Have you ever wished you could have a quick recap of a movie so you know what it was about without actually having to watch it? Well then, I’ve got you covered.
Today, I will explain a dark romance called 13 Going on, 30, which was initially released in 2004.
After total humiliation at her thirteenth birthday party, Jenna Rink wants just to hide until she’s thirty. Thanks to some wishing dust, Jenna’s prayer has been answered. This can’t be a better life without a knockout body, a dream apartment, a fabulous wardrobe, an athlete boyfriend, a dream job, and superstar friends. Unfortunately, Jenna realizes that this is not what she wants.
The only one that she needs is her childhood best friend, Matt, a boy that she thought destroyed her party. But when she finds him, he’s a grown-up and not the same person that she knew. – Starring Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, and Judy Greer. SPOILER ALERT #DUH
At the start of the movie, we get a close look at the main character, Jenna Rink, as she is having her picture taken for the school yearbook.
However, it doesn’t end well for Jenna, as the photographer snaps her picture before she’s ready. How embarrassing!
On the day she gets her horrible school picture back, her goofy best friend Matt cheers her up when he takes a picture of them smiling with his camera and chatters in excitement about how it’s her 13th birthday, so they have to document every moment of the special day.
Then enters Tom-Tom, the most popular girl in the school, with her five stooges. Also known as the “Six Chicks.”
Tom-Tom approaches Jenna as she, and the other girls, boast about how photogenic she is. Then, they make fun of Matt until he walks away.
She then asks to speak to Jenna alone and tells her that she wanted to attend her party with her friends, including a boy named Chris Grandy, but that they wouldn’t be able to make it since they had a group project that was due soon.
Jenna agrees to complete their assignment for them so that they can come to her birthday party, and she is obviously ecstatic when Tom-Tom agrees.
After school, we see Jenna and Matt walking home as they talk. Matt can’t believe that Jenna invited “those girls to her party, but she counters with her dream to one day be a part of the “Six Chicks.”
Matt then raises the question, “How could you be the seventh member of a group called the Six Chicks?”
He tells her that she is great because she is an original, but she doesn’t waver in her desire to be “cool.”
Before they part ways to their neighboring houses, they share some razzles despite Jenna joking that they’re for kids, and Matt snaps another picture of her as she heads inside.
Jenna prepares for the birthday party in her room as she applies heavy makeup and stuffs some tissue into her bra. Her parents then come in with a camera wishing her a happy birthday, but they are surprised at her appearance.
She’s humiliated and stuffs her face in her bed in horror. Her mom asks her dad to leave and reminds her how beautiful she is naturally as she removes the tissue from her bra.
Jenna argues that she wants to look like the models in Poise magazine and how she can’t wait to be “thirty, flirty, and thriving” before her mom leaves the room. She then hurriedly replaces the tissue in her bra.
Then we cut to the birthday girl dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as she prepares for the party. Matt walks in on her as he brings in his first gift, a handmade dollhouse that he calls the “Jenna Dream House.”
He clearly spent a lot of time and put a lot of thought into the gift. He also got her some wishing dust that could make all her dreams come true, and he sprinkled the wishing power all over her dream dollhouse. The doorbell ruins the adorable moment as Jenna panics, and she shoves the dollhouse into the closet.
Tom-Tom and her entourage come in and dump their coats on her. Then comes in her dream guy, Chris, and his two friends in a cool convertible. We see Matt dancing embarrassingly before Tom-Tom changes the song.
Matt tells Jenna he is going next door to get his Casio, and Jenna responds by telling him to do whatever he wants. As she says, she doesn’t need the “play-by-play,” a call-back to a joke Tom-Tom made earlier, causing them all to laugh at him.
After Matt leaves, Tom-Tom suggests that they should play 7 Minutes in Heaven. She tricks Jenna by blindfolding her and making her think that Chris would be the first to play with her.
She shoves her into the closet, grabs the project proposal, and then they all abandon her. Matt comes back in while they are making their escape, and they tell Matt that Jenna is waiting for him in the closet.
When he meets her in the closet, Jenna calls him by Chris’ name and then is alarmed when it is not Chris’ voice she hears in response. She shoves Matt out, closes herself into the closet, shouts that she hates herself, and repeats how she wants to be “thirty, flirty and thriving” over and over as she bangs against the wall. The wishing powder works its magic as it spills on her from the dream dollhouse while she sits on the floor beneath it, blindfolded.
She wakes up as a 30-year-old version of herself in a strange place, and she freaks out before she goes through the mail and realizes that she actually lives there!
But the craziness has only just begun!
She finds out someone else is in her house as a man comes out of the bathroom and gets naked in front of her. Not knowing who the man is, she screams and runs out of the apartment!
Once she gets downstairs, she meets Lucy, who tells her to hurry and get into the car. She argues that she does not get into cars with strangers but decides to jump in when her presumed boyfriend sticks his head out of the window to the apartment and calls “sweet bottom” to her.
Lucy tells Jenna that she is her best friend and jokes that she must be acting weird because she’s hungover.
Jenna is absolutely in shock when she finds out that she now works at the magazine she loved when she was a child! Not only that, but she was also a top executive! After they arrive at work, their boss reveals that there is a leak in their company!
Their top competitor, Sparkle, has been writing and publishing the same stories! After the meeting, Jenna’s assistant tells her that her mom has called.
After questioning why she wouldn’t let her know, she finds out that she had previously told her not to bother her with family calls.
She then tells her that she needs her to track down Matt, which she does.
She gets the surprise of her life when she arrives at Matt’s place, and he tells her that they have not been friends for years.
She begins to panic, and the charming Matt gets her some water to calm her down before they leave to find her apartment together, and he fills her in. Not only was she a Six Chick, but she was practically their leader! Lucy, her best friend, was none other than the popular Tom-Tom! She even won prom queen before they graduated, and Matt and Jenna hadn’t seen each other ever since. Before they part ways, they do their signature goodbye as a way to reminisce about their childhood friendship.
Later, as she is heading out to a work party, she meets her thirteen-year-old neighbor and strikes up a conversation with her. The child is even perplexed as Jenna has never bothered to talk to her before. Once she’s at the party, the editor of Sparkle shows up uninvited and trash-talks Poise. Both Lucy and Jenna are not pleased, and they begin to panic when they realize that people are starting to leave the party early.
But Jenna is practically a hero when she tells the DJ to play Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and she begins doing the dance moves in the middle of the floor with Matt. Other people join in the dance and the party livens up! Matt has a moment where he looks at Jenna and then tells her he has to leave before the song even ends.
On a later evening, Jenna goes to meet Lucy at a bar, where Lucy tells her that some guy is checking her out. To Lucy’s confusion, Jenna walks over to a teenage boy, and she has to pull her away before she can do any damage! As they walk outside, they bump into Jenna’s boyfriend. You know, the naked man that was in her apartment?
She finds out that her boyfriend is a celebrity hockey player right before they run into Matt. Obviously, there’s no love lost between Matt and Tom-Tom, now Lucy, as they exchange biting remarks. They exchange greetings and introduce their respective partners, Matt having his fiancée, Wendy, by his side. His fiancée talks about how she’s an anchorwoman in Chicago and wants Matt to join her there soon. They part ways, and Jenna leaves with her boyfriend, who she just found out is named Alex Carson, who takes her to his apartment and grosses her out by starting a striptease. She runs away and leaves him hanging! Literally!
During a brainstorming session, her boss tells them that Sparkle has been doing better numbers than them. He orders them to do a redesign according to the stakeholders, and Jenna takes on the challenge with enthusiasm.
After the meeting, her assistant gives her some nasty messages people left for her before one of her co-worker’s husbands comes in to greet her. After her assistant leaves, he kisses her, but she pulls away and kicks him in the gonads before storming out. Jenna then realizes what kind of person she has become when she overhears Lucy talking to someone about her stealing someone’s idea and then firing them!
She goes to meet the only person she trusts, Matt. They went for a walk and talked about what went wrong. She learns that she threw his dollhouse at him on her thirteenth birthday, which is when their friendship ultimately ended. She tells Matt to stop being so nice to her because she feels like she doesn’t deserve it, and she cries as she runs away.
She escapes to her parent’s house, somewhere she can feel safe. Her parents get back home from their vacation, and it’s a very emotional and long-awaited reunion. As they talk, she asks her mom if she would undo any moment in her life if given a chance. Her mom says no and doesn’t regret making mistakes because she would not have learned how to make things right.
In a stroke of genius, she decided to hire Matt as their photographer for the redesign while looking at the yearbook. They take pictures of high school students, and her proposed theme for Poise’s redesign is “Class of 2004”.
They end up spending more and more time together, and they eventually kiss while in a park after goofing around on a swing. We see Jenna telling some thirteen-year-old girls at a sleepover about the moment between her and Matt, after which they dance around the room to “Love is a Battlefield.”
Jenna soon presents the redesign to her boss, pitching that they would do a magazine that features normal people instead of models that no one cares about. They loved her theme much more than Lucy’s, which was overtly glamorous.
Lucy is unhappy about the results and later goes to Jenna’s office, where she finds letters from Sparkle magazine. It turns out that Jenna was the leak! Lucy then calls Sparkle and pitches Jenna’s idea to them. Matt comes in to meet Jenna but finds Lucy instead, who tells him that Jenna decided not to use his pictures anymore. She also tricks him into signing a release form if they choose to use the pictures in a catalog.
Jenna returns to her office to discover that Lucy had used her theme to become the new chief executive of Sparkle! She goes to Matt’s house to confide in him, where she meets his Fiancé, who tells her that they will be getting married the next day. Jenna is heartbroken, but at the last minute, she decides to attend the wedding.
Jenna arrives just when the wedding is about to start. She sees Matt, who admits he has always been in love with her but cannot let his fiancé down. He tells her that sometimes we get everything we want except the dream house. He then gives her the dream house she threw at him 17 years ago and asks if she could take it.
She agrees and tells him she loves him right before she leaves. She sits down in the yard and cries as she hears the wedding procession. There’s still some of the wishing dust on the dream house as the wind blows it on her face.
Then we’re back to our 13-year-old Jenna sitting in the closet. She’s so happy to see Matt as she runs out, jumps on him, and kisses him. She walks over to Tom-Tom and tears up the project proposal, telling her she doesn’t want to be like her, and even dumps her drink on her. Basically, she kicks her to the curb!
The movie ends with Matt and Jenna getting married and moving in together. They sit on a couch in the middle of their lawn, eating their favorite candy right in front of their pink dream house. Talk about a happily ever after!
