realizes that the reason he's been so relentlessly overprotective of his daughter is fear that without a tight leash, she'd grow up like her mom and become sexually adventurous with multiple partners) but the quiet strength of Herzlinger's direction and fine acting by a well-assembled cast — notably Smith as Martin, Stevenson as Bruce Cahill and Reiley McClendon, a stocky young man with a facial resemblance to the young Elvis, as Sam — he's nice-looking but not so overwhelmingly attractive you'd wonder why half the girls in school aren't carrying his kids!